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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Browning's Heroines
+
+Author: Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+Illustrator: Maxwell Armfield
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2007 [EBook #21247]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROWNING'S HEROINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[FRONTISPIECE: Pippa]
+
+
+
+
+BROWNING'S
+HEROINES
+
+
+BY ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE
+WITH FRONTISPIECE & DECORATIONS
+BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD
+
+
+LONDON
+CHATTO & WINDUS
+1913
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When this book was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say
+about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"--and the
+question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal
+ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If
+there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said
+himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to _suggest_--to open
+magic casements--surely is the office of our artists in every sort:
+thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show
+the casement stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat
+desperately to open it. Saying the things "about" is the other people's
+function. It is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her
+castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is
+nothing.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Browning, I think, is "coming back," as stars come back. There has been
+the period of obscuration. Seventeen years ago, when the _Yellow Book_
+and the _National Observer_ were contending for _les jeunes_, Browning
+was, in the more "precious" côterie, king of modern poets. I can
+remember the editor of that golden Quarterly reading, declaiming,
+quoting, almost breathing, Browning! It was from Henry Harland that this
+reader learnt to read _The Ring and the Book_: "Leave out the lawyers
+and the Tertium Quid, and all after Guido until the Envoi." It was Henry
+Harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of:
+
+     "And thinking too--oh, thinking, if you like,
+     How utterly dissociated was I. . . ."
+
+--regardless of all aptitude in the allusion, making it simply because
+it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day
+struck calm" were always _his_ days of excitement. . . . A hundred
+Browning verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in
+Cromwell Road.
+
+_Misconceptions_ was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying
+branches:
+
+     "This is a spray the bird clung to. . . ."
+
+You were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that
+first stanza--and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza
+was. Nor shall I easily let slip the memory of _Apparent Failure_, thus
+recited. He would begin at the second verse, the "Doric little Morgue"
+verse. You were not to miss the great "phrase" in
+
+     "The three men who did most abhor
+     Their lives in Paris yesterday. . . ."
+
+--but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos
+in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell
+you, of Browning's chief defect--over-statement.
+
+     "How did it happen, my poor boy?
+       You wanted to be Bonaparte,
+     And have the Tuileries for toy,
+       And could not, so it broke your heart. . . ."
+
+How compassionately he would give that forth! "A screen of glass, you're
+thankful for"; "Be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "Poor men God made,
+and all for this!"--the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in
+those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle
+foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "H. H." by telling him he
+had a foreign accent.
+
+Those were Browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. Two or
+three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a _Standard_
+reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve
+the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short
+stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete! . . . How young
+that critic must have been--so young that he had never seen a star
+return. Quite differently they come back--or is it quite the same? Soon
+we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and--oh
+wonder!--is trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. The stars
+always do that, this watcher fancies, and certainly Browning, like the
+Jub-jub, was ages ahead of the fashion. His passport for to-day is dated
+up to the very hour--for though he could be so many other things
+besides, one of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that
+he could be so "ugly." _That_ would not have been reckoned among his
+glories in the Yellow Book-room; but the wheel shall come full
+circle--we shall be saying all this, one day, the other way round. For,
+as Browning consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in
+_Fifine_,[x:1] each age believes--and should believe--that to it alone
+the secret of true art has been whispered.
+
+                                               ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[x:1] I write far from my books, but the passage will be easily found or
+recalled.
+
+
+11 HOLLAND ROAD,
+KENSINGTON, W.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+GIRLHOOD
+
+                                                        PAGE
+INTRODUCTORY                                               3
+
+  I. THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"                          15
+
+ II. PIPPA PASSES
+        I. Dawn: Pippa                                    23
+       II. Morning: Ottima                                36
+      III. Noon: Phene                                    51
+       IV. Evening; Night: The Ending of the Day          67
+
+III. MILDRED TRESHAM                                      81
+
+ IV. BALAUSTION                                           93
+
+  V. POMPILIA                                            122
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE GREAT LADY
+
+"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"       165
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE LOVER
+
+  I. LOVERS MEETING                                      199
+
+ II. TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
+        I. The Lady in "The Glove"                       215
+       II. Dîs Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron De Nos Jours   224
+      III. The Laboratory                                233
+       IV. In a Year                                     237
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE WIFE
+
+  I. A WOMAN'S LAST WORD                                 245
+
+ II. JAMES LEE'S WIFE                                    250
+        I. She Speaks at the Window                      254
+       II. By the Fireside                               256
+      III. In the Doorway                                257
+       IV. Along the Beach                               258
+        V. On the Cliff                                  261
+       VI. Reading a Book, under the Cliff               262
+      VII. Among the Rocks                               265
+     VIII. Beside the Drawing-board                      268
+       IX. On Deck                                       271
+
+
+PART V
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
+
+  I. THE WOMAN UNWON                                     277
+
+ II. THE WOMAN WON                                       304
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+[Illustration: GIRLHOOD]
+
+
+
+
+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."
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT LADY]
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT LADY
+
+"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"
+
+
+For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the
+perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious
+than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things
+adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning,
+even a "lady" could be a woman--and remain a woman, even though she be
+turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted
+from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our
+poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but
+that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And
+especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material
+cares prevail not--where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers
+"not for bread alone."
+
+     "Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red--
+     On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
+     O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his
+         head?"
+
+He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul
+existed. True, that in _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[166:1] the soul _is_
+questioned:
+
+     "Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
+         earned.
+     The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
+
+But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but
+those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire
+social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in
+Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite
+the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile
+"simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature,
+since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness
+is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted,
+brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.
+
+     "Well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and
+         afford
+     --She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
+     While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
+
+The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the
+listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so
+plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions:
+"Must we die?"--
+
+     "Those commiserating sevenths--'Life might last! we can but try!'"
+
+The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then
+come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must
+be answered to."
+
+     "So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
+     'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!
+     I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'
+     Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by
+         one,
+     Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
+         undone,
+     Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."
+
+. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that
+_he_, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:
+
+                   ". . . You know physics, something of geology,
+     Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
+     Butterflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be!
+     As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
+     Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
+         crop:
+     What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to
+         stop?" . . .
+
+Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What,
+"creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since
+he is neither deaf nor blind:
+
+     "But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy
+         mind! . . .
+     'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
+     Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
+     Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
+
+After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not _only_ the wise
+men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to
+that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this
+pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty,
+riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall
+kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and
+once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in
+true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible
+to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of _In a
+Balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble,
+yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all,
+in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is
+given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my
+feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her
+first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically;
+then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely
+back to earth--in _My Last Duchess_ and _The Flight of the Duchess_
+respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree,
+in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have
+the lady dead.
+
+First, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"
+of a dead Italian girl.
+
+     "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
+     Looking as if she were alive. I call
+     That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
+     Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
+     Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
+     Frà Pandolf by design: for never read
+     Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
+     The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
+     But to myself they turned (since none puts by
+     The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
+     And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
+     How such a glance came there; so, not the first
+     Are you to turn and ask thus."
+
+The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"
+is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy
+from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a
+connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier
+rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that
+nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless
+art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even
+now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed
+her--nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that
+_he_ could have been wrong. This Duchess--it would have been idle to
+"make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the
+exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other
+lesser being) without stooping--"and I choose never to stoop." Her error
+had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which
+Frà Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it
+was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her
+cheek? It had _not_ been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Frà
+Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist--may have said,
+for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the
+"faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of
+paint to reproduce.
+
+                                      ". . . Such stuff
+     Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
+     For calling up that spot of joy."
+
+As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to
+the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement:
+
+                               ". . . She had
+     A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
+     Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
+     She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."
+
+Even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and
+accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly
+conveyed:
+
+     "Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
+     The dropping of the daylight in the west,
+     The bough of cherries some officious fool
+     Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
+     She rode with round the terrace--all and each
+     Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
+     Or blush, at least. . . ."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+We, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to
+the Duke, looking at the Duchess. We can see the quivering, glad, tender
+creature as though we also were at gaze on Frà Pandolf's picture. . . .
+I call _this_ piece a wonder, now! Scarce one of the monologues is so
+packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most
+"simple"--even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they
+are, as Mr. Arthur Symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." Two lives
+are summed up in fifty-six lines. First, the ghastly Duke's; then,
+hers--but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one. . . . Everything
+that came to her was transmuted into her own dearness--even his favour
+at her breast. We can figure to ourselves the giving of that
+"favour"--the high proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude:
+Sir Willoughby Patterne by intelligent anticipation. But then, though
+the approving speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with
+his bough of cherries--and speech and blush were given again! Absurder
+still, the spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule . . .
+
+                         "Who'd stoop to blame
+     This sort of trifling?"
+
+Even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of
+ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's
+gift"--even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted"
+him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not
+have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made
+excuse) . . . even so (this must be impressed upon the envoy), it would
+have meant some stooping, and the Duke "chooses never to stoop."
+
+Still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the
+next Duchess! . . . More and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued
+upon that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is
+sounding in his ear--
+
+              ". . . Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt,
+     Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
+     Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
+     Then all smiles stopped together."
+
+There falls a curious, throbbing silence. The envoy still sits gazing.
+There she stands, _looking as if she were alive_. . . . And almost he
+starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a
+meaning--
+
+                                ". . . There she stands
+     As if alive"
+
+--the picture is a wonder!
+
+Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had
+just now sounded: "_Then all smiles stopped together_"?
+
+She stands there--smiling . . . But the Duke grows weary of this pause
+before Frà Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders.
+Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily
+in silence, taken: the next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in
+the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:
+
+     "Will't please you rise? We'll meet
+     The company below, then."
+
+The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere,
+as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his
+master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair
+daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . But in a hot
+resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such
+proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . .
+Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the
+due deference:
+
+                         ". . . Nay, we'll go
+     Together down, sir,"
+
+--and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by _him_) the
+envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor
+has no eyes for "wonders" now--he has seen the wonder, has heard the
+horror. . . . His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can
+pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them,
+however, must be pointed out:
+
+                   ". . . Notice Neptune, though,
+     Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
+     Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."
+
+. . . Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands,
+or _was_, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not
+where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by
+flame; has been snatched from _her_ Duke, and borne away to joy and
+love--by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that
+came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved
+herself.
+
+The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller
+whom he calls his friend.
+
+     "What a thing friendship is, world without end!"
+
+It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess
+all were young--if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up
+at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had
+been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and
+died there,
+
+     "At next year's end, in a velvet suit . . .
+     Petticoated like a herald,
+     In a chamber next to an ante-room
+     Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
+     What he called stink, and they perfume."
+
+The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the boy to Paris, where she
+belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So
+the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were
+railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years
+were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."
+
+     "And he came back the pertest little ape
+     That ever affronted human shape;
+     Full of his travel, struck at himself.
+     You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?
+     --Not he!"
+
+--for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue,
+and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one
+good thing left in these evil days:
+
+     "So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
+     This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."
+
+It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages
+were revived:
+
+     "The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."
+
+The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its
+origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs
+and length, all speed, no strength:
+
+     "They should have set him on red Berold,
+     Mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . .
+     With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
+     And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"
+
+Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He
+preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty
+Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" . . . anything in
+the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.
+
+     "Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
+     And out of a convent, at the word,
+     Came the lady in time of spring.
+     --Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"
+
+Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad
+in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:
+
+     "And so we saw the lady arrive;
+     My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
+     She was the smallest lady alive,
+     Made in a piece of Nature's madness,
+     Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
+     That over-filled her."
+
+She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle,
+where the Duke awaited her.
+
+     "Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,
+     Straight at the castle, that's best indeed
+     To look at from outside the walls"
+
+--and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and
+thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of
+gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who
+rode on her other hand, the name of every bird that flew past: "Was
+that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"
+
+Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess--but
+she _is_ the same!), the little lady rode forward:
+
+     "When suddenly appeared the Duke."
+
+She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the
+Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather
+aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick
+tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the
+background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky
+sullied by a chill wind,
+
+     "The lady's face stopped its play,
+     As if her first hair had grown grey;
+     For such things must begin some one day."
+
+But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if
+she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad
+in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the
+brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for
+a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman--and this huntsman, who has _had_ a
+beloved wife, knows what he is saying.
+
+     "She was active, stirring, all fire--
+     Could not rest, could not tire--
+     To a stone she might have given life! . . .
+     And here was plenty to be done,
+     And she that could do it, great or small,
+     She was to do nothing at all."
+
+For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted
+a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and
+out of it:
+
+     "To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
+     At the proper place, in the proper minute,
+     And die away the life between."
+
+The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian
+girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing
+enough (the old huntsman remembers)--but for the grief that followed
+after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would
+find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a
+fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But
+"the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be
+contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly _make_ it.
+Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic,
+for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose
+to stoop. _He_ would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded
+applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's
+claws."
+
+     "So the little lady grew silent and thin,
+     Paling and ever paling."
+
+_Then all smiles stopped together_ . . . And the Duke, perceiving, said
+to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way
+to deal with it.
+
+Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a
+little more than he can stand--but, unlike the envoy, he can express
+himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes
+on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many
+a year,
+
+     "And the Duke's self . . . you shall hear."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+     "Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,
+     When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
+     A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"
+
+it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season
+(he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"),
+found that a hunting party was indicated:
+
+     "Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"
+
+Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was
+properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron
+saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,
+
+     "And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"
+
+But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and
+jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's
+part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly
+announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:
+
+     "When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
+     Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,
+     And with water to wash the hands of her liege
+     In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,
+     Let her preside at the disemboweling."
+
+All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even
+the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed--and only
+then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to
+his lady.
+
+And the little Duchess--paler and paler every day--said she would not
+go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their
+long lashes, as if too weary even for _him_ to light them; and she duly
+acknowledged his forethought for her,
+
+     "But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,
+     Of the weight by day and the watch by night,
+     And much wrong now that used to be right;"
+
+and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."
+
+But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted:
+it was hardly the time . . .
+
+The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room,
+because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside
+on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the
+casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep
+through also.
+
+Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a
+smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother
+to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it
+all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her
+whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture,
+passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin--at
+any rate, he showed a very stiff back.
+
+However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable--fog
+that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect
+sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the
+woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the
+courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with
+the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the
+Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes--presents for which an
+equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.
+
+And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with
+the earth, the ore, the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can
+baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a
+swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can
+do with sand!
+
+     "Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,
+     Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
+     As if in pure water you dropped and let die
+     A bruised black-blooded mulberry."
+
+And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads
+distinct inside."
+
+These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the
+castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they
+reached the fosse, all stopped but one:
+
+     "The oldest Gipsy then above ground."
+
+This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew
+her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit--yet
+here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no
+use now but to gather brine."
+
+She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse
+reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual
+acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her;
+in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level
+whine," that as well as to bring the presents, she had come to pay her
+duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an
+idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face.
+Supposing he set _this_ old woman to teach her, as the other had failed?
+What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his
+fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone?
+He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was
+approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The
+huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude
+of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth
+tightened, her brow brightened--it was as if she were promising to give
+the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse--and
+then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower,"
+that she might wile away an hour for her:
+
+     "Whose mind and body craved exertion,
+     And yet shrank from all better diversion."
+
+And then the Duke rode off.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins
+what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can
+read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can
+simply accept and understand it--leaving the rest to the
+"Browningites," of whom Browning declared that _he_ was not.
+
+The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him--a
+little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke--saw
+something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure
+that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She
+looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily,
+no stooping nor hobbling--above all, no cringing! She was wholly
+changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had
+extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed
+edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we
+may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen.
+But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first
+he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but
+brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from
+their places--as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . He accepted
+all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and
+took the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.
+
+     "And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one,
+     For since last night, by the same token,
+     Not a single word had the lady spoken."
+
+The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the
+weather."
+
+Jacynth never could tell him afterwards _how_ she came to fall soundly
+asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the
+whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across
+the open country--for in those days he had a falcon eye--when, all in a
+moment, his ear was arrested by
+
+     "Was it singing, or was it saying,
+     Or a strange musical instrument playing?"
+
+It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the
+lattice, pulled the curtain, and--first--saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep
+along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of
+the room, on the seat of state,
+
+     "Was a queen--the Gipsy woman late!"
+
+She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat
+between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set
+on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old
+woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the
+lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining.
+She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion--and
+the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the
+rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's
+face.
+
+     "For it was life her eyes were drinking . . .
+     Life's pure fire, received without shrinking,
+     Into the heart and breast whose heaving
+     Told you no single drop they were leaving."
+
+The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose
+over each shoulder,
+
+     "And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,
+     Moving to the mystic measure,
+     Bounding as the bosom bounded."
+
+He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all
+at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:
+
+     "And I kept time to the wondrous chime,
+     Making out words and prose and rhyme,
+     Till it seemed that the music furled
+     Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped
+     From under the words it first had propped."
+
+He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"--and
+the Gipsy said:
+
+     "And so at last we find my tribe,
+     And so I set thee in the midst . . .
+     I trace them the vein and the other vein
+     That meet on thy brow and part again,
+     Making our rapid mystic mark;
+     And I bid my people prove and probe
+     Each eye's profound and glorious globe
+     Till they detect the kindred spark
+     In those depths so dear and dark . . .
+     And on that round young cheek of thine
+     I make them recognise the tinge . . .
+     For so I prove thee, to one and all,
+     Fit, when my people ope their breast,
+     To see the sign, and hear the call,
+     And take the vow, and stand the test
+     Which adds one more child to the rest--
+     When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,
+     And the world is left outside."
+
+There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady
+if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of
+the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:
+
+     "So, trial after trial past,
+     Wilt thou fall at the very last
+     Breathless, half in trance
+     With the thrill of the great deliverance,
+     Into our arms for evermore;
+     And thou shalt know, those arms once curled
+     About thee, what we knew before,
+     _How love is the only good in the world_.
+     Henceforth be loved as heart can love,
+     Or brain devise, or hand approve!
+     Stand up, look below,
+     It is our life at thy feet we throw
+     To step with into light and joy;
+     Not a power of life but we employ
+     To satisfy thy nature's want."
+
+The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and
+understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will
+do more than the world has done"--and the tribe will at least approach
+that end with this beloved woman. She says not _how_--whether by one
+man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by _her_ giving "her
+wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . .
+
+     "I foresee and I could foretell
+     Thy future portion, sure and well;
+     But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
+     Let them say what thou shalt do!"
+
+But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with
+their blame, their praise:
+
+     "Our shame to feel, our pride to show,
+     Glad, angry--but indifferent, no!"
+
+And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old
+age--will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and
+reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul"
+. . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be
+like the ending of a dream, when
+
+     "Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
+     Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."
+
+With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music
+began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the
+charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised
+afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the
+ground, and hurried round to the portal. . . . In another minute he
+would have entered:
+
+     "When the door opened, and more than mortal
+     Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
+     All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
+     The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.
+     She was so different, happy and beautiful,
+     I felt at once that all was best" . . .
+
+And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was,
+in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her,
+"the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers
+to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she
+wanted--like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild
+creature's bidding was. . . . He went before her to the stable; she
+followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last--sunk back into her
+former self,
+
+     "Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."
+
+He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the
+castle--the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile
+from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and
+knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began
+to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")--not meaning to be
+obtrusive--she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of
+the head. . . . Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy
+behind her--and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready
+whenever God should please that she needed him. . . . And she looked
+down
+
+     "With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"
+
+and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! If it
+had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone
+home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself--but it was not a
+purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each
+other in a convent:
+
+     "This, see, which at my breast I wear,
+     Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment)
+     And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
+     And then--and then--to cut short--this is idle,
+     These are feelings it is not good to foster.
+     I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
+     And the palfrey bounded--and so we lost her."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to
+need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we
+like that _saves_ us; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that
+crushes love.
+
+     "Love is the only good in the world."
+
+And the love (though it _may_ be) _need_ not be the love of man for
+woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which
+made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home,
+and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the
+name of every bird--the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too
+easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she
+looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but
+love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must
+die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was
+neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not
+"fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing,
+nothing else--
+
+     "And die away the life between."
+
+And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must
+care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the
+disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the
+hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for
+the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . That night,
+even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without
+love, a world that did not want her--and _she_ was here, and she must
+stay, until, until . . . Which would the coming child be--herself again,
+or _him_ again? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.
+
+And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"--they wanted
+her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to
+change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her
+cheek--they liked _her_. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true,"
+for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.
+
+It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation
+of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great
+tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his
+ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"--and to all of us, the
+Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for
+nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to
+compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the
+little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. _She_ placed
+the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she
+beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.
+
+     "And so at last we find my tribe,
+     And so I set thee in the midst . . .
+     Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . .
+     It is our life at thy feet we throw
+     To step with into light and joy."
+
+The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage--needed
+swift decision--needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she
+saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess
+heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was
+ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard
+aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives
+not, we know from the old huntsman:
+
+     "For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;
+     So they made no search and small inquiry";
+
+and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.
+
+Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of
+them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn
+adorer. He had stayed at the castle:
+
+     "I must see this fellow his sad life through--
+     He is our Duke, after all,
+     And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";
+
+--but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go
+journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear
+the last news of her:
+
+     "And when that's told me, what's remaining?"
+
+For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard
+for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some
+hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep
+soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer
+be cast before swine that can't value them. "_Amen._"
+
+But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little
+lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's
+play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there--just as one
+likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left
+precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke
+the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.
+
+And is it not good to think that almost immediately after _The Flight of
+the Duchess_ was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted
+woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been
+prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the
+Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill
+to read those lines of silenced prophecy:
+
+     "I foresee and I could foretell
+     Thy future portion, sure and well:
+     But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
+     Let them say what thou shalt do!"
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by
+a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died
+in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded"
+(says Vernon Lee, in her _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_)
+"in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme
+simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+[Illustration: THE LOVER]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+LOVERS MEETING
+
+
+Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing
+which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
+common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
+him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
+any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
+sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
+outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
+analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
+passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
+trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
+us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
+so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
+next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that
+is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
+aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
+expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper
+study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and
+that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron,
+almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
+Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
+Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
+and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.
+
+In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
+inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
+flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
+ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the
+wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
+withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
+"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
+love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
+_do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
+something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
+other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
+but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
+faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more
+axiomatically than Browning ever said it:
+
+     "He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"
+
+--but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly
+proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such
+was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man
+declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He
+understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!)
+conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he
+understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far
+hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when
+by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for
+Browning, lay in loving greatly.
+
+Thus, for example, it is notable that, except _The Laboratory_ and
+_Fifine at the Fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon
+jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in
+love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in _Fifine_), even the departure
+from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of
+insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be
+(she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and
+always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be
+deep and true as well as brilliant.
+
+For Browning, _how_ love comes is not important. It may be by the
+high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely
+answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our
+dearest memory.
+
+     "What is he buzzing in my ears?
+       'Now that I come to die,
+     Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
+       Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
+
+And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man
+"used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the
+"suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it
+were, with the bottles on the bedside table.
+
+     "At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
+       There watched for me, one June,
+     A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,
+       My poor mind's out of tune."
+
+Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the
+details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle
+labelled 'Ether,'"
+
+     "And stole from stair to stair,
+
+     And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
+       We loved, Sir--used to meet:
+     How sad and mad and bad it was--
+       But then, how it was sweet!"
+
+They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other
+"confession"--if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life:
+that is all.
+
+In _Confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. In _Love among
+the Ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone,
+is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before
+him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of
+"a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful
+prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace,"
+a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve
+men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:
+
+     "And such glory and perfection, see, of grass
+             Never was"
+
+--as here,
+
+     "Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
+             Long ago;
+     Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
+             Struck them tame;
+     And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
+             Bought and sold."
+
+Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part
+of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his
+minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the
+chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles
+as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes
+and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows
+
+     "That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
+             Waits me there
+     In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
+             For the goal,
+     When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
+             Till I come."
+
+That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its
+temples and colonnades,
+
+     "All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then
+             All the men!
+     When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
+             Either hand
+     On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
+             Of my face,
+     Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
+             Each on each."
+
+A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they
+built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a
+thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . .
+
+     "Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
+             Earth's returns
+     For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.
+             Shut them in
+     With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
+             Love is best!"
+
+But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
+we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
+even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can
+meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
+off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
+at the other side of the bay:
+
+     "Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
+     Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
+     A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
+     And blue spurt of a lighted match,
+     And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
+     Than the two hearts beating each to each!"
+
+Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.
+
+     "Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
+     And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;
+     And straight was a path of gold for him,
+     And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]
+
+These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
+describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
+he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
+lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
+his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
+another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love
+"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose
+separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
+who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.
+
+     "Dear, had the world in its caprice
+       Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,
+       Have recognised your plighted troth,
+     Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'--
+     How many precious months and years
+       Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
+       Before we found it out at last,
+     The world, and what it fears?
+
+     How much of priceless life were spent
+       With men that every virtue decks,
+       And women models of their sex,
+     Society's true ornament--
+     Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
+       Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
+       And feel the Boulevard break again
+     To warmth and light and bliss?"
+
+That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
+They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
+trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
+would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_
+gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
+choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that
+sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
+happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in
+the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
+Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
+signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
+courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
+leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not
+included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"
+
+I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
+had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
+pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all
+who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
+could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
+it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
+it recognises the true Contemner! To
+
+     "Feel the Boulevard break again
+     To warmth and light and bliss"
+
+--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the
+example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be
+dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they
+could not _forget_ the world.
+
+Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
+to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might
+be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
+imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
+marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless
+stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
+rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
+actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
+should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in
+his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings
+his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":
+
+     "Till I seemed to have and hold
+           In the vacancy
+           'Twixt the walls and me
+     From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold
+     To the foot in its muslin fold--
+
+     Have and hold, then and there,
+           Her, from head to foot,
+           Breathing and mute,
+     Passive and yet aware,
+     In the grasp of my steady stare--
+
+     Hold and have, there and then,
+           All her body and soul
+           That completes my whole,
+     All that women add to men,
+     In the clutch of my steady ken"--
+
+. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of
+his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw
+her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to
+suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:
+
+     "Out of doors into the night!
+           On to the maze
+           Of the wild wood-ways,
+     Not turning to left nor right
+     From the pathway, blind with sight--
+
+     Swifter and still more swift,
+           As the crowding peace
+           Doth to joy increase
+     In the wild blind eyes uplift
+     Thro' the darkness and the drift!"
+
+And he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be
+relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes
+shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even
+from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the
+lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and
+spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the
+arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes,
+comes . . .
+
+     "'Now--now'--the door is heard!
+           Hark, the stairs! and near--
+           Nearer--and here--
+     'Now!' and at call the third
+     She enters without a word!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she
+not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?
+
+But in _Porphyria's Lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too,
+sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes
+to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and
+rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of
+passion's answering passion.
+
+     "The rain set early in to-night,
+       The sullen wind was soon awake,
+     It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
+       And did its worst to vex the lake:
+       I listened with heart fit to break.
+     When glided in Porphyria." . . .
+
+She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
+kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
+she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled
+gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,
+
+     "And, last, she sat down by my side
+     And called me. When no voice replied,
+
+     She put my arm about her waist,
+       And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
+     And all her yellow hair displaced,
+       And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
+       And spread o'er all her yellow hair--
+
+     Murmuring how she loved me--she
+       Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
+     To set its struggling passion free
+       From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
+       And give herself to me for ever."
+
+But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
+there had seized her
+
+     "A sudden thought of one so pale
+       For love of her, and all in vain:
+       So, she was come through wind and rain."
+
+She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
+fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
+was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
+grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
+possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
+it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
+calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him
+and draws his head to her breast.
+
+     "Be sure I looked up at her eyes
+       Happy and proud; at last I knew
+     Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
+       Made my heart swell, and still it grew
+       While I debated what to do.
+
+     That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
+       Perfectly pure and good: I found
+     A thing to do, and all her hair
+       In one long yellow string I wound
+       Three times her little throat around,
+
+     And strangled her." . . .
+
+But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
+to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
+loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
+beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_
+shoulder bore
+
+       "The smiling rosy little head,
+     So glad it has its utmost will,
+       That all it scorned at once is fled,
+       And I, its love, am gained instead!
+
+     Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
+       Her darling one wish would be heard.
+     And thus we sit together now,
+       And all night long we have not stirred,
+       And yet God has not said a word!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse
+Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that
+it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But
+only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream,
+if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly
+happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real,
+whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly
+matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the
+madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the
+little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the
+love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was
+_herself_. When in all the rest of life would such another moment
+come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could
+die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the
+sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover
+felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have
+been:
+
+     "And thus we sit together now,
+     And yet God has not said a word!"
+
+Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the
+woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even
+_he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the
+nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we
+get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just
+now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I
+think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be,
+since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That
+the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like
+the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of
+love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these
+things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the
+"tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love
+consists for woman.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the
+minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopædia_ the difficulty is
+frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the
+last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires
+more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who
+speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
+misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
+Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
+refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is
+an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.
+
+[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen
+stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break
+in sense or sound."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
+
+
+I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"
+
+Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had
+one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity
+of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in
+two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the
+Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
+_dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
+earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
+prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
+lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this
+interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
+it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
+till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
+the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world
+knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned
+alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:
+
+                               ". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
+     Not love, set that task to humanity!"
+
+But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
+that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
+much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
+told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
+alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had
+penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had
+listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she
+watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted,
+hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck
+fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation,
+yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the
+lions! With the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless
+answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst
+she had dreaded.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened--the
+most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French
+knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in
+the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner,
+and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered
+the _Petite Bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty
+women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his
+powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Étampes, friend of the Dauphin's
+neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Médicis--foe of that wife's
+so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande
+Sénéschale de Normandie."
+
+The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse
+d'Étampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the
+Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Sénéschale, always supreme in
+taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard--and this was why Pierre sometimes
+found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in
+his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.
+
+That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been
+signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:
+
+     "Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm
+     Caught thinking war the true pastime.
+     Is there a reason in metre?
+     Give us your speech, master Peter!"
+
+Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words
+before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"
+
+They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers
+mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset.
+Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge
+and the lady he was "adoring."
+
+     "Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed
+     Her, and the horrible pitside"
+
+--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
+dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
+beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
+door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating
+hearts . . .
+
+     "Then earth in a sudden contortion
+     Gave out to our gaze her abortion.
+     Such a brute! . . .
+     One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy
+     To see the black mane, vast and heapy,
+     The tail in the air stiff and straining,
+     The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."
+
+And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
+noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
+and he was free again.
+
+     "Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!
+     And you saw by the flash on his forehead,
+     By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
+     He was leagues in the desert already."
+
+The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
+Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it
+were almost certain death:
+
+     "Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"
+
+But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
+a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
+the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
+been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
+balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the
+barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he
+was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an
+one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De
+Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place
+where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more,
+as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye
+was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done
+the same:
+
+                               ". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
+     Not love, set that task to humanity!"
+
+--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
+with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."
+
+All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her
+self-possession amid the Court's mockery.
+
+     "As if from no pleasing experiment
+     She rose, yet of pain not much heedful,
+     So long as the process was needful.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     She went out 'mid hooting and laughter;
+     Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."
+
+Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added;
+"I must know human nature."
+
+     "She told me, 'Too long had I heard
+     Of the deed proved alone by the word:
+     For my love--what De Lorge would not dare!
+     With my scorn--what De Lorge could compare!
+     And the endless descriptions of death
+     He would brave when my lip formed a breath,
+     I must reckon as braved'" . . .
+
+--and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was
+understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the
+lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to
+that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to
+reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and
+the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And
+at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for
+mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped
+across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De
+Lorge here and now? For _now_ she was still free; now she could find out
+what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break
+down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then
+discover that it did not mean anything at all! So--she had thrown the
+glove.
+
+     "'The blow a glove gives is but weak:
+     Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?
+     But when the heart suffers a blow,
+     Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been
+capable of the public insult. The pain of _that_, had she loved him,
+must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of
+this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere
+vanity." Love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . .
+Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a
+youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would
+pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as
+that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but
+there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been
+Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it
+right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.
+
+     "And when, shortly after, she carried
+     Her shame from the Court, and they married,
+     To that marriage some happiness, maugre
+     The voice of the Court, I dared augur."
+
+De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and
+finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week.
+Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the
+King desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on
+that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell
+the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that
+he brought _hers_ with no murmur.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in
+accepting De Lorge's "devotion"--not because De Lorge was worthless, but
+because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not
+love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we
+now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could
+never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no
+right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone
+her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.
+
+But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that
+love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so
+subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and
+that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think
+there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of
+King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de
+Valois, sister of the King--we have only to consider the story of Diane
+de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise _that_
+most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it
+loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It
+scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again
+it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we
+gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to
+plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send
+them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits
+not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will
+have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the
+glove.
+
+     "Utter the true word--out and away
+     Escapes her soul." . . .
+
+Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul
+will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love
+set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot win her our full
+pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."
+
+
+II.--DÎS ALITER VISUM; OR, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS
+
+"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of
+the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood,
+and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand
+against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is
+assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of
+this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life--to their own
+disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the
+spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets
+again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them
+in a Paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still
+is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes
+to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost
+be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having
+rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married
+her[224:1]--and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in
+any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the
+most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who
+understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in
+perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in
+this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who
+doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one
+of the great disastrous marriages of the world.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known
+one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice
+had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged,
+and lamed":
+
+     "Famous, however, for verse and worse,
+     Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"
+
+--that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious
+was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.
+
+She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a
+mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty
+thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read
+verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the Great, the
+Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully
+amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could
+float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull
+floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her
+"twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had
+chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it,
+so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus
+the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited
+her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back
+upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and
+made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt
+that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the
+episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she
+asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on
+him that day.
+
+     "Did you determine, as we stepped
+       O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get
+     Her for myself, and what's the earth
+       With all its art, verse, music, worth--
+     Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"
+
+For she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would
+come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant
+silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow.
+They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old,
+famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her
+wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all
+other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her
+choice! . . . A perfect hour for both--while it lasted.
+
+But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not
+last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full
+time for both to reason and reflect. . . . And thus (still interpreting
+to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice
+which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_
+not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
+is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
+as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
+is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.
+
+For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
+is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
+as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
+would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
+he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
+ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
+according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
+him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his
+own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
+clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
+very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
+foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
+side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
+can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then,
+would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
+he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the
+world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks
+freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a
+nosegay!
+
+     "That ended me." . . .
+
+They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
+scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
+they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
+general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
+really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
+civilisation as there was:
+
+       "And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:
+     Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
+       By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
+     On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."
+
+Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
+has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
+he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
+to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
+interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be
+patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has
+cried, in the words which open the poem:
+
+     "Stop, let me have the truth of that!
+       Is that all true?"
+
+--and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of
+her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.
+
+For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood
+unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her,
+to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing
+less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased,
+but they will talk of it in _her_ way. So she cuts him short, and draws
+this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . Has she not matured? might
+it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But
+suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul,
+and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something
+greater in herself.
+
+     "Now I may speak: you fool, for all
+       Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
+     What was the sea for? What, the grey
+       Sad church, that solitary day,
+     Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
+
+     Was there nought better than to enjoy?
+       No feat which, done, would make time break,
+     And let us pent-up creatures through
+       Into eternity, our due?
+     No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
+
+     No grasping at love, gaining a share
+       O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
+     With death . . . ?"
+
+He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that
+the least--"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and
+sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but
+completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that.
+Only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all
+they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their
+souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:
+
+     "The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"
+
+Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she
+can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two
+souls--nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced vilely last night,
+they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her
+vogue has had its day"? . . . And what of the speaker herself? It takes
+but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot:
+
+     "Here comes my husband from his whist."
+
+What is "the truth of that"?
+
+Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of _Youth and Art_:
+again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the
+fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? Does love
+weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the
+lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant
+"that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a
+vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one
+might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful
+marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is
+not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further
+declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it
+is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul
+unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace
+the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the
+view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of _Dîs Aliter
+Visum_. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal
+mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging
+that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who
+argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than
+this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our
+standpoint. _That_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law,
+and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental
+state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the
+experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to
+act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she
+has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the
+unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be
+loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any
+ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly
+have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking
+elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can
+do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something
+too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not
+be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern
+mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them
+more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a
+worldling. Witty as she has become, there still remain in her, I fear,
+some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . To sum up, for
+this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at
+his best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.
+
+
+III.--THE LABORATORY
+
+Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is
+not, and will not be, a victim.
+
+At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in
+such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into
+the soul of this woman in _The Laboratory_, Browning has penetrated till
+he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another
+fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the
+Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration.
+Every word counts, almost every comma--for, like Browning, we too seem
+to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the
+very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech
+is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression
+of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant
+and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She is a Court lady of the _ancien régime_, in the great Brinvilliers
+poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his
+laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small,
+gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old
+wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there
+is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . Now she must put
+on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes
+that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with
+all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to
+peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent;
+even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she
+must pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and
+then:
+
+     "Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"
+
+--but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out
+a cry:
+
+     "He is with her, and they know that I know
+     Where they are, what they do . . ."
+
+--the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in
+the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps
+through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget _me_, she thinks,
+as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . Yet even in this hell, there is
+some solace. They must be remembering her, and
+
+                             ". . . they believe my tears flow
+     While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
+     Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."
+
+Yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and
+mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and
+watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her
+restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_
+way, to stanch the wound it makes!
+
+     "That in the mortar--you call it a gum?
+     Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
+     And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
+     Sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?"
+
+But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a
+moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the
+old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that
+hateful Court where each knows of her misery.
+
+     "To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
+     A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"
+
+She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in
+half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her
+breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . But he is
+taking too long.
+
+     "Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim!
+     Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"
+
+For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and
+dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift
+the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . But one must be content: the
+old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to
+the vessel again, a new doubt assails her.
+
+     "What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me--
+     That's why she ensnared him: this never will free
+     The soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'No!'
+     To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.
+
+     For only last night, as they whispered, I brought
+     My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought
+     Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
+     Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
+wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to
+remain,
+
+     "Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]--
+     He is sure to remember her dying face!"
+
+Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not
+look morose about it:
+
+     "It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."
+
+She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:
+
+     "_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"
+
+There it lies--there. . . .
+
+     "Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
+     You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"
+
+--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
+is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
+might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
+thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the
+King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her
+passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of
+those torments.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
+hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
+now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?
+
+     "If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"
+
+Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
+utterance, and it is here.
+
+
+IV.--IN A YEAR
+
+Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
+"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
+even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The
+Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
+at her lover's mutability.
+
+     "Was it something said,
+       Something done,
+     Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
+       Turn of head?
+     Strange! that very way
+       Love begun:
+     I as little understand
+       Love's decay."[238:1]
+
+Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
+it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
+abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
+greatly that still, still, she can dream:
+
+     "Would he loved me yet,
+       On and on,
+     While I found some way undreamed
+       --Paid my debt!
+     Gave more life and more,
+       Till, all gone,
+     He should smile, 'She never seemed
+       Mine before.'"
+
+But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
+too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?
+
+     "Well, this cold clay clod
+       Was man's heart:
+     Crumble it, and what comes next?
+       Is it God ?" . . .
+
+The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!
+
+     "'Dying for my sake--
+       White and pink!
+     Can't we touch these bubbles then
+       But they break?'"
+
+That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
+hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
+since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]
+
+Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
+been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the
+supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love,
+can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet
+after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
+loves truly?
+
+Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?
+
+     "I had wealth and ease,
+       Beauty, youth:
+     Since my lover gave me love,
+       I gave these.
+
+     That was all I meant
+       --To be just,
+     And the passion I had raised
+       To content.
+     Since he chose to change
+       Gold for dust,
+     If I gave him what he praised,
+       Was it strange?"
+
+And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
+herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
+"way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .
+
+I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
+above:
+
+     "_And the passion I had raised
+       To content._"
+
+From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
+cries:
+
+     "I, too, at love's brim
+       Touched the sweet:
+     I would die if death bequeathed
+       Sweet to him."
+
+This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
+regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
+express either the girl or her poet.
+
+The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second
+verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
+going is so subtly indicated.
+
+     "Strange! that very way
+       Love begun:
+     I _as little understand_
+       Love's decay."
+
+We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should
+say love knows not reason--but love and God forbid that it should _aim_
+at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not
+die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with
+scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of
+"re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back
+to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not
+re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation,
+like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and
+suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How
+many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in
+some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that
+"ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_
+self: we pass into a Hades.
+
+     "Well, this cold clay clod
+       Was man's heart:
+     Crumble it, and what comes next?
+       Is it God?"
+
+Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from
+our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little,
+it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will
+endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . .
+Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more
+clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who
+comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer
+as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.
+Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both
+have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of
+love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of
+"dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in
+scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream,
+and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love
+that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be
+applied to Annabella Milbanke.
+
+[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the
+alliteration in this line.
+
+[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only
+after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of
+the rhyme."
+
+[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of
+male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+[Illustration: THE WIFE]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+A WOMAN'S LAST WORD
+
+
+They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does
+not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. But does thinking signify? She
+loves--is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at
+all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving,
+she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no
+influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last
+word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she
+contends no more?
+
+     "What so wild as words are?"
+
+--and that _they_ should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds
+debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the
+hawk spies from a bough above.
+
+     "See the creature stalking
+       While we speak!
+     Hush and hide the talking,
+       Cheek on cheek!"
+
+For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious
+effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be
+"talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way--or no: that is a
+paltry yielding. There shall _be_ no way but his.
+
+     "What so false as truth is,
+       False to thee?"
+
+She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to
+"know":
+
+     "Where the apple reddens
+       Never pry--
+     Lest we lose our Edens,
+       Eve and I.
+
+     Be a god and hold me
+       With a charm!
+     Be a man and fold me
+       With thine arm!
+
+     Teach me, only teach, Love!
+       As I ought
+     I will speak thy speech, Love,
+       Think thy thought--
+
+     Meet, if thou require it,
+       Both demands,
+     Laying flesh and spirit
+       In thy hands."
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice
+whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She
+hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it--since he can
+desire it. Since he _can_ . . .
+
+     "That shall be to-morrow,
+       Not to-night:
+     I must bury sorrow
+       Out of sight:
+
+     --Must a little weep, Love,
+       (Foolish me!)
+     And so fall asleep, Love,
+       Loved by thee."
+
+He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
+"sleep"; all shall be as before.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.
+For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
+silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
+otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
+highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
+for the woman.
+
+By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his
+three great songs of wedded love:
+
+     "Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
+       Your heart anticipate my heart,
+     You must be just before, in fine,
+       See and make me see, for your part,
+     New depths of the divine!"
+
+Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She,
+looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
+lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
+the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so
+grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the
+woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
+thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband
+to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long
+dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
+back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
+they found each other once for all.
+
+     "My perfect wife, my Leonor,
+       Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
+     Whom else could I dare look backward for,
+       With whom beside should I dare pursue
+     The path grey heads abhor?
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     My own, confirm me! If I tread
+       This path back, is it not in pride
+     To think how little I dreamed it led
+       To an age so blest that, by its side,
+     Youth seems the waste instead?"
+
+And now read again:
+
+     "Meet, _if thou require it_,
+       Both demands,
+     Laying flesh and spirit
+       In thy hands."
+
+A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
+yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_
+say to one another:
+
+     "Come back with me to the first of all,
+       Let us lean and love it over again,
+     Let us now forget and now recall,
+       Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
+     And gather what we let fall!"
+
+Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun
+so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!
+
+But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
+often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
+the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
+not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning
+from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet,
+strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
+sure indenture of freedom.
+
+     "That shall be to-morrow,
+       Not to-night:
+     I must bury sorrow
+       Out of sight."
+
+The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
+highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
+so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JAMES LEE'S WIFE
+
+
+In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
+heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
+"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
+The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
+"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman
+of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are
+at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's
+last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
+upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
+would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
+gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
+she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."
+
+We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
+speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
+nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not
+clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show
+us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
+woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail;
+the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from
+"old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"
+since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the
+whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere
+studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is _in excelsis_--for
+hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least
+could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live,
+remembering James Lee.
+
+Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[251:1] we may read a
+symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may
+watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed
+in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. _That_, as
+uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her
+husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet
+still can claim that he "set down to her"
+
+     "Love that was life, life that was love,
+       A tenure of breath at your lips' decree,
+     A passion to stand as your thoughts approve,
+       A rapture to fall where your foot might be."
+
+More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of
+"mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and
+resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the
+mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us,
+with so much at once of pity and of irony.
+
+James Lee's wife is a plain woman.
+
+     "Why, fade you might to a thing like me,
+       And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
+     Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . .
+
+So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired,
+coarse-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we
+find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the
+passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the
+first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was
+passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too
+closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it
+could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of
+course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon:
+_she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was
+she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation,
+never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds.
+Thus she sums him:
+
+     "With much in you waste, with many a weed,
+     And plenty of passions run to seed,
+       But a little good grain too."
+
+This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
+type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a
+mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
+of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
+realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
+almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_
+none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
+alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last
+Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
+or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
+unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
+the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
+gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
+lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
+curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
+amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.
+
+Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
+woman.
+
+
+I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW
+
+He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
+Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
+well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
+lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
+I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]
+
+And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
+it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
+always seems to come.
+
+     "Ah, Love, but a day
+       And the world has changed!
+     The sun's away,
+       And the bird estranged;
+     The wind has dropped,
+       And the sky's deranged:
+     Summer has stopped."
+
+We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
+faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
+is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! Such
+annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
+Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us
+think of something else. . . . But she goes on, and now we shall not\
+doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says:
+
+     "Look in my eyes!
+       Wilt thou change too?
+     Should I fear surprise?
+       Shall I find aught new
+     In the old and dear,
+       In the good and true,
+     With the changing year?"
+
+The questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or
+him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the
+man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the
+thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind.
+"I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And
+then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:
+
+     "Thou art a man,
+       But I am thy love.
+     For the lake, its swan;
+       For the dell, its dove;
+     And for thee (oh, haste!)
+       Me, to bend above,
+     Me, to hold embraced."
+
+She does not _say_, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must
+think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . And
+when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to
+ourselves the all it lacks.
+
+
+II.--BY THE FIRESIDE
+
+Summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. The
+blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits
+watching them. The wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck
+wood. . . .
+
+     "Oh, for the ills half-understood,
+         The dim dead woe
+         Long ago
+     Befallen this bitter coast of France!"
+
+And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:
+
+     "Well, poor sailors took their chance;
+         I take mine."
+
+Out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be
+eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate,
+
+     "O' the warm safe house and happy freight
+         --Thee and me."
+
+The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships
+safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood
+that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "That is worse."
+
+And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men
+on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman
+before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail"
+. . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open
+beneath?
+
+_This_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too
+can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is
+given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been
+lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors
+drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house."
+That melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she
+broods. . . .
+
+
+III.--IN THE DOORWAY
+
+She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn
+landscape.[257:1] It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like
+a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the
+wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on
+the wing.
+
+     "Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!"
+
+As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the
+golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its
+stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart
+"shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled."
+
+But courage, courage! Winter comes to all--not to them alone. And have
+they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms,
+and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to
+yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the
+magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it
+seems an event), yet will again find food. But November--the chill month
+with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite
+departed. . . . No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to
+mere material nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit
+His power to put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies
+external change:
+
+     "Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!"
+
+And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the
+house, and the field . . . and love.
+
+
+IV.--ALONG THE BEACH
+
+Rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. She walks alone
+on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
+for miles";[258:1] and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
+they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet." . . .
+Piteous phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason
+why he is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she
+would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
+almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
+woman. . . . She begins her "reasoning."
+
+     "You wanted my love--is that much true?
+     And so I did love, so I do:
+       What has come of it all along?
+
+     I took you--how could I otherwise?
+       For a world to me, and more;
+     For all, love greatens and glorifies
+     Till God's aglow, to the loving eyes,
+       In what was mere earth before.
+
+     Yes, earth--yes, mere ignoble earth!
+       Now do I mis-state, mistake?
+     Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?
+     Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,
+       Seal my sense up for your sake?
+
+     Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!
+       You were just weak earth, I knew":
+
+--and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our
+study.
+
+Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it
+is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she _has_ been wise in
+one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"--that
+memorable phrase, so Browningesque!
+
+She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. Thus far, then, kind and
+wise in her great passion. . . . But she should _forget_ that she has
+seen through him--she should keep that vision in the background, not
+hold it ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is
+where she has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was--and
+did not he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that
+was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the
+more to come?
+
+     "Well, and if none of these good things came,
+       What did the failure prove?
+     The man was my whole world, all the same."
+
+_That_ is the fault in her:
+
+       "That I do love, watch too long,
+     And wait too well, and weary and wear;
+     And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
+       Fit subject for some new song."
+
+She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the
+indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt--and such
+"light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a
+bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life,
+and _that_ is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . So
+the songs have said and will say for all time--the new songs for the old
+despair.
+
+But though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to
+act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is
+a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her
+means--neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he
+resents, she still must do immutably--bound upon the wheel of her true
+self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.
+
+She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach--"on the edge of the
+low rocks by the sea, for miles."
+
+
+V.--ON THE CLIFF
+
+But still love is a power! Love can move mountains, for is not love the
+same as faith? And not a mountain is here, but a mere man's
+heart--already "moved," for he _has_ loved her.
+
+It is summer again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry
+grass--if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the
+summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and
+flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell:
+"death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one
+another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the
+dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket!
+A cricket--only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real
+fairy, with wings all right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of
+fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly.
+
+     "No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,
+     See, wonderful blue and red!"
+
+Shall there not then be other analogies? May not the minds of men,
+though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them,
+transfigured like them:
+
+     "With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs--
+     Love settling unawares!"
+
+It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles
+happen every day.
+
+
+VI.--READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF
+
+These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The
+singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its
+appeal.
+
+     "'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,
+       Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
+     No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited
+       With falsehood--love, at last aware
+     Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--
+
+     'We have them; but I know not any tone
+       So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;
+     Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
+       If they knew any way to borrow
+     A pathos like thine own?'"
+
+The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she
+turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is
+almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
+thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_
+of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him,
+and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
+has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
+wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
+interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
+suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but
+the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
+her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
+phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
+woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
+dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
+how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:
+
+     "Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
+       Himself the undefeated that shall be:
+     Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test--
+       His triumph in eternity
+     Too plainly manifest!"
+
+Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
+pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the
+happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
+"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
+mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a
+midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
+country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute
+must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
+earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:
+
+       "So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
+     'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
+       Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
+     The limit time assigns.'" . . .
+
+Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.
+
+     "Nothing can be as it has been before;
+       Better, so call it, only not the same.
+     To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
+       And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
+     So answered: Never more!
+
+     Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
+       Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
+     Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
+       From change to change unceasingly,
+     His soul's wings never furled!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
+above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
+face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
+intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she
+rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
+still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
+moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
+imperiously again. The laws of nature?
+
+     "That's a new question; still replies the fact,
+       Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
+     We moan in acquiescence."
+
+Only to acquiescence can we attain.
+
+     "God knows: endure his act!"
+
+But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these,
+nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
+mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
+"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as
+it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we
+would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but
+time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
+while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried
+it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and
+life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could
+have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband
+loved her. . . .
+
+
+VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS
+
+Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
+is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
+that summer still may stay that we are tortured.
+
+     "Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
+       This autumn morning!"
+
+She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
+earth. That is best.
+
+                     ". . . How he sets his bones
+     To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
+     For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
+       Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
+     The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."
+
+The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
+tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old
+earth.
+
+But soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest.
+What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over
+the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth
+smiles and knows":
+
+     "If you loved only what were worth your love,
+     Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
+       Make the low nature better by your throes!
+     Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"
+
+I confess that I cannot follow this analogy. The lesson may be clear--of
+that later; the analogy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower
+nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this,
+what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her
+smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those
+less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." That seems to me to touch
+this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the
+unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is
+getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in
+the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine
+simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I
+still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.
+
+And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say
+that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also
+self-sufficiency?
+
+     "Make the low nature better by your throes."
+
+It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live,
+despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may
+call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For
+human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may
+indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it
+subsists.
+
+Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this
+strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must
+leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?
+But possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle.
+
+
+VIII.--BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD
+
+She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of
+a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da
+Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been
+happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped
+ardour.
+
+     "Its beauty mounted into my brain,"
+
+and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the
+chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:
+
+     "With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
+     I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
+     Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
+     Still from one's soulless finger-tips."
+
+This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
+it, by which one knows
+
+     "That here at length a master found
+     His match, a proud lone soul its mate."
+
+Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--
+
+                   ". . . how free, how fine
+     To fear almost!--of the limit-line."
+
+_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
+which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
+Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
+She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is
+not the same as Da Vinci's.
+
+     "Little girl with the poor coarse hand"
+
+. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
+Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
+like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."
+
+But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
+with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
+Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
+laugh her woes to scorn.
+
+     "The fool forsooth is all forlorn
+     Because the beauty she thinks best
+     Lived long ago or was never born,
+     Because no beauty bears the test
+     In this rough peasant hand!"
+
+It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
+years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
+but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use
+
+     "Of flesh and bone and nerve that make
+       The poorest coarsest human hand
+       An object worthy to be scanned
+     A whole life long for their sole sake."
+
+Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
+of life--this incompleteness?
+
+     "Now the parts and then the whole!"
+
+And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she,
+with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
+No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:
+
+     "'What use survives the beauty?'"
+
+Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.
+
+Then _this_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
+daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
+husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
+will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
+she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.
+
+     "Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!
+     I have my lesson, shall understand."
+
+This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for
+survival.
+
+
+IX.--ON DECK
+
+And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
+her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well,
+it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.
+
+     "There is nothing to remember in me,
+       Nothing I ever said with a grace,
+     Nothing I did that you care to see,
+       Nothing I was that deserves a place
+     In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."
+
+No "_petite fleur dans la pensée_"--none, none: she grants him all her
+dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is
+gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
+have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more
+certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
+His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
+loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
+in his eyes as he is in hers!
+
+So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when
+such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the
+"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her
+ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
+pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is
+so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.
+
+Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
+hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
+hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the
+sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own
+should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as
+bright a brow. . . .
+
+     "Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"
+
+But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
+the joy would have killed her.
+
+Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing
+like her," with the coarse hair and skin . . .
+
+     "You might turn myself!--should I know or care
+     When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"
+
+Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her
+
+     "Love that was life, life that was love";
+
+and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives
+his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. If she could fancy
+one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks
+again. . . . But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the
+little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and
+vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and
+cliff and rocks. All the formulas have failed but this one. This one
+will not fail. He is set free.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is
+too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have
+been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate;
+and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be
+different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was
+meant to be.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[251:1] The poems were first called _James Lee_ only.
+
+[254:1] _Life_, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.
+
+[257:1] "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . .
+Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_Life_, p. 266.
+
+[258:1] _Life_, p. 266.
+
+[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836,
+when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864.
+
+[263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and
+second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was
+enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul
+in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost."
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+[Illustration: THE TROUBLE OF LOVE]
+
+
+
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
+
+
+I
+
+THE WOMAN UNWON
+
+In the section entitled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of
+love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has
+assigned that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in
+suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman
+as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character
+through the utterances of men--and these are noble utterances, every
+one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks
+that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view
+and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine
+utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is
+imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an
+absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love
+in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."
+
+I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.
+Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on
+the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring
+love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will
+be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman
+should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of
+things as they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish
+his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over
+Nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite
+certainly _a person_--included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning
+should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his
+"teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence
+for man. But the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and
+myself--that, in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when
+expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well
+account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . Can it be,
+then, that Browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much
+less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly
+for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did
+he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of
+women? This, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet I think
+that affirmed it must be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart
+with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that
+of thaumaturgic power--it is but to say that he could not turn himself
+into a woman!
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In what ways does Browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for
+man? First, of course, as loved and unwon. But though this be the most
+obvious of the ways, not obvious is Browning's treatment of it. To love
+"in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. No love is in vain. Grief,
+anguish even, may attend it, but never can its issue be futility. Nor is
+this merely the already familiar view that somehow, though rejected,
+love benignly works for the beloved. "That may be, that _is_" (he seems
+to say), "but it is not the truth which most inspires me." The glory of
+love for Browning resides most radiantly in what it does for the lover's
+own soul. It is "God's secret": one who loves is initiate.
+
+     "Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
+         her;
+     Her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's
+         remainder.
+     Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and
+         blended:
+     And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been
+         ended."
+
+That is the concluding stanza of _Cristina_, which might be called the
+companion-piece to _Porphyria's Lover_; for in each the woman belongs to
+a social world remote from her adorer's; in each she has, nevertheless,
+perceived him and been drawn to him--but in _Cristina_ is caught back
+into the vortex, while in _Porphyria's Lover_ the passion prevails, for
+the man, by killing her, has kept her folded in "God's secret" with
+himself.
+
+     "She should never have looked at me if she meant I should not love
+         her!
+     There are plenty . . . men, you call such, I suppose . . . she may
+         discover
+     All her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found
+         them:
+     But I'm not so, and she knew it, when she fixed me, glancing round
+         them."
+
+That is the lover's first impulsive cry on finding himself "thrown
+over." Why did she not leave him alone? Others tell him that that
+"fixing" of hers means nothing--that she is, simply, a coquette. But he
+"can't tell what her look said." Certainly not any "vile cant" about
+giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about
+lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the
+queen of women. Not _that_, whatever else!
+
+And now, so sure of this that he grows sure of other things as well, he
+declares that it was a moment of true revelation for her also--she
+_did_ perceive in him the man she wanted.
+
+     "Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk that
+         moments,
+     Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments
+     Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
+     Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing."
+
+That was what she had felt--the queen of women! A coquette, if they
+will, for others, but not for him; and, though cruel to him also in the
+event, not because she had not recognised him. She _had_ recognised him,
+and more--she had recognised the great truth, had deeply felt that the
+soul "stops here" for but one end, the true end, sole and single: "this
+love-way."
+
+If the soul miss that way, it goes wrong. There may be better ends,
+there may even be deeper blisses, but that is the essential--that is the
+significant thing in life.
+
+But they need not smile at his fatuity! He sees that she "knew," but he
+can see the issue also.
+
+     "Oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in
+         derision,
+     Trampled out the light for ever. Never fear but there's provision
+     Of the devil's to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in
+         rapture" . . .
+
+_That_ must be reckoned with; but all it does to those who "catch God's
+secret" is simply to make them prize their capture so much the more:
+
+     "Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
+         her;"
+
+--for though she has cast him off, he has grasped her soul, and will
+retain it. He has prevailed, and all the rest of his life shall prove
+him the victorious one--the one who has two souls to work with! He will
+prove all that such a pair can accomplish; and then death can come
+quickly: "this world's use will have been ended." She also knew this,
+but would not follow it to its issue. Thus she lost him--but he gained
+her, and that shall do as well.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+No loving "in vain" there! But this poem is the high-water mark of
+unsuccessful love exultant. Browning was too true a humanist to keep us
+always on so shining a peak; he knew that there are lower levels, where
+the wounded wings must rest--that mood, for instance, of wistful
+looking-back to things undreamed-of and now gone, yet once experienced:
+
+     "This is a spray the bird clung to,
+       Making it blossom with pleasure,
+     Ere the high tree-top she sprung to,
+       Fit for her nest and her treasure.
+       Oh, what a hope beyond measure
+     Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to--
+     So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!
+
+     This is a heart the Queen leant on" . . .
+
+--and in a stanza far less lovely than that of the bird, he shows forth
+the analogy. The Queen "went on"; but what a moment that heart had
+had! . . . Gratitude, we see always, for the gift of love in the heart,
+for God's secret. The lover was left alone, but he had known the thrill.
+"Better to have loved and lost"--nay, but "lost," for Browning, is not
+in the scheme. She is there, in the world, whether his or another's.
+
+Sometimes she has never been his at all, has never cared:
+
+     "All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
+     Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
+     And strew them where Pauline may pass.
+     She will not turn aside? Alas!
+     Let them lie. Suppose they die?
+     The chance was, they might take her eye."
+
+And then, for many a month, he tried to learn the lute to please her.
+
+     "To-day I venture all I know.
+     She will not hear my music? So!
+     Break the string; fold music's wing:
+     Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"
+
+Thus we gradually see that all his life he has been learning to love
+her. Now he has resolved to speak. . . . Heaven or hell?
+
+     "She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
+     Lose who may--I still can say
+     Those who win heaven, blest are they!"
+
+Here again is Browning's typical lover. Never does he whine, never
+resent: she was free to choose, and she has not chosen _him_. That is
+pain; but of the "humiliation" commonly assigned to unsuccessful love,
+he never dreams: where can be humiliation in having caught God's
+secret? . . . And even if she have half-inclined to him, but found that
+not all herself can give herself--more pain in that, a nearer approach
+to "failure," perhaps--even so, he understands.
+
+     "I said--Then dearest, since 'tis so,
+     Since now at length my fate I know,
+     Since nothing all my love avails,
+     Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,
+       Since this was written and needs must be--
+     My whole heart rises up to bless
+     Your name in pride and thankfulness!
+     Take back the hope you gave--I claim
+     Only a memory of the same
+     --And this beside, if you will not blame,
+       Your leave for one more last ride with me."
+
+The girl hesitates. Her proud dark eyes, half-pitiful, dwell on him for
+a moment--"with life or death in the balance," thinks he.
+
+                                   ". . . Right!
+     The blood replenished me again;
+     My last thought was at least not vain;
+     I and my mistress, side by side
+     Shall be together, breathe and ride;
+     So, one day more am I deified.
+       _Who knows but the world may end to-night?_"[285:1]
+
+Now the moment comes in which he lifts her to the saddle. It is as if he
+had drawn down upon his breast the fairest, most celestial cloud in
+evening-skies . . . a cloud touched gloriously at once by setting sun
+and rising moon and evening-star.
+
+     "Down on you, near and yet more near,
+     Till flesh must fade for heaven was here--
+     Thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear!
+       Thus lay she a moment on my breast."
+
+And then they begin to ride. His soul smooths itself out--there shall be
+no repining, no questioning: he will take the whole of his hour.
+
+     "Had I said that, had I done this,
+     So might I gain, so might I miss.
+     Might she have loved me? just as well
+     She might have hated, who can tell!
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+       And here we are riding, she and I."
+
+_He_ is not the only man who has failed. All men strive--who succeeds?
+His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe--everywhere the
+_done_ is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men dream beyond their
+powers:
+
+     "I hoped she would love me; here we ride!"
+
+No one gains all. Hand and brain are never equal; hearts, when they can
+greatly conceive, fail in the greatest courage; nothing we do is just
+what we dreamed it might be. We are hedged in everywhere by the fleshly
+screen. But _they_ two ride, and he sees her bosom lift and fall. . . .
+To the rest, then, their crowns! To the statesman, ten lines, perhaps,
+which contain the fruit of all his life; to a soldier, a flag stuck on a
+heap of bones--and as guerdon for each, a name scratched on the Abbey
+stones.
+
+     "My riding is better, by their leave!"
+
+Even our artists! The poet says the thing, but we feel it. Not one of us
+can express it like him; but has he _had_ it? When he dies, will he have
+been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have
+never turned a line?
+
+     "Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."
+
+(Note the fine irony here. The poet shall sing the joy of riding; this
+man _rides_.)
+
+The great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to Art:
+
+     "And that's your Venus, whence we turn
+     To yonder girl that fords the burn!"
+
+But the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not
+pity him. The musician fares even worse. After _his_ life's labours,
+they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention,
+but fashions change so quickly in music--he is out-of-date. He gave his
+youth? Well--
+
+     "I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine."
+
+Supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have
+for which to strive? We must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss
+to die for! If _he_ had this glory-garland round his soul, what other
+joy could he ever so dimly descry?
+
+     "Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
+       Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride."
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching
+pace. It shall be best as she decrees. She rejects him: he will not
+whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him--_she_ shall
+not be wrong! He has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of
+her--and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. That moment he
+has, whole and perfect:
+
+     "Who knows but the world may end to-night!"
+
+Yes; they ride on--the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompass them;
+they are together. His soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from
+her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great
+paradox--almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union,
+and so silent. . . . But is she _not_ there? and, being there, does she
+not now seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from
+her? She _is_ there--
+
+     "And yet--she has not spoke so long!"
+
+She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what
+his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it
+mean? . . . And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What
+if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she
+does love?
+
+Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's
+flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with
+him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity--
+
+     "And heaven just prove that I and she
+       Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious
+love-song--surpassed, I think and many others think, by none in the
+world--I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has
+rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in
+all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the
+pity--and the pride? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by
+his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he
+must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings,
+riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the
+"obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who
+made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the
+transcendentalists.
+
+Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to
+meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon
+this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys
+himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from
+the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean
+anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it
+means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and
+know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best
+meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced
+mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the
+hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of
+Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.
+Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those
+unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades,
+caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose
+pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."
+
+The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly
+cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate
+purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]
+
+She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these
+impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth
+shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these
+shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back
+to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet,
+beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience;
+he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And
+she--forgives him, but not loves him.
+
+     "What means the sad slow silver smile above
+     My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best
+     But acquiescence that I take my rest,
+     Contented to be clay?"
+
+She "smiles him slow forgiveness"--nothing more; he is dismissed, must
+travel forth again. _This_ time he may return, untinged by the ray which
+he is to traverse. She sends him, deliberately; he must break through
+the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her--but he is to come back
+unsmirched. So she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed.
+
+And patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone--until this day. This
+day his patience fails him, and he speaks. Once more he had come
+back--once more been "pardoned." But the pity was so gentle--like a
+moon-beam. He had almost hoped the smile would pass the "pallid moonbeam
+limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." If she could
+pass that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay
+from gold's own self; "for gold means love." . . . But no; the "sad slow
+silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence
+in his lesserness for _him_. _She_ acquiesced not; she keeps her love
+for the "spirit-seven" before God's throne.[291:1]
+
+He then made one supreme appeal for
+
+     "Love, the love sole and whole without alloy."
+
+Vainly! Such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." Her calm regard was
+unchanged--nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply
+disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his
+kissing of her feet--he _did_ go forth again. This time he might return,
+immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . He knew he
+could not, but--he _might_! She promises that he can: should he not
+trust her?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, to-day, once more he is returned. Still she stands, still she
+listens, still she smiles! But he protests at last:
+
+     "Surely I had your sanction when I faced,
+     Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray
+     Whence I retrack my steps?"
+
+The crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back
+deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again
+for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of
+that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly:
+she _had_ ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and
+body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and
+frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"--just as he had been
+with crimson, purple!
+
+She willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. He pleads once more
+her own permission--nay, command! And, as before, she shows
+
+     "Scarce recognition, no approval, some
+     Mistrust, more wonder at a man become
+     Monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well,
+     Through his adventure."
+
+But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must
+share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one
+way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:
+
+     "I pass into your presence, I receive
+     Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."
+
+But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his
+penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved,
+the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the
+experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.
+
+                            ". . . No, I say:
+     No fresh adventure! No more seeking love
+     At end of toil, and finding, calm above
+     My passion, the old statuesque regard,
+     The sad petrific smile!"
+
+And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard
+and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.
+
+     "You very woman with the pert pretence
+     To match the male achievement!"
+
+_Who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough
+effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper";
+when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that
+womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the
+truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as
+by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the
+very muck that made it!
+
+But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,
+
+     "The true slave's querulous outbreak!"
+
+And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but
+_this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to
+that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys?
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a
+nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal
+of love, accepted conventionally." _How_ impossible he has shown not
+only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. This is not
+woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true
+slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If
+women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"
+they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There
+must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to
+shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the
+smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the
+marrings which have made it possible.
+
+But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He
+accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what
+is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of
+the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a
+she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man
+could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays--of
+all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could
+explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot.
+Experience is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"--the
+colours! The shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there,
+hearted." True, but this is not _experience_, and she shall not conceit
+herself into believing it to be. She shall not set up the "pert pretence
+to match the male achievement": she shall learn that men make women
+"easy victors," when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's
+sake. One or the other she must choose: knowledge and the right to
+judge, or ignorance and the duty to refrain from judgment. . . . And
+yet--he goes again; he obeys the silver smile! For the "crimson-quest
+may deepen to a sunrise"; he _may_ come back and find her waiting,
+"sunlight and salvation," because she understands at last; and both
+shall look for stains from those long shafts, and see none there. . . .
+Maybe, maybe: he goes--will come again one day; and _that_ at last may
+prove itself the day when "men are pure, and women brave."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+We pass from the unearthly atmosphere of _Numpholeptos_--well-nigh the
+most abstract of all Browning's poems--to the vivid, astonishing realism
+of _Too Late_.
+
+Edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is
+musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which
+has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his
+absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who
+married the other." He had been wont to "sit and look at his life." That
+life, until he met her, had rippled and run like a river. But he met her
+and loved her and lost her--and it was as if a great stone had been cast
+by a devil into his life's mid-current. The waves strove about it--the
+waves that had "come for their joy, and found this horrible stone
+full-tide."
+
+The stone thwarted God. But the lover has had two ways of thinking about
+it. Though the waves, in all their strength and fullness, could not win
+past, a thread of water might escape and run through the
+"evening-country," safe, untormented, silent, until it reached the sea.
+This would be his tender, acquiescent brooding on all she is to him, and
+the hope that still they may be united at the last, though time shall
+then have stilled his passion.
+
+The second way was better!
+
+     "Or else I would think, 'Perhaps some night
+       When new things happen, a meteor-ball
+     May slip through the sky in a line of light,
+       And earth breathe hard, and landmarks fall,
+     And my waves no longer champ nor chafe,
+       Since a stone will have rolled from its place: let be!'"
+
+For the husband might die, and he, still young and vigorous, might try
+again to win her. . . . That was how he had been wont to "sit and look
+at his life."
+
+     "But, Edith dead! No doubting more!"
+
+All the dreams are over; all the brooding days have been lived in vain.
+
+     "But, dead! All's done with: wait who may,
+       Watch and wear and wonder who will.
+     Oh, my whole life that ends to-day!
+       Oh, my soul's sentence, sounding still,
+     'The woman is dead that was none of his;
+       And the man that was none of hers may go!'
+     There's only the past left: worry that!" . . .
+
+All that he was or could have been, she should have had for a word, a
+"want put into a look." She had not given that look; now she can never
+give it--and perhaps she _does_ want him. He feels that she does--a
+"pulse in his cheek that stabs and stops" assures him that she "needs
+help in her grave, and finds none near"--that from his heart, precisely
+_his_, she now at last wants warmth. And he can only send it--so! . . .
+His acquiescence then had been his error.
+
+     "I ought to have done more: once my speech,
+       And once your answer, and there, the end,
+     And Edith was henceforth out of reach!
+       Why, men do more to deserve a friend,
+     Be rid of a foe, get rich, grow wise,
+       Nor, folding their arms, stare fate in the face.
+     Why, better even have burst like a thief
+       _And borne you away to a rock for us two,
+       In a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief_" . . .
+
+Well, _he_ had not done this. But--
+
+     "What did the other do? You be judge!
+       Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!
+     Give him his six whole years: I grudge
+       None of the life with you, nay, loathe
+     Myself that I grudged his start in advance
+       Of me who could overtake and pass.
+     But, as if he loved you! No, not he,
+       Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . .
+
+--for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is
+and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her
+was among unaccountable things. That _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and
+free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and
+held it forth to _her_, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the
+glass!" . . . For--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place
+this passionate love-song by itself in the world--
+
+     "Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
+       More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     The others? No head that was turned, no heart
+       Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"
+
+Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a
+friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to
+believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they
+were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth
+about her was simply that
+
+     "On the whole, you were let alone, I think."
+
+And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who
+acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?
+
+     "He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
+       Loved you and doved you--did not I laugh?"
+
+Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of
+poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover:
+they had both been tried.
+
+     "Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,
+     _Tekel_, found wanting, set aside,
+       Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark
+     Till comfort come, and the last be bled:
+     He? He is tagging your epitaph."
+
+And now sounds that cry of the girl of _In a Year_.
+
+     "If it could only come over again!"
+
+She _must_ have loved him best. If there had been time. . . . She would
+have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched
+the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart,
+to find that only verses could spurt from it. . . .
+
+     "And late it was easy; late, you walked
+       Where a friend might meet you; Edith's name
+     Arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked;
+       If I heard good news, you heard the same;
+     When I woke, I knew that your breath escaped;
+       I could bide my time, keep alive, alert."
+
+Now she is dead: "no doubting more." . . . But somehow he will get his
+good of it! He will keep alive--and long, she shall see; but not like
+the others; there shall be no turning aside, and he will begin at once
+as he means to end. Those others may go on with the world--get gold,
+get women, betray their wives and their husbands and their friends.
+
+     "There are two who decline, a woman and I,
+       And enjoy our death in the darkness here."[301:1]
+
+And he recurs to her cherished, her dwelt-on, adored defects. Only _he_
+could have loved her so, in despite of them. The most complex mood of
+lovers, this! Humility and pride are mingled; one knows not which is
+which--the pride of love, humility of self. Only so could the loved one
+have declined to our level; only so could our love acquire value in
+those eyes--and yet "the others" did not love so, the defects _were_
+valid: there should be some recognition: "_I_ loved, _quand même_!" Why,
+it was almost the defects that brought the thrill:
+
+     "I liked that way you had with your curls,
+       Wound to a ball in a net behind:
+     Your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl's,
+       And your mouth--there was never, to my mind,
+     Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;
+       And the dented chin, too--what a chin!
+     There were certain ways when you spoke, some words
+       That you know you never could pronounce:
+     You were thin, however; like a bird's
+       Your hand seemed--some would say, the pounce
+     Of a scaly-footed hawk--all but!
+       The world was right when it called you thin.
+
+     But I turn my back on the world: I take
+       Your hand, and kneel, and lay to my lips.
+     Bid me live, Edith!"
+
+--and she shall be queen indeed, shall have high observance, courtship
+made perfect. He seems to see her stand there--
+
+     "Warm too, and white too: would this wine
+     Had washed all over that body of yours,
+       Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus!"
+
+. . . The wine of his life, that she would not take--but she shall take
+it now! He will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by
+drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. Edith needs
+help in her grave and finds none near--wants warmth from his heart? He
+sends it--so.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. She
+was the man's whole life, and she has died. Then he dies too, that he
+may live.
+
+     "There are two who decline, a woman and I,
+       And enjoy our death in the darkness here."
+
+Yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for
+intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul
+endures."
+
+This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does
+courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart
+has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the
+loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with
+it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart
+will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late--it calls from the
+grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain:
+
+     "For God above creates the love to reward the love."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, _Any Wife to
+any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.
+
+[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than
+this--nor more famous.
+
+[289:1] In _By the Fireside_.
+
+[290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198.
+
+[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the
+Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion
+which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'
+are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common
+image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify
+wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the,
+after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is
+"an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted
+conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or
+twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to
+the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity
+are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely:
+"Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Hegelian chord of experience.
+
+[301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned
+lyrics:--
+
+     "The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell,
+       In crazy dances they're leaping:
+     We two in the grave lie well, lie well,
+       And I in thine arms am sleeping.
+
+     The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day,
+       To Heaven or Hell they're hieing:
+     We two care nothing, we two will stay
+       Together quietly lying."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WOMAN WON
+
+
+Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than
+now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she
+be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it),
+because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has
+never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is _because_ men feel so
+keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the
+real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it.
+Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if
+love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come
+to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.
+
+But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are
+accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said
+of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what
+Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.
+
+             "Room after room,
+             I hunt the house through
+             We inhabit together.
+     Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her--
+     Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her
+     Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
+     As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
+     Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."
+
+So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she
+does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind
+to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses,
+_for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows
+nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room!
+How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when
+she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . .
+if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce
+it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very
+inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear
+her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there
+seem to be for him.
+
+     "Yet the day wears,
+     And door succeeds door;
+     I try the fresh fortune--
+     Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
+     Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
+     Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
+     But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore,
+     Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"
+
+Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is
+not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms:
+it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_
+house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out
+as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek
+at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!
+
+She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a
+secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and
+thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always
+elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he
+quickly answers:
+
+     "Escape me?
+     Never--
+     Beloved!
+     While I am I, and you are you,
+     So long as the world contains us both,
+     Me the loving and you the loth,
+     While the one eludes, must the other pursue."
+
+But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find
+her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_.
+
+     "My life is a fault at last, I fear:
+     It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
+     Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."
+
+It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at
+one another, and he takes heart again.
+
+     "But what if I fail of my purpose here?
+     It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
+     To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
+     And, baffled, get up and begin again--
+     So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."
+
+But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him
+to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:
+
+     "Look but once from your farthest bound
+     At me so deep in the dust and dark,
+     No sooner the old hope goes to ground
+     Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
+           I shape me--
+           Ever
+           Removed!"
+
+Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each
+other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and
+fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I
+have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the
+thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover
+can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of
+_Love in a Life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the
+same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear
+that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the
+_body_; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various
+points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain,
+the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through _her_ house he
+cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes
+him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension;
+she does not desire to "escape" him.
+
+The old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the
+riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might
+be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is
+kept back:
+
+     "While the one eludes must the other pursue."
+
+"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for
+the desire of the man."
+
+In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at
+one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous;
+the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart
+shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind
+her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the
+last resort, on _her_.
+
+But in _Two in the Campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. What he
+wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to
+forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be
+done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her--and he cannot
+tell her, for he does not himself fully know.
+
+     "I wonder do you feel to-day
+       As I have felt since, hand in hand,
+     We sat down on the grass, to stray
+       In spirit better through the land,
+     This morn of Rome and May?"
+
+His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks
+and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . No;
+it escapes, escapes.
+
+     "Help me to hold it! First it left
+       The yellowing fennel. . . ."
+
+What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it--and the
+thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five
+green beetles are groping--but not there either does it rest . . . it is
+all about him: entangling, eluding:
+
+     "Everywhere on the grassy slope,
+       I traced it. Hold it fast!"
+
+The grassy slope may be the secret! That infinity of passion and
+peace--the Roman Campagna:
+
+     "The champaign with its endless fleece
+       Of feathery grasses everywhere!
+     Silence and passion, joy and peace,
+       An everlasting wash of air--
+     Rome's ghost since her decease."
+
+And think of all that that plain even now stands for:
+
+     "Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
+       Such miracles performed in play,
+     Such primal naked forms of flowers,
+       Such letting nature have her way
+     While heaven looks from its towers!"
+
+They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot
+_they_ "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?
+
+     "How say you? Let us, O my dove,
+       Let us be unashamed of soul,
+     As earth lies bare to heaven above!
+       How is it under our control
+     To love or not to love?"
+
+But always they stop short of one another. That is the dread mystery:
+
+     "I would that you were all to me,
+       You that are just so much, no more.
+     Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
+       Where does the fault lie? What the core
+     O' the wound, since wound must be?"
+
+He longs to yield his will, his whole being--to see with her eyes, set
+his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part
+his--_be_ her. . . .
+
+     "No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
+       Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
+     Catch your soul's warmth--I pluck the rose
+       And love it more than tongue can speak--
+     Then the good minute goes."
+
+Goes--with such swiftness! Already he is "far out of it." And shall this
+never be different?
+
+                    ". . . Must I go
+     Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
+       Onward, whenever light winds blow?"
+
+He must indeed, for already he is "off again":
+
+     "Just when I seemed about to learn!"
+
+Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is
+lost again:
+
+     "The old trick! Only I discern--
+       Infinite passion, and the pain
+     Of finite hearts that yearn."
+
+_No_ contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are
+finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as
+they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the
+sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again--again they
+shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"
+
+For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna
+itself says that--
+
+     "Rome's ghost since her decease."
+
+Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms,
+they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old.
+_New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old_; and all the lovers have
+discerned, like him,
+
+     "Infinite passion, and the pain
+     Of finite hearts that yearn."
+
+For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the
+sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:
+
+     "I _wonder_ do you feel to-day
+     As I have felt . . . ?"
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In the enchanting _Lovers' Quarrel_ we find a less metaphysical pair
+than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken
+her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of
+her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly
+and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have
+frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly
+he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them
+both at the same moment--games out of straws of their own devising;
+drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:
+
+     "Free on each other's flaws,
+     How we chattered like two church daws!"
+
+And then the _Times_ would come in--and the Emperor has married his
+Mlle. de Montijo!
+
+     "There they sit ermine-stoled,
+     And she powders her hair with gold."
+
+Or a travel-book arrives from the library--and the two heads are close
+together over the pictures.
+
+     "Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
+     Miles and miles of gold and green
+       Where the sunflowers blow
+       In a solid glow,
+     And to break now and then the screen--
+       Black neck and eyeballs keen,
+     Up a wild horse leaps between!"
+
+. . . No picture in the book like that--what a genius he is! The book is
+pushed away; and there lies the table bare:
+
+     "Try, will our table turn?
+     Lay your hands there light, and yearn
+       Till the yearning slips
+       Thro' the finger-tips
+     In a fire which a few discern,
+       And a very few feel burn,
+     And the rest, they may live and learn!
+
+     Then we would up and pace,
+     For a change, about the place,
+       Each with arm o'er neck:
+       'Tis our quarter-deck,
+     We are seamen in woeful case.
+       Help in the ocean-space!
+     Or, if no help, we'll embrace."
+
+The next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in
+that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing
+properly the parts:
+
+     "See how she looks now, dressed
+     In a sledging-cap and vest!
+       'Tis a huge fur cloak--
+       Like a reindeer's zoke
+     Falls the lappet along the breast:
+       Sleeves for her arms to rest,
+     Or to hang, as my Love likes best."
+
+Now it is _his_ turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the Spanish
+ladies can"--but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork
+moustache, and she "turns into such a man!" . . .
+
+All this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth
+and put it to sleep. Snow-time is love-time--for hearts can then show
+all:
+
+     "How is earth to know
+     Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months ago--and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! The
+March sun feels like May. He looks out upon it:
+
+         "All is blue again
+         After last night's rain,
+     And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
+         Only, my Love's away!
+     I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
+
+Yes--she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not
+take two to do that wretched deed, _she_ has quarrelled. It was some
+little thing that he said--neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor
+taunt:
+
+     "And the friends were friend and foe!"
+
+She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.
+
+One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was
+_not_ so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless!
+This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour--that much is
+clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What _had_ he said?
+Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting
+of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice
+can--for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or
+the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly,
+she had gone, and still is gone--and he sits marvelling. Three months!
+Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a
+word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been _one_ person!
+
+     "Me, do you leave aghast
+     With the memories We amassed?"
+
+Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.
+
+     "Love, if you knew the light
+     That your soul casts in my sight,
+         How I look to you
+         For the pure and true,
+     And the beauteous and the right--"
+
+But so had she looked to _him_, and he had shown her "a moment's
+spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this
+against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever
+happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred
+by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear.
+But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is
+different with love.
+
+     "Wrong in the one thing rare--
+     Oh, it is hard to bear!"
+
+And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be
+dancing down the dell,
+
+     "Each with a tale to tell,
+     Could my Love but attend as well."
+
+But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier
+every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the
+spring, when the almond-blossom blows.
+
+         "We shall have the word
+         In a minor third
+     There is none but the cuckoo knows:
+         Heaps of the guelder rose!
+     I must bear with it, I suppose."
+
+For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back.
+Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as
+spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there,
+and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the
+heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is
+now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":
+
+     "Heart, shall we live or die?
+     The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"
+
+Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow,
+the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:
+
+     "Not to our ingle, though,
+     Where we loved each the other so!"
+
+If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring,
+when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to
+love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose
+which he will have to bear with . . .
+
+But, after all, it _is_ November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his;
+she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were
+winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him _as before_" (thus we
+perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her
+before with that word which was _not_ so many things!)--and what else is
+it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In
+March, too, there are storms--here is one beginning now, at noon, which
+shows that it will last. . . . Not yet, then, the too lovely spring!
+
+         "It is twelve o'clock:
+         I shall hear her knock
+     In the worst of a storm's uproar:
+         I shall pull her through the door,
+     I shall have her for evermore!"
+
+. . . I think she came back. She would want to see how well he
+understood the spring--he who could make that picture of the Pampas'
+sheen and the wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he
+not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere
+_Times_ news? And it _is_ impossible to bear with the guelder-rose--the
+guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will
+efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the
+worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door!
+
+In _The Lost Mistress_ it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We
+are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her--he who so
+tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see
+how much he suffers--he still can say the "little things" she liked.
+
+     "All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
+       As one at first believes?
+     Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
+       About your cottage eaves!
+
+     And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
+       I noticed that, to-day;
+     One day more breaks them open fully
+       --You know the red turns grey."
+
+That is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it.
+
+     "To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
+       May I take your hand in mine?
+     Mere friends are we--well, friends the merest
+       Keep much that I resign."
+
+He is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. _He_ resigns.
+But the friends do not know what "he" knew.
+
+     "For each glance of the eye so bright and black
+       Though I keep with heart's endeavour--
+     Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
+       Though it stay in my soul for ever--"
+
+. . . Is this like a friend? But he accepts her bidding--very nearly.
+There are some things, perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not
+fear--he will try.
+
+     "Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
+       Or only a thought stronger;
+     I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
+       Or so very little longer!"
+
+Again we have the typical Browning lover, who will not reproach nor
+scorn nor whine. But I think that this one had perhaps a little excess
+of whimsical humour. She would herself have needed a good deal of such
+humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "_Does truth sound
+bitter, as one at first believes?_" Somewhat puzzling to her, it may be,
+that very philosophical reflection! . . . This has been called a noble,
+tender, an heroic, song of loss. For me there lurks a smile in it. I do
+not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather I a little
+wonder how she could have sent him away. But is it certain that she will
+not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? He means to hold her
+hand a little longer than the others do!
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+_The Worst of It_ is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has
+left him for a lover. He cares for nothing else in the world; his whole
+heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her.
+But there is no way, for him. And the "worst of it" is that all has
+happened _through_ him. She had given him herself, she had bound her
+soul by the "vows that damn"--and then had found that she must break
+them. And he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down!
+
+But _she_--the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of
+white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like
+myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! Is there to be no
+heaven for her--no crown for that brow? Shall other women be sainted,
+and not she, graced here beyond all saints?
+
+     "Hardly! That must be understood!
+       The earth is your place of penance, then."
+
+But even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . If
+it had only been he that was false, not she! _He_ could have borne all
+easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little
+difference. And he is nothing, while she is all.
+
+Too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against
+the woman. Instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that
+which he makes--though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not
+catch.
+
+     "And I to have tempted you"--
+
+. . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:
+
+     "I to have tempted you! I, who tired
+       Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
+     I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
+       Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
+     And you meant to have hated and despised--
+       Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"
+
+This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the
+beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and
+assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender,
+generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as
+some old writer called _anger_. All these wonderful and subtle reasons
+for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that
+awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even
+then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble
+enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth
+is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer--almost they
+might be called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing
+stanzas of _The Worst of It_, and feel that no one should be doomed to
+suffer such forgiveness. What chance had _her_ soul? At every turn it
+found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all
+eternity.
+
+     "I knew you once; but in Paradise,
+         If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
+
+No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and
+passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at
+all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that
+even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already
+that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of
+Judgment. And he _is_ so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a
+Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous--perfectly right. . . . And
+sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious
+brow,--sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue,
+we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of
+shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.
+
+     "We take our own method, the devil and I,
+       With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
+     And the best we wish to what lives, is--death."
+
+_She_ is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now
+she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes
+on to reflect--most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured
+too long:--
+
+     "[You] have done no evil and want no aid,
+       Will live the old life out and chance the new.
+     And your sentence is written all the same,
+       And I can do nothing--pray, perhaps:
+     But somehow the word pursues its game--
+       If I pray, if I curse--for better or worse:
+     And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
+       And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.
+
+     Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
+       Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
+     Be happy! Add but the other grace,
+       Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
+     I knew you once: but in Paradise,
+       If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
+
+I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel,
+do we not? that _now_ she is having her first opportunity to be both
+happy and good--free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband.
+And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost
+redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to
+woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many
+of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of
+the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in
+man. But not in _James Lee's Wife_ is the top-note of magnanimity more
+strained than in _The Worst of It_. Moral gymnastics should not be
+practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than
+Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his
+warm, wise heart--too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and
+forgot the truth. "A man and woman _might_ feel so," he sometimes seems
+to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so
+felt."
+
+And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women--the worst of it. But
+oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a
+reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust
+and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great
+Epilogue:--
+
+     "Greet the unseen with a cheer."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[308:1] Compare this passage with one in a letter to E. B. B.: "In this
+House of Life, where I go, you go--when I ascend, you run before--when I
+descend, it is after you."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+This text uses a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has
+been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem.
+They are indicated here by five asterisks:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The number of periods in ellipses match the original.
+
+Thought breaks in the text are indicated by the following:
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+The word manoeuvre used an ae ligature in the original.
+
+Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+The following words appear in the original with and without hyphens:
+
+     commonplace/common-place
+     disgrace/dis-grace
+     moonbeam/moon-beam
+     wellnigh/well-nigh
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROWNING'S HEROINES ***
+
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+
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+
+
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Browning's Heroines
+
+Author: Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+Illustrator: Maxwell Armfield
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2007 [EBook #21247]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROWNING'S HEROINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/pippa.png" alt="Pippa" width="45%"/>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<h1 style="margin-top: 2em;">BROWNING'S<br />
+HEROINES</h1>
+
+<h3 style="margin-top: 2em;"><span class="smcap">by</span> ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE<br />
+WITH FRONTISPIECE &amp; DECORATIONS<br />
+BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD</h3>
+
+<h4 style="margin-top: 4em;">LONDON<br />
+CHATTO &amp; WINDUS<br />
+1913</h4>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_vii" id="Page_vii">[Pg vii]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>When this book was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say
+about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"&mdash;and the
+question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal
+ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If
+there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said
+himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to <i>suggest</i>&mdash;to open
+magic casements&mdash;surely is the office of our artists in every sort:
+thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show
+the casement stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat
+desperately to open it. Saying the things "about" is the other people's
+function. It is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her
+castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is
+nothing.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Browning, I think, is "coming back," as stars come back. There has been
+the period of obscuration. Seventeen years ago, when the <i>Yellow Book</i>
+and the <i>National Observer</i> were contending for <i>les</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_viii" id="Page_viii">[Pg viii]</a></span><i>jeunes</i>, Browning
+was, in the more "precious" c&ocirc;terie, king of modern poets. I can
+remember the editor of that golden Quarterly reading, declaiming,
+quoting, almost breathing, Browning! It was from Henry Harland that this
+reader learnt to read <i>The Ring and the Book</i>: "Leave out the lawyers
+and the Tertium Quid, and all after Guido until the Envoi." It was Henry
+Harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And thinking too&mdash;oh, thinking, if you like,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How utterly dissociated was I.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;regardless of all aptitude in the allusion, making it simply because
+it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day
+struck calm" were always <i>his</i> days of excitement.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. A hundred Browning
+verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in Cromwell Road.</p>
+
+<p><i>Misconceptions</i> was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying
+branches:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This is a spray the bird clung to.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>You were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that
+first stanza&mdash;and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza
+was. Nor shall I easily let slip the memory of <i>Apparent Failure</i>, thus
+recited. He would begin at the second verse, the "Doric little Morgue"
+verse. You were not to miss the great "phrase" in</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The three men who did most abhor<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their lives in Paris yesterday.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_ix" id="Page_ix">[Pg ix]</a></span></p><p>&mdash;but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos
+in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell
+you, of Browning's chief defect&mdash;over-statement.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How did it happen, my poor boy?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You wanted to be Bonaparte,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And have the Tuileries for toy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And could not, so it broke your heart.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How compassionately he would give that forth! "A screen of glass, you're
+thankful for"; "Be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "Poor men God made,
+and all for this!"&mdash;the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in
+those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle
+foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "H. H." by telling him he
+had a foreign accent.</p>
+
+<p>Those were Browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. Two or
+three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a <i>Standard</i>
+reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve
+the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short
+stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. How young that
+critic must have been&mdash;so young that he had never seen a star return.
+Quite differently they come back&mdash;or is it quite the same? Soon we shall
+be able to judge, for this star is returning, and&mdash;oh wonder!&mdash;is
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_x" id="Page_x">[Pg x]</a></span>trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. The stars always do
+that, this watcher fancies, and certainly Browning, like the Jub-jub,
+was ages ahead of the fashion. His passport for to-day is dated up to
+the very hour&mdash;for though he could be so many other things besides, one
+of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that he could be so
+"ugly." <i>That</i> would not have been reckoned among his glories in the
+Yellow Book-room; but the wheel shall come full circle&mdash;we shall be
+saying all this, one day, the other way round. For, as Browning
+consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in <i>Fifine</i>,<a name="FNanchor_X-1_1" id="FNanchor_X-1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_X-1_1" class="fnanchor">[x:1]</a> each age
+believes&mdash;and should believe&mdash;that to it alone the secret of true art
+has been whispered.</p>
+
+<p class="authorsc">Ethel Colburn Mayne.</p>
+
+
+<p class="smcap">11 Holland Road,<br />
+<span style="margin-left: 1em;">Kensington, W.</span></p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_X-1_1" id="Footnote_X-1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_X-1_1"><span class="label">[x:1]</span></a> I write far from my books, but the passage will be easily
+found or recalled.</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xi" id="Page_xi">[Pg xi]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image02.png" alt="Two birds, possibly eagles" width="70%"/>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class="centered">
+<table summary="Table of Contents" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="4" border="0" width="60%">
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">PART I</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">GIRLHOOD</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright" colspan="4">PAGE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Introductory</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Girl in "Count Gismond"</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_15">15</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Pippa Passes</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Dawn: Pippa</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_23">23</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Morning: Ottima</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_36">36</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">III.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Noon: Phene</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_51">51</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Evening; Night: The Ending of the Day</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_67">67</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">III.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Mildred Tresham</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_81">81</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Balaustion</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_93">93</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">V.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Pompilia</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_122">122</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">PART II</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">THE GREAT LADY</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">"My Last Duchess," and "The Flight of the Duchess"</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_165">165</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4"><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_xii" id="Page_xii">[Pg xii]</a></span>PART III</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">THE LOVER</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">Lovers Meeting</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_199">199</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="3"><span class="smcap">Trouble of Love: The Woman's</span></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Lady in "The Glove"</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_215">215</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">D&icirc;s Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron De Nos Jours</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_224">224</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">III.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">The Laboratory</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_233">233</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">In a Year</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">PART IV</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">THE WIFE</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">A Woman's Last Word</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_245">245</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">James Lee's Wife</span></td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_250">250</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">She Speaks at the Window</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_254">254</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">By the Fireside</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_256">256</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">III.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">In the Doorway</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_257">257</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">IV.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Along the Beach</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_258">258</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">V.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">On the Cliff</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_261">261</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">VI.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Reading a Book, under the Cliff</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_262">262</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">VII.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Among the Rocks</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_266">266</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">VIII.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">Beside the Drawing-board</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_268">268</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td>&nbsp;</td>
+  <td class="tdright">IX.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft">On Deck</td>
+  <td class="tdright"><a href="#Page_271">271</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">PART V</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="tdcenter" colspan="4">TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="right">I.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Woman Unwon</span></td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_277">277</a></td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+  <td class="right">II.</td>
+  <td class="tdleft" colspan="2"><span class="smcap">The Woman Won</span></td>
+  <td class="right"><a href="#Page_304">304</a></td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_1" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PART I</h2>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image03.png" alt="Girlhood" width="65%" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</a></span></p>
+<h2>BROWNING'S HEROINES</h2>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h2>INTRODUCTORY</h2>
+
+
+<p>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&mdash;that is, as a
+"thing-by-itself." People had perceived&mdash;dimly enough, but with eyes
+which have since grown clearer-sighted&mdash;that there is a stage in woman's
+development <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</a></span>which ought to be her very own to enjoy, as a man enjoys
+<i>his</i> adolescence. This dawning sense is explicit in the earlier verses
+of one of Browning's most original utterances, <i>Evelyn Hope</i>, which is
+the call of a man, many years older, to the mysterious soul of a dead
+young girl&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sixteen years old when she died!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Perhaps she had hardly heard my name;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It was not her time to love; beside,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her life had many a hope and aim,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Duties enough and little cares,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And now was quiet, now astir .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For each man kills the thing he loves."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>pr&eacute;cis</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</a></span><span class="i0">"Whither went the lovely hoyden?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Disappeared in bless&egrave;d wife;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Servant to a wooden cradle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Living in a baby's life."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;for though the wife and mother be the happiest that ever
+was, she can never be a girl again.</p>
+
+<p>In the same way, to me the earliest verses of <i>Evelyn Hope</i> are the
+loveliest. As I read on, doubts and questions gather fast&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But the time will come&mdash;at last it will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When, Evelyn Hope, what meant (I shall say)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the lower earth, in the years long still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That body and soul so pure and gay?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why your hair was amber, I shall divine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And your mouth of your own geranium's red&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And what you would do with me, in fine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the new life come in the old one's stead.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I have lived (I shall say) so much since then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Given up myself so many times,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gained me the gains of various men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Either I missed, or itself missed me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I want and find you, Evelyn Hope!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What is the issue? let us see!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</a></span><span class="i0">I loved you, Evelyn, all the while.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My heart seemed full as it could hold?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was place and to spare for the frank young smile,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the red young mouth, and the hair's young gold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So, hush&mdash;I will give you this leaf to keep:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">See, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There, that is our secret: go to sleep!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You will wake, and remember, and understand."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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. <i>Will</i> Evelyn,
+on waking, "remember and understand"? Will she not have passed by very
+far, in the spirit-world, this unconscious egotist?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. True, he can to
+some extent realise that probability&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Delayed it may be for more lives yet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through worlds I shall traverse, not a few:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Much is to learn, much to forget,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere the time be come for taking you."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>taking</i> of any man.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. This is a curious lapse in Browning, to whom
+women are, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</a></span>in the highest sense of the word, individuals&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Trust, that's purer than pearl"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hers shall be the breathing balm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And hers the silence and the calm,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of mute insensate things;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</a></span></p><p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All the breath and the bloom of the year in the bag of one bee:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the core of one pearl all the shade and the shine of the sea:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breath and bloom, shade and shine&mdash;wonder, wealth, and&mdash;how far above them!&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Truth, that's brighter than gem,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trust, that's purer than pearl&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Brightest truth, purest trust, in the universe, all were for me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the kiss of one girl."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nothing there of "Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever"! Do
+the fortunate girls of to-day get <i>Summum Bonum</i> 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</a></span>surely be in paradise. They keep, in the words of our
+poet, "much that we resigned"&mdash;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&mdash;the
+pose was ignoble, the balance insecure. One day, he will himself look
+back, rejoicing that he is down; and when&mdash;or if&mdash;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 <i>A Pearl, A Girl</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A simple ring with a single stone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To the vulgar eye no stone of price:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whisper the right word, that alone&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Forth starts a sprite, like fire from ice,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lo! you are lord (says an Eastern scroll)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of heaven and earth, lord whole and sole,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through the power in a pearl.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">A woman ('tis I this time that say)<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With little the world counts worthy praise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Utter the true word&mdash;out and away<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Escapes her soul: I am wrapt in blaze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Creation's lord, of heaven and earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lord whole and sole&mdash;by a minute's birth&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Through the love in a girl!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</a></span></p><p>As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be! But observe that
+he has to utter the <i>true</i> word.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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 <i>Pauline</i>, for which, despite its manifold beauties, he
+never in later life cared at all&mdash;more, he wished to suppress it. In
+<i>Pauline</i>, 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 <i>Pauline</i> is by far the least original of his works in outlook&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Pauline, mine own, bend o'er me&mdash;thy soft breast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall pant to mine&mdash;bend o'er me&mdash;thy sweet eyes<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</a></span><span class="i0">And loosened hair and breathing lips, and arms<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drawing me to thee&mdash;these build up a screen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To shut me in with thee, and from all fear .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And again in the picture of her, lovely to the sense, but, in some
+strange fashion, hardly less than nauseating to the mind&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Love looks through&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whispers&mdash;E'en at the last I have her still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With her delicious eyes as clear as heaven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When rain in a quick shower has beat down mist .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How the blood lies upon her cheek, outspread<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As thinned by kisses! only in her lips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It wells and pulses like a living thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And her neck looks like marble misted o'er<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With love-breath&mdash;a Pauline from heights above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stooping beneath me, looking up&mdash;one look<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As I might kill her and be loved the more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So love me&mdash;me, Pauline, and nought but me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never leave loving!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 "<i>mon pauvre ami</i>." Let any woman
+ask herself what that phrase implies, when used by her in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</a></span>speaking of a
+lover&mdash;"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&mdash;for the poem is merely, as Mr. Chesterton says, "the typical
+confession of a boy"&mdash;was very much less lachrymose than that of <i>mon
+pauvre ami</i>. Unconsciously, then, here&mdash;but in another poem soon to be
+discussed, not unconsciously&mdash;there sounds the humorous note in regard
+to men which dominates so many of women's relations with them. "The big
+child"&mdash;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 <i>Youth and Art</i> is gayer and more ironic. Here we have
+a woman, successful though (as I read the poem)<a name="FNanchor_12-1_2" id="FNanchor_12-1_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_12-1_2" class="fnanchor">[12:1]</a> <i>not</i> famous,
+recalling to a successful and famous sculptor the days when they lived
+opposite one another&mdash;she as a young student of singing, he as a budding
+statuary&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We studied hard in our styles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For air looked out on the tiles,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For fun watched each other's windows.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</a></span><span class="i0">And I&mdash;soon managed to find<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Weak points in the flower-fence facing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was forced to put up a blind<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And be safe in my corset-lacing.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No harm! It was not my fault<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If you never turned your eyes' tail up<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As I shook upon E in alt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or ran the chromatic scale up.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why did you not pinch a flower<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In a pellet of clay and fling it?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why did I not put a power<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of thanks in a look, or sing it?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I confess that this lyric, except for its penultimate verse, soon to be
+quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it&mdash;"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&mdash;and why should they not? When at the end she cries&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This could but have happened once,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we missed it, lost it for ever"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this"
+was?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Each life's unfulfilled, you see;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We have not sighed deep, laughed free,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Starved, feasted, despaired&mdash;been happy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</a></span></p><p>Away from its irritating context, that stanza <i>is</i> delightful; with the
+context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen
+in love&mdash;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 <i>Youth and Art</i> 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, <i>Youth
+and Art</i> seems to my sense.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 <i>bals-par&eacute;s</i>. 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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12-1_2" id="Footnote_12-1_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12-1_2"><span class="label">[12:1]</span></a> 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 <i>bals-par&eacute;s</i>," and she has married
+"a rich old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the
+successful cantatrice.</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</a></span></p>
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"</h3>
+
+
+<p>It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and
+the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Here
+is the story.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>Shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked
+forth Count Gauthier&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And he thundered 'Stay!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all stayed. 'Bring no crowns, I say!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">About her! Let her shun the chaste,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or lay herself before their feet!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall she whose body I embraced<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A night long, queen it in the day?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For Honour's sake no crowns, I say!'"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Some years afterwards she told the story of that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>Her friend asked her what she had answered, and she replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I? What I answered? As I live<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I never fancied such a thing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As answer possible to give;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But only for one moment. For instantly another knight strode out&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. North, South,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">East, West, I looked. The lie was dead<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And damned, and truth stood up instead."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"God took that on him&mdash;I was bid<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Watch Gismond for my part: I did.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</a></span><span class="i0">Did I not watch him while he let<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His armourer just brace his greaves,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rivet his hauberk, on the fret<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The while! His foot .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. my memory leaves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No least stamp out, nor how anon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He pulled his ringing gauntlets on."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Cleaving till out the truth he clove.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Which done, he dragged him to my feet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And said 'Here die, but end thy breath<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In full confession, lest thou fleet<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From my first, to God's second death!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say, hast thou lied?' And, 'I have lied<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To God and her,' he said, and died."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then Gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend
+she could not repeat. She sank on his breast&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Over my head his arm he flung<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Against the world .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless Browning heroine we find the
+characteristic marks. On that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</a></span>birthday morning, almost her greatest joy
+was in the sense of her cousins' love&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I thought they loved me, did me grace<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To please themselves; 'twas all their deed"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. Both were
+beautiful&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Each a queen<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By virtue of her brow and breast;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not needing to be crowned, I mean,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As I do. E'en when I was dressed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had either of them spoke, instead<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of glancing sideways with still head!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But no: they let me laugh and sing<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My birthday-song quite through .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Chose time and place and company<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To suit it .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>for with sad experience&mdash;"knowledge of the world"&mdash;to aid her, she can
+see that the whole must have been pre-concerted&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And doubtlessly ere he could draw<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">All points to one, he must have schemed!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</a></span></p><p>Her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible
+to us of a later day&mdash;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"&mdash;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&mdash;can apprehend each word in
+the dialogue between slayer and slain&mdash;can, over the bleeding body,
+receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man
+like a dog&mdash;and, gathered to Gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all
+repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside
+him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. All this we women of a later day have "resigned"&mdash;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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</a></span>that Man&mdash;male
+Man&mdash;is the least protective of animals.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Over my head his arm he flung<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Against the world .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our elder boy has got the clear<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Great brow; tho' when his brother's black<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full eye shows scorn, it .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;fibbing words! The broken line is finished thus&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Gismond here?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And have you brought my tercel back?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I just was telling Adela<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How many birds it struck since May."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</a></span></p><p>We, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this
+one&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>"PIPPA PASSES"</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I. DAWN: PIPPA</h4>
+
+<p>The whole of Pippa is emotion. She "passes" alone through the drama,
+except for one moment&mdash;only indirectly shown us&mdash;in which she speaks
+with some girls by the way. She does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite
+emotion uttering itself in song&mdash;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."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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
+"<i>long</i> 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest
+touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo<a name="FNanchor_24-1_3" id="FNanchor_24-1_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_24-1_3" class="fnanchor">[24:1]</a>&mdash;the lovely little
+town of Northern Italy <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The least of thy gazes or glances,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One of thy choices or one of thy chances,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and, in this case, as a dramatic&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her
+invocation to the holiday is out of character&mdash;impossible to regard its
+lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an
+unlettered girl.</p>
+
+<p>But all carping is forgotten when we reach</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But thou must treat me not<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As prosperous ones are treated .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Me, who am only Pippa&mdash;old year's sorrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All other men and women that this earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Belongs to, who all days alike possess,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make general plenty cure particular dearth,<a name="FNanchor_26-1_4" id="FNanchor_26-1_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_26-1_4" class="fnanchor">[26:1]</a><br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</a></span><span class="i0">Get more joy one way, if another less:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Can rain disturb<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her Sebald's homage? all the while thy rain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He will but press the closer, breathe more warm<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Against her cheek: how should she mind the storm?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown&mdash;that Ottima's
+"happiness" is not in her husband.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</a></span><span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. what care bride and groom<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Save for their dear selves? 'Tis their marriage day;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sunbeams and pleasant weather, spite of thee."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The third Happy One&mdash;or Happy Ones, for these two Pippa cannot
+separate&mdash;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"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She in her age, as Luigi in his youth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For true content .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Aye&mdash;though the evening should be obscured with mist, <i>they</i> will not
+grieve&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The cheerful town, warm, close,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And safe, the sooner that thou art morose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Receives them .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is all the difference bad weather can make to such a pair.</p>
+
+<p>The Fourth Happy One is Monsignor, "that holy and beloved priest," who
+is expected this night from Rome,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To visit Asolo, his brother's home,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And say here masses proper to release<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A soul from pain&mdash;what storm dares hurt his peace?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</a></span></p><p>And now the great Day knows all that the Four Happy Ones possess,
+besides its own "blue solemn hours serenely flowing"&mdash;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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But Pippa&mdash;just one such mischance would spoil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's toil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With a single splash from my ewer!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You that would mock the best pursuer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was my basin over-deep?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">One splash of water ruins you asleep,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now grow together on the ceiling!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That will task your wits."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here we light on a trait in Browning of which Mr. Chesterton most
+happily speaks&mdash;his use of "homely and practical images .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</a></span>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 <i>Pippa Passes</i> 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&mdash;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. grow together on the ceiling.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That will task your wits!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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 <i>The Englishman in
+Italy</i>, or the stomach-cyst in <i>Mr. Sludge the Medium</i>&mdash;"the
+monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</a></span>these lines on
+the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque&mdash;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"&mdash;but are
+monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the
+mind from which they are supposed to come.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"New-blown and ruddy as St. Agnes' nipple,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk-bird's poll!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>One such example is enough. We have once more been deprived of Pippa,
+and got nothing really worth the possession in exchange.</p>
+
+<p>But Pippa is quickly retrieved, with her gleeful claim that <i>she</i> 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in midst of thy glee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love thy Queen, worship me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There will be warrant for the worship&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. For am I not, this day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whate'er I please? What shall I please to-day?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I may fancy all day&mdash;and it shall be so&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the Happiest Four in our Asolo!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</a></span></p><p>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&mdash;that
+she begins and ends with love, which children give and take
+unconsciously.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Some one shall love me, as the world calls love:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am no less than Ottima, take warning!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The gardens and the great stone house above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And other house for shrubs, all glass in front,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are mine; where Sebald steals, as he is wont,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To court me, while old Luca yet reposes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How we talk in the little town below."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So the first dream is over.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love, love, love&mdash;there's better love, I know!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love
+of Jules and Phene&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Why should I not be the bride as soon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As Ottima?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</a></span>arrive&mdash;"if you
+call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. one flash<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Blacker than all except the black eyelash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So strict was she the veil<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should cover close her pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pure cheeks&mdash;a bride to look at and scarce touch,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Scarce touch, remember, Jules! For are not such<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So startling as her real first infant kiss?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, no&mdash;not envy, this!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. for if you gave me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leave to take or to refuse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In earnest, do you think I'd choose<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That sort of new love to enslave me?<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</a></span><span class="i0">Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As little fear of losing it as winning:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And only parents' love can last our lives."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Let me be Luigi! If I only knew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What was my mother's face&mdash;my father, too!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Nay, if you come to that, best love of all<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is God's;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and she will be Monsignor! To-night he will bless the home of his dead
+brother, and God will bless in turn</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With love for all men! I, to-night at least,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would be that holy and beloved priest."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All service ranks the same with God."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</a></span></p><p>No one can work on this earth except as God wills&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. God's puppets, best and worst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are we; there is no last or first."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in
+greatness.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I will pass each, and see their happiness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And envy none&mdash;being just as great, no doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Useful to men, and dear to God, as they!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Down the grass path grey with dew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the swallow never flew,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor yet cicala dared carouse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No, dared carouse&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and begins her Day.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</a></span>II. MORNING: OTTIMA</h4>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, don't speak, then!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he
+recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</a></span></p><p>With <i>his</i> first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that
+the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nature, another outside. I looked up&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Silent as death, blind in a flood of light;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, I remember!&mdash;and the peasants laughed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This house was his, this chair, this window&mdash;his."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This
+house <i>was</i> his.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;." 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&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night
+with a sun added"; neither <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</a></span>dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is
+altered with this dawn&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"</p>
+
+<p>No: he will lean forth&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I cannot scent blood here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Foul as the morn may be."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But his mood shifts quickly as her own&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. There, shut the world out!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The world and all outside!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal
+to let the truth stand forth between them&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Let us throw off<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With all of it."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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." <i>His blood</i>, for instance&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. let those two words mean 'His blood';<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'His blood.'&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</a></span></p><p>She answers with phrases, the things that madden him&mdash;she speaks of
+"the deed," and at once he breaks out again. <i>The deed</i>, and <i>the
+event</i>, and <i>their passion's fruit</i>&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the devil take such cant!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am his cut-throat, you are .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Here's wine!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>I brought it when we left the house above,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>And glasses too&mdash;wine of both sorts</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He takes no notice; he reiterates&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience&mdash;the quality of
+her defect of callousness&mdash;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&mdash;the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.</p>
+
+<p>Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red
+wine: "No, the white&mdash;the white!"&mdash;then drinks ironically to Ottima's
+black <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</a></span>eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should
+not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Do you remember last damned New Year's Day?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The characters now are poised for us&mdash;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)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Do you<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yes, still love you, love you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In spite of Luca and what's come to him."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</a></span></p><p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. still could lose each other, were not tied<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By this .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: <i>Is</i> he so
+surely for ever hers?</p>
+
+<p>She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early
+days of love&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. That May morning we two stole<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Under the green ascent of sycamores"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. come upon a thing like that,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suddenly&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not
+say "a thing" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in
+a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</a></span>upon it now? For him,
+it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. For me<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(she goes on),</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Luca, than&mdash;&mdash;'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered
+man, she goes to Sebald and takes <i>his</i> hands, as if to feign that other
+taking.</p>
+
+<p>With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings
+her back&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Take your hands off mine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis the hot evening&mdash;off! oh, morning, is it?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Come in and help to carry"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and with ghastly glee she adds&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. We may sleep<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the
+man and his deepening <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</a></span>horror at what they have done. She winds and
+unwinds her hair&mdash;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&mdash;though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to
+fondle her as before&mdash;but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's
+bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <i>This</i> is
+the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"One must be venturous and fortunate:&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What is one young for else?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+why&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He gave me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Life, nothing less"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he
+no right after all&mdash;what was there to wonder at?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He sat by us at table quietly:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</a></span>itself&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And best (<i>look at me while I speak to you</i>)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Best for the crime."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. this naked crime of ours<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May not now be looked over: look it down."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the
+past?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</a></span><span class="i0">"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever and anon some bright white shaft<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The thunder like a whole sea overhead .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;while she, in a frenzy of passion&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. stretched myself upon you, hands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All my locks loose, and covered you with them&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You, Sebald, the same you!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body and
+of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This way? Will you forgive me&mdash;be once more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My great queen?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Magnificent in sin. Say that!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So she bids him; so he crowns her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Magnificent .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</a></span></p><p>&mdash;but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of
+a girl singing.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The year's at the spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And day's at the morn;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Morning's at seven;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The hill-side's dew-pearled;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lark's on the wing;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The snail's on the thorn:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God's in his heaven&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All's right with the world!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">(<i>Pippa passes.</i>)<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But she does not know, and, lingering for a moment
+by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You, you spoke!"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but she, contemptuously&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</a></span><span class="i4h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Oh, that little ragged girl!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She must have rested on the step: we give them<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But this one holiday the whole year round.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Did you ever see our silk-mills&mdash;their inside?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be
+quiet&mdash;but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call,
+for <i>his</i> voice will be sure to carry.</p>
+
+<p>No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven.
+Terribly he turns upon her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Go, get your clothes on&mdash;dress those shoulders!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Wipe off that paint! I hate you"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a
+yet more hideous contemplation of her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My God, and she is emptied of it now!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Outright now!&mdash;how miraculously gone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All of the grace&mdash;had she not strange grace once?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No purpose holds the features up together,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only the cloven brow and puckered chin<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stay in their places: and the very hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That seemed to have a sort of life in it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drops, a dead web!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Speak to me&mdash;not of me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</a></span></p><p>But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's
+aspect&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Broke the delicious indolence&mdash;all broken!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Once more that cry breaks from her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To me&mdash;not of me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. a fawning, cringing lie,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. My God!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I should have known there was no blood beneath!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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"&mdash;can be sure that <i>he</i> 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</a></span>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I hate, hate&mdash;curse you! God's in his heaven!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other
+commentators,<a name="FNanchor_49-1_5" id="FNanchor_49-1_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_49-1_5" class="fnanchor">[49:1]</a> I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive
+from the first&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i15">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself&mdash;kill me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me&mdash;then<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yourself&mdash;then&mdash;presently&mdash;first hear me speak!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I always meant to kill myself&mdash;wait, you!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Lean on my breast&mdash;not as a breast; don't love me</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>The more because you lean on me, my own</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Heart's Sebald!</i> There, there, both deaths presently!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast&mdash;not as a breast";
+"Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</a></span>for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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"&mdash;and in the dying,
+each is again revealed. He, all self&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>My</i> brain is drowned now&mdash;quite drowned: all <i>I</i> feel"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and so on; while her sole utterance is&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Not me&mdash;to him, O God, be merciful!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Truth is the strong thing&mdash;let man's life be true!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can
+accept the retribution and feel no <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</a></span>faintest impulse to blame and wound
+her lover&mdash;<i>she</i> 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. <i>Direct intervention</i>: not
+every soul needs that. And&mdash;whether it be intentional or not, I feel
+unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it
+be unintentional&mdash;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.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III. NOON: PHENE</h4>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</a></span>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>At noon the married pair arrive&mdash;the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half
+in storm and half in calm&mdash;patted down over the left temple&mdash;like a
+frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he
+murders the marble in."<a name="FNanchor_52-1_6" id="FNanchor_52-1_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_52-1_6" class="fnanchor">[52:1]</a> The bride is&mdash;"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,<a name="FNanchor_52-2_7" id="FNanchor_52-2_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_52-2_7" class="fnanchor">[52:2]</a> 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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "How
+magnificently <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</a></span>pale"&mdash;and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze
+of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity&mdash;pity!" he
+exclaims&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass
+in with them&mdash;but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and
+loitered about the house as they arrived.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If you'll not die: so, never die!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</a></span>until he feels that
+her soul is drawing his to such communion that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I could<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Change into you, beloved! You by me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I by you; this is your hand in mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I have spoken: speak you!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him
+onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"&mdash;the life with her .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and
+yet, how shall he work!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The live truth, passing and re-passing me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sitting beside me?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"&mdash;but in a new access of
+joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had
+contrived for her letters&mdash;in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her
+skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah&mdash;this that swam down like a first moonbeam<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into my world!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand.
+She is not looking.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But there is nothing strange in that&mdash;all the
+rest is new <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</a></span>to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things,
+and adoringly he watches her as&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Again those eyes complete<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of all my room holds; to return and rest<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On me, with pity, yet some wonder too .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But pity and wonder are natural in her&mdash;is she not an angel from heaven?
+Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits;
+so&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let your first word to me rejoice them too."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to
+read .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;and <i>they</i> 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&mdash;<i>this</i>? She will recognise
+this of Hippolyta&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no,
+it is unrecognised; so they <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But still no word from her&mdash;no least, least
+word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But you must say a 'well' to that&mdash;say 'well'!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has
+found "the real flesh Phene .&nbsp;.&nbsp;." 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah, you will die&mdash;I knew that you would die!"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and after that, there falls a long silence.</p>
+
+<p>Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"&mdash;that is what she says for her
+first bridal words.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Have ended some time!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to
+him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</a></span></p><p>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&mdash;the words <i>he</i> spoke&mdash;instead of those
+which had "cost such pains to learn .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."</p>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <i>He</i> was not to wallow in the
+mire: <i>he</i> 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"&mdash;said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia was,
+in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this girl
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "Paolina, my little friend of the
+Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter&mdash;"the
+first moonbeam!"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown
+writer.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to
+her when they were indissolubly united.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</a></span>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&mdash;"oh, alone indubitably!"&mdash;for
+Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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?" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</a></span>she asks piteously&mdash;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&mdash;"no, or you would!"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;"above the world."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The same smile girls like me are used to bear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But never men, men cannot stoop so low .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>that</i> smile&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But still Natalia said they were your friends,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And they assented though they smiled the more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all came round me&mdash;that thin Englishman<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He held a paper"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.</p>
+
+<p>But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those
+eyes, as now Jules lets her!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I believe all sin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All memory of wrong done, suffering borne,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</a></span><span class="i0">Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Never to overtake the rest of me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All that, unspotted, reaches up to you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Drawn by those eyes!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering&mdash;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&mdash;altered&mdash;and what can she do?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and
+<i>that</i> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Or stay! I will repeat<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Their speech, if that contents you. Only change<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No more"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</a></span><span class="i0">"I am a painter who cannot paint;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In my life, a devil rather than saint;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In my brain, as poor a creature too;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No end to all I cannot do!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet do one thing at least I can&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love a man or hate a man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Supremely: thus my lore began .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned
+them&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find&mdash;this!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>here</i> 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?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And I am to go on without a word."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She goes on&mdash;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, <i>how</i> his hate can "grin through
+Love's rose-braided <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</a></span>mask," and <i>how</i>, 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By thy bride&mdash;how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"meet"&mdash;he remembers her; he speaks to her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. You I shall not meet:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I dreamed, saying this would wake me."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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
+<i>he</i> would, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is
+his pleasure&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</a></span>Venice, there is just one
+hope, for dimly she hears him say&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Just that one vague, far hope, and for her <i>how</i> 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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Give her but a least excuse to love me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When&mdash;where&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How&mdash;can this arm establish her above me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If fortune fixed her as my lady there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There already, to eternally reprove me?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is the song the peasants sing of "Kate the Queen"<a name="FNanchor_64-1_8" id="FNanchor_64-1_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_64-1_8" class="fnanchor">[64:1]</a> and the page
+who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of
+doing good to"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Need him to help her!'&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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? <i>He</i> had not, in his dreams of love.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+And all at <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</a></span>once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep mysterious
+import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Here is a woman with utter need of me&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting
+her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Look at the woman here with the new soul .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i7">This new soul is mine!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Scatter all this, my Phene&mdash;this mad dream!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What's the whole world except our love, my own!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And you are ever by me while I gaze,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Are in my arms as now&mdash;as now&mdash;as now!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</a></span></p><p>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&mdash;but never will she
+speak much: she <i>is</i> silence. Her need of him indeed was utter&mdash;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 <i>was</i> no self to save&mdash;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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I think that Phene would have
+killed herself&mdash;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"&mdash;the others
+of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound,
+than in that line which Browning sets in the mouth of silence?</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</a></span>IV. EVENING; NIGHT: THE ENDING OF THE DAY</h4>
+
+<p>Our interest now centres again upon Pippa&mdash;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"&mdash;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&mdash;those at the beginning and
+the end&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross
+falsification of the whole beauty of <i>Pippa Passes</i>"&mdash;a glaring
+instance, as he says, of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</a></span>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<a name="FNanchor_68-1_9" id="FNanchor_68-1_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_68-1_9" class="fnanchor">[68:1]</a> (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."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>On her return to Asolo from Orcana, she passes the ruined turret wherein
+Luigi and his mother&mdash;those Third Happiest Ones whom in her thoughts she
+had not been able to separate&mdash;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"&mdash;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&mdash;for Bluphocks is the creature of
+anyone's purse.</p>
+
+<p>As Pippa reaches the turret, a thought of days <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</a></span>long, long before it
+fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells
+how&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A king lived long ago,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the morning of the world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When earth was nigher heaven than now;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe
+from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the gods&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That, having lived thus long, there seemed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No need the king should ever die."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;that sense of the beauty and glory of
+the world which was so strong in him that he felt</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"God must be glad one loves his world so much."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</a></span>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&mdash;and how her blue eyes lift to them</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"As if life were one long and sweet surprise!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In June she comes&mdash;and with the reiteration, Luigi falters, for he
+recollects that in this June they were to see together "the Titian at
+Treviso."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. that low noise is heard again&mdash;"the voice of
+Pippa, singing."</p>
+
+<p>And, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of
+the world, Luigi cries&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No need that sort of king should ever die!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And she begins again&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Among the rocks his city was:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Before his palace, in the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He sat to see his people pass,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And judge them every one"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and as she tells the manner of his judging, Luigi again exclaims:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That king should still judge, sitting in the sun!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the song goes on&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</a></span><span class="i0">"His councillors, to left and right,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Looked anxious up&mdash;but no surprise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Disturbed the king's old smiling eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the very blue had turned to white";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Approach that threshold in the sun,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Assault the old king smiling there .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such grace had kings when the world begun!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>cries Luigi bitterly, for at Vienna the Python <i>is</i> the king, and brave
+men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He hesitates no more&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and rushes from the turret, resolute for Vienna.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and thus Pippa's passing,
+Pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the Duomo Santa
+Maria, where the Fourth <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</a></span>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.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the farm among<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cherry-orchards, and how April snowed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">White blossom on her as she ran."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>she</i> leads. She may be sure the old people
+have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made a dung-hill of her garden!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her
+fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and the noise the wasps made, eating the long <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</a></span>papers that were strung
+there to keep off birds in fruit-time.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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!"&mdash;and tells <i>her</i> 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>while she had stained her fingers red by</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On the bright table: how he laughed!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <i>is</i>
+no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got&mdash;does Cecco beat her
+still? But Cecco doesn't matter, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span>nor the loss of her young freshness,
+so long as she keeps her "curious hair"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your colour .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The men say they are sick of black."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one
+that very likely "the men" are sick of <i>her</i> hair, and does she pretend
+that <i>she</i> has tasted lampreys and ortolans .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but in the midst of this
+new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Why there! Is not that Pippa<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We are to talk to, under the window&mdash;quick&mdash; .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as
+they had been told.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you sing first," retorts the other&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then if she listens and comes close .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I'll tell you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sing that song the young English noble made<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who took you for the purest of the pure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And meant to leave the world for you&mdash;what fun!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and the red-fingered one calls to her to come
+closer still, they won't eat her&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</a></span>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&mdash;she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes
+"less like canoes" for her small feet; <i>then</i> she may hope to feast upon
+lampreys and drink Breganze, as Zanze does.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And now Pippa sings one
+of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the
+country girl. It begins&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Overhead the tree-tops meet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was nought above me, and nought below<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My childhood had not learned to know"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Suddenly God took me .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of
+cries and the flinging down of a man, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</a></span>and then a noise as of dragging a
+bound prisoner out.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Monsignor appeared for an instant at the window as
+she, coming from the Duomo, passed his house. His aspect disappointed
+her&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No mere mortal has a right<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To carry that exalted air;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Best people are not angels quite .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and with that one look at him, she passed on to Asolo.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</a></span>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&mdash;come now?"<a name="FNanchor_77-1_10" id="FNanchor_77-1_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_77-1_10" class="fnanchor">[77:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the girl&mdash;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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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"&mdash;making use of a certain Bluphocks, an Englishman. Monsignor
+will not <i>formally</i> assent, of course .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but will he give the steward
+time to cross the Alps? The girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty
+singing Felippa,<a name="FNanchor_77-2_11" id="FNanchor_77-2_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_77-2_11" class="fnanchor">[77:2]</a> gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass
+off Bluphocks as a somebody, and once Pippa entangled&mdash;it will be best
+accomplished through her singing.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Well, Monsignor has listened;
+Monsignor conceives&mdash;is it a bargain?</p>
+
+<p>It was precisely as the steward asked that question that Pippa finished
+her song of a maiden's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</a></span>lesson and its ending, and Monsignor leaped up
+and shouted to his guards.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;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, <i>she</i> 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&mdash;no foreigner had
+come to the mills that she recollects.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<p>But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of
+envy and curiosity begin to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</a></span>clear off&mdash;she goes over the game of
+make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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, <i>she</i> must be content.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Even her lily's asleep,
+but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has plucked for
+it&mdash;the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the hill.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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&mdash;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?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No:
+nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening
+sleepy lilies will not do&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so
+alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with&mdash;this morning's, for
+instance, of being anyone she liked. She had played her game, had kept
+it up loyally with herself all day&mdash;what was the good?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</a></span><span class="i0">"Now, one thing I should like to really know:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How near I ever might approach all those<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I only fancied being, this long day:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As to .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. in some way .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. move them&mdash;if you please,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do good or evil to them some slight way.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For instance, if I wind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And border Ottima's cloak's hem .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. No nearer
+than that can she get&mdash;her silk might border Ottima's cloak's hem.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+But she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety,
+trust, and courage Pippa must somehow swing&mdash;and how shall she achieve
+it? There floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the
+morning&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All service ranks the same with God."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even this can help her only a little&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"True in some sense or other, I suppose .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24-1_3" id="Footnote_24-1_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24-1_3"><span class="label">[24:1]</span></a> Asolo, in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque medi&aelig;val
+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 medi&aelig;val turrets.&mdash;<span class="smcap">Berdoe</span>,
+<i>Browning Cyclop&aelig;dia</i>, p. 50.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26-1_4" id="Footnote_26-1_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26-1_4"><span class="label">[26:1]</span></a> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49-1_5" id="Footnote_49-1_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49-1_5"><span class="label">[49:1]</span></a> Dr. Berdoe and Mrs. Orr.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52-1_6" id="Footnote_52-1_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52-1_6"><span class="label">[52:1]</span></a> All the talk between the students is in prose.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52-2_7" id="Footnote_52-2_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52-2_7"><span class="label">[52:2]</span></a> The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately
+opposite Venice.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64-1_8" id="Footnote_64-1_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64-1_8"><span class="label">[64:1]</span></a> 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."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68-1_9" id="Footnote_68-1_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68-1_9"><span class="label">[68:1]</span></a> "The name means <i>Blue-Fox</i>, and is a skit on the
+<i>Edinburgh Review</i>, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77-1_10" id="Footnote_77-1_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77-1_10"><span class="label">[77:1]</span></a> The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in
+prose.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77-2_11" id="Footnote_77-2_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77-2_11"><span class="label">[77:2]</span></a> 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."</p></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</a></span></p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h3>MILDRED TRESHAM</h3>
+
+<h4>IN "A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON"</h4>
+
+
+<p>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
+<i>expression</i>, 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&mdash;and hence her speech must of necessity ring false, for
+innocence knows nothing of itself.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</a></span>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&mdash;and that when departure from
+this was the <i>circumstance</i> 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 <i>mi&egrave;vre</i> can justly describe. He does not, in
+short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her&mdash;and, among
+those others, not himself.</p>
+
+<p>In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly
+untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox&mdash;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&mdash;that his
+fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted,"
+thus becomes inclined to mawkishness .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it <i>may</i> be, I say, but at the
+bottom of my <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For each man kills the thing he loves";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;he exaggerates, he loses
+grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The character of Mildred in <i>A Blot in the 'Scutcheon</i> is a striking
+example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent
+passion into <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</a></span>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&mdash;he learns not <i>whom</i>. 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I was young,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And your surpassing reputation kept me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So far aloof .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</a></span></p><p>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. "Medi&aelig;val" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>"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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. is to say that there is
+no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;I had
+no mother.'"</p></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</a></span></p><p>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 <i>recurrence</i> to that cry.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The cry itself&mdash;I cannot be alone
+in thinking&mdash;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&mdash;it occurs, in soliloquy, immediately after
+an interview with her lover.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I was so young, I loved him so, I had<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>I fell</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is said
+by others of her. And <i>God forgot me</i>&mdash;is this the thought of one who
+"loves him so"?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it <i>is</i>
+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&mdash;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 <i>is</i>, sorrow for the sorrow that her recklessness may
+cause to others will indeed put <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</a></span>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 <i>not</i>, if Mertoun is the mere seducer .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;and here
+she does for one second attain to authenticity&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Thorold, do you devise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fit expiation for my guilt, if fit<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endure<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bless you&mdash;that my spirit yearns to purge<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her stains off in the fierce renewing fire:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But do not plunge me into other guilt!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, guilt enough .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She of course refuses the name. He tells her to pronounce, then, her own
+punishment.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</a></span></p><p>Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement,
+well-nigh sickens the soul:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To die here in this chamber, by that sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would seem like punishment; so should I glide<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the surest" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</a></span></p><p>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 <i>he</i> says can be
+brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that
+<i>she</i> says.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;called by her,
+in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this planned piece of deliberate
+wickedness" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "I'll not!" she cries&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'I'll not affect a grace<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That's gone from me&mdash;gone once, and gone for ever!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace <i>is</i> gone; but
+surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</a></span>penitence was Mildred Tresham's
+"fall," but those crude cries of shame.</p>
+
+<p>We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her
+brother&mdash;that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and
+conventional morality,"<a name="FNanchor_90-1_12" id="FNanchor_90-1_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_90-1_12" class="fnanchor">[90:1]</a> 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"&mdash;his own dauntless, individual woman,
+seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah, Thorold, we can but&mdash;remember you!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was indeed all <i>they</i> could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget
+him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given
+us&mdash;the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</a></span><span class="i0">"You cannot know the good and tender heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As light where friends are .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this
+lady," Tresham adds&mdash;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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I&mdash;forgive not,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There! Do not think too much upon the past!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While it stood up between my friend and you;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I may dispose of it: I give it you!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It loves you as mine loves!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined,
+will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</a></span>seem to them the all-sufficient claim
+for Thorold's deed&mdash;Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. You hold our 'scutcheon up.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Must wash one blot away; the first blot came<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All's gules again: no care to the vain world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From whence the red was drawn!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And on Austin's cry that "no blot shall come!" he answers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Vengeance</i>: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard
+that word, that "God"?</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_90-1_12" id="Footnote_90-1_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_90-1_12"><span class="label">[90:1]</span></a> Berdoe. <i>Browning Cyclop&aelig;dia.</i></p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h3>BALAUSTION</h3>
+
+<h4>IN "BALAUSTION'S ADVENTURE" AND "ARISTOPHANES' APOLOGY"</h4>
+
+
+<p>To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women&mdash;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&mdash;"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 <i>Apology</i>. In that piece, the Bald Bard
+himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes,
+the <i>Adventure</i>, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric
+phrases our queen before we crown her.</p>
+
+<p>He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that
+her adored Euripides <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</a></span>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<a name="FNanchor_94-1_13" id="FNanchor_94-1_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_94-1_13" class="fnanchor">[94:1]</a> bids!"&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Forward he stepped: I rose and fronted him";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and as thus for the first time they meet, he breaks into a p&aelig;an of
+admiration:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Victory's self upsoaring to receive<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The poet? Right they named you .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. some rich name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In <i>ion</i>' .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and trying to recall that name "in <i>ion</i>," he guesses two or three at
+random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it
+comes: <i>Balaustion</i>, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</a></span>"Thanks, Rhodes!"&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and
+ardour, it is greatly <i>this</i> that makes Balaustion queen&mdash;the lovely
+eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed
+almost right!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from
+herself in the <i>Adventure</i>. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members
+of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming
+names: "Petal&eacute;, Phullis, Charop&eacute;, Chrusion"&mdash;to whom she cries in the
+delightful opening:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To tell you the adventure!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</a></span>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<a name="FNanchor_96-1_14" id="FNanchor_96-1_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_96-1_14" class="fnanchor">[96:1]</a> was there,
+and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who
+would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"<a name="FNanchor_96-2_15" id="FNanchor_96-2_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_96-2_15" class="fnanchor">[96:2]</a>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i12h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never disloyal to the life and light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the whole world worth calling world at all!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">To Athens, all of us that have a soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Follow me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and thus she drew together a little band, "and found a ship at Kaunos,"
+and they turned</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Proud for our heart's true harbour."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You bring a boatful of Athenians here";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of
+Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'Wait!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure).<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'That song was veritable Aischulos,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Familiar to the mouth of man and boy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Old glory: how about Euripides?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might you know any of his verses too?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And so, although she has some other name,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">You shall find food, drink, odour all at once."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But
+she could do better than that&mdash;she could recite a whole play:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><span class="smcap">Alkestis</span>!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</a></span><span class="i0">"Herakles, whom you house i' the city here<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I come a suppliant to your Herakles!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take me and put me on his temple-steps<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To tell you his achievement as I may."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Then," she continues, in a passage which rings out again in the
+<i>Apology</i>:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And poetry is power&mdash;they all outbroke<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a great joyous laughter with much love:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Thank Herakles for the good holiday!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>In we row bringing in Euripides!</i>'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Until they sent us on our way again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With good words and great wishes."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"whom
+their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet
+countryman"&mdash;sent her a crown <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</a></span>of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third
+thing .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Petal&eacute;, Phullis, Charop&eacute;, Chrusion, hear of this also&mdash;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
+Pir&aelig;us, 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We are to marry. O Euripides!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Everyone who speaks of <i>Balaustion's Adventure</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness,
+modesty, tenderness, insight, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</a></span>gravity .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 <i>Apology</i>, 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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <i>Apology</i>) of the first adventure's telling:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. O that Spring,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That eve I told the earlier<a name="FNanchor_101-1_16" id="FNanchor_101-1_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_101-1_16" class="fnanchor">[101:1]</a> to my friends!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And other stars steal on the evening star,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</a></span></p><p>Then, in the <i>Adventure</i>, comes the translation by Browning of the
+<i>Alkestis</i> 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&mdash;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&mdash;so crowned, so trusted,
+us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?</p>
+
+<p>"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes&mdash;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 <i>Alkestis</i> of Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed
+divine&mdash;"this grand benevolence."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When she had told the "perfect piece" to her girl-friends, a sudden
+inspiration came to her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</a></span><span class="i0">"I think I see how .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You, I, or anyone might mould a new<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Admetos, new Alkestis";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes
+full tide across her soul:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Ah, that brave<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bounty of poets, the one royal race<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That ever was, or will be, in this world!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They give no gift that bounds itself and ends<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The man who only was a man before,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That he grows god-like in his turn, can give&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He also; share the poet's privilege,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old.<br /></span>
+<span class="i7h">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. So with me:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Satisfied heart and soul&mdash;yet more remains!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could we too make a poem? Try at least,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And, trying thus, Balaustion, Feminist, portrays the perfect marriage.</p>
+
+<p>Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning's <i>Alkestis</i>, will not let his
+wife be sacrificed for him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and he speaks, as in a vision, of the purpose of Zeus in himself.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</a></span><span class="i0">"This purpose&mdash;that, throughout my earthly life,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mine should be mingled and made up with thine&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And we two prove one force and play one part<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And do one thing. Since death divides the pair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis well that I depart and thou remain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bend yet awhile, a very flame above<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rift I drop into the darkness by&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And bid remember, flesh and spirit once<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never be that abominable show<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of passive death without a quickening life&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is so that the man speaks to and of the woman, in Balaustion's and
+Browning's <i>Alkestis</i>.</p>
+
+<p>And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint
+existence lies not in her, but in him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'What! thou soundest in my soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To depths below the deepest, reachest good<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By evil, that makes evil good again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so allottest to me that I live,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And not die&mdash;letting die, not thee alone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But all true life that lived in both of us?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Therewith her whole soul entered into his,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But when she reaches the nether world&mdash;"the downward-dwelling
+people"&mdash;she is rejected as a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Admetos must not be himself and thou!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lo, Alkestis was alive again."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How do our little squabbles&mdash;the "Sex-War"&mdash;look to us after this?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>When next we meet with Balaustion, in <i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>, she is
+married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the
+waters&mdash;this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</a></span>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"&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work
+of Aristophanes, the <i>Lysistrata</i>; 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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Euripides! Such
+a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the death."</p>
+
+<p>Yet, musing on that death, her wrath had fallen from her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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,<a name="FNanchor_106-1_17" id="FNanchor_106-1_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_106-1_17" class="fnanchor">[106:1]</a> bury him in
+Pir&aelig;us&mdash;Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</a></span></p><p>But she was not moved to sympathy with the general cry.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, for his mere mortal body:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>She</i> knew, that night, a better way to hail his soul's new freedom.
+This, by</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Singing, we two, its own song back again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up to that face from which flowed beauty&mdash;face<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now abler to see triumph and take love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than when it glorified Athenai once."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes: they two would read together <i>Herakles</i>, 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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</a></span></p><p>He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of
+mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched&mdash;no word could
+they utter, nor one laugh laugh.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. So he drove them out, and stood
+alone confronting</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On much disapprobation and mistake."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she
+turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>for it was the triumph-night, and merriment had reigned at the banquet,
+reigned and increased</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Till something happened' .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">Here he strangely paused";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them
+there.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;such a change as they
+are in this very moment beholding.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Just so, some overshadow, some new care<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And left there only such a dark surmise&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No wonder if the revel disappeared,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So did his face shed silence every side!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I recognised a new man fronting me."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</a></span></p><p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The merest female child may question me.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had
+disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoning<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At ease of undisputed mastery<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Over the body's brood, those appetites.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"These made a glory, of such insolence&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I thought&mdash;such domineering deity .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Impudent and majestic .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Bold speech be&mdash;welcome to this honoured hearth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Good Genius!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</a></span></p><p>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&mdash;she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the
+exultant cry:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No matter for the murk that was&mdash;perchance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That will be&mdash;certes, never should have been<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such orb's associate!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mark that Aristophanes has not yet <i>said</i> anything to justify her change
+of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this
+recantation&mdash;for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth
+trusts him.</p>
+
+<p>Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes
+<i>Aristophanes' Apology</i>. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he
+understands and practises it&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</a></span>the growing charm which such revelation
+has for her opponent.</p>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Anyhow, I have followed happily<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The impulse, pledged my genius with effect,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since, come to see you, I am shown&mdash;myself!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Herakles</i> 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.</p>
+
+<p>She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house <i>is</i> the shrine of
+that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"&mdash;yet
+she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay
+yearned, to reverence him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</a></span><span class="i0">"So you but suffer that I see the blaze<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And not the bolt&mdash;the splendid fancy-fling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If he does <i>this</i>, if he shows her</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yon supreme calmness,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she will interpose:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Such as you see me! Silk breaks lightning's blow!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;it is the formidable claim, "immunity of
+faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why <i>he</i>, 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&mdash;and Euripides, "that calm cold
+sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</a></span>both extended the limitations of art,
+both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph&mdash;yet
+Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against
+the very creature who loved all that <i>he</i> loved! And she declares that
+such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low
+by him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now she has gone too far&mdash;she has spoken too boldly.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'But this exceeds our license!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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!"&mdash;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</a></span><span class="i4">"think out thoroughly how youth should pass&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Help him, Balaustion! Use the rosy strength!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and he urges her to use it all, to "let the whole rage burst in brave
+attack."</p>
+
+<p>It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting&mdash;how eagerly
+he awaits her use of the rosy strength.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But she begins meekly enough.
+She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love of all
+things lovable"; in <i>that</i>, 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</a></span>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
+<i>Cresphontes</i>?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Come, for the heart within me dies away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So long dost thou delay!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <i>Lysistrata</i>!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;she gladly grants it; but he
+has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the crowns: is
+such crowning the true guerdon?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Tell him, my other poet&mdash;where thou walk'st<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even <i>that</i>
+the question? No: the question is&mdash;did both men wish to waft the white
+sail of <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</a></span>good and beauty on its way? Assuredly.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And so she cries at
+the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole
+source of ardour&mdash;she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the
+poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach
+this poet so:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But that the other king stands suddenly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In all the grand investiture of death,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bowing your knee beside my lowly head<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Equals one moment!<br /></span>
+<span class="i22">&mdash;Now arise and go.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Both have done homage to Euripides!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he insists that her defence has been oblique&mdash;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
+<i>Herakles</i>, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the <i>Alkestis</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It ends with the lament of the Chorus for the departure of Herakles:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The greatest of all our friends of yore<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We have lost for evermore!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long
+silence, on this night of losing a friend.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</a></span></p><p>Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'&mdash;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 <i>could</i> 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; <i>he</i>, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no
+Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion&mdash;Balaustion must let him use it for
+once&mdash;and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his
+doom.</p>
+
+<p>He gives some verses,<a name="FNanchor_117-1_18" id="FNanchor_117-1_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_117-1_18" class="fnanchor">[117:1]</a> then breaks off in laughter, having, as he
+says, "sung content back to himself," since he is <i>not</i> Thamyris, but
+Aristophanes.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Farewell, brave couple! Next year, welcome me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</a></span>greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the <i>Frogs</i>. It
+was all <i>him</i>, Balaustion says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There blazed the glory, there shot black the shame"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so Athenai felt she had a friend<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But then, what happened? The great battle of &AElig;gos Potamos was fought and
+lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's
+first words were, "Down with the Pir&aelig;us! Peace needs no bulwarks." At
+first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey&mdash;but when the next
+decree came forth, "No more democratic government; <i>we</i> shall appoint
+your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started
+up a-stare, their hands refused their office.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Three days they stood, stared&mdash;stonier than their walls."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a
+conference, issued decree. Not the Pir&aelig;us only, but all Athens should be
+destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at
+last should peace dwell there.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p><p>Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her words .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then did a man of Phokis rise&mdash;O heart!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Who</i> was the man of Phokis rose and flung<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;the "choric flower" of the <i>Elektra</i>, full in the face of the foe?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And poetry is power, and Euthukles<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'&mdash;cried<br /></span>
+<span class="i10">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'Let stand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Athenai'! .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and Athens was saved through Euripides,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Through Euthukles, through&mdash;more than ever&mdash;me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that
+though Athens might be saved, the Pir&aelig;us 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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The very day Euripides was born."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But <i>they</i> would not see the passing of Athenai; they would go, fleeing
+the sights and sounds,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And press to other earth, new heaven, by sea<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and they embarked. It should be Rhodes indeed: to Rhodes they now are
+sailing.</p>
+
+<p>Euripides lies buried in the little valley "laughed and moaned about by
+streams,"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They mix in Arethusa by his grave."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But, just as she had known, this revocation <i>has</i> consoled her. Now she
+will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor in
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she
+and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That's in the cloud there, with the new-born star!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate
+its heaven here on earth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Above all crowding, crystal silentness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Above all noise, a silver solitude .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hatred and cark and care, what place have they<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In yon blue liberality of heaven?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They are entering Rhodes now, and every wave and wind seems singing out
+the same:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All in one chorus&mdash;what the master-word<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They take up? Hark! 'There are no gods, no gods!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glory to <span class="smcap">God</span>&mdash;who saves Euripides!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion&mdash;and Triumphant
+Woman. What other man has given us this?&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most
+wished women to do that.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_94-1_13" id="Footnote_94-1_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_94-1_13"><span class="label">[94:1]</span></a> I follow Browning's spellings throughout.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96-1_14" id="Footnote_96-1_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96-1_14"><span class="label">[96:1]</span></a> The character of Balaustion is wholly imaginary.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_96-2_15" id="Footnote_96-2_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_96-2_15"><span class="label">[96:2]</span></a> A town of the island of Rhodes.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_101-1_16" id="Footnote_101-1_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_101-1_16"><span class="label">[101:1]</span></a> In the <i>Apology</i>, she tells "the second supreme
+adventure": her interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of
+the <i>Herakles</i> of Euripides.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_106-1_17" id="Footnote_106-1_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_106-1_17"><span class="label">[106:1]</span></a> Euripides died at the Court of Archelaus, King of
+Macedonia.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_117-1_18" id="Footnote_117-1_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_117-1_18"><span class="label">[117:1]</span></a> Browning never finished his translation of this
+splendid song.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span></p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h3>POMPILIA</h3>
+
+<h4>IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"</h4>
+
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>I should have said that this <i>has been</i> 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&mdash;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? <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span>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!"&mdash;how would that sound as a war-cry?</p>
+
+<p>Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male
+generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails
+me&mdash;and if me, then probably many another&mdash;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&mdash;the fates who rule the destiny of nations.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. We turn now
+to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering&mdash;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&mdash;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: <i>this</i>
+created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in <i>The
+Ring and the Book</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Another day that finds her living yet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Little Pompilia, with the patient brow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And lamentable smile on those poor lips,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span><span class="i0">And, under the white hospital-array,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It seems that when her husband struck her first,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She prayed Madonna just that she might live<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So long as to confess and be absolved;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And whether it was that, all her sad life long<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never before successful in a prayer,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This prayer rose with authority too dread&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or whether because earth was hell to her,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By compensation when the blackness broke,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To show her for a moment such things were,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;the prayer was granted her.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who did it shall account to Christ&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Having no pity on the harmless life<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And gentle face and girlish form he found,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thus flings back. Go practise if you please<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span><span class="i0">With men and women. Leave a child alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For Christ's particular love's sake!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story
+of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it&mdash;and as Browning, in the issue,
+makes us see and feel it too.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>The Ring and the Book</i>, Browning tells us this story&mdash;this "pure
+crude fact" (for fact it actually is)&mdash;<i>ten times over</i>, 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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.</p>
+
+<p>2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.</p>
+
+<p>3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.</p>
+
+<p>4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.</p>
+
+<p>5. Giuseppe Caponsacchi (the priest with whom Pompilia fled),
+at the trial.</p>
+
+<p>6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.</p>
+
+<p>7. Count Guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the
+defence.</p>
+
+<p>8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.</p>
+
+<p>9. The Pope, considering his decision on Guido's appeal to him
+after the trial.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span>10. Guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers
+before execution.</p></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;the utter loveliness and purity
+of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,<a name="FNanchor_126-1_19" id="FNanchor_126-1_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_126-1_19" class="fnanchor">[126:1]</a> "as
+neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span></p><p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prime nature with an added artistry."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;for she was past fifty.
+In due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span>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 <i>had</i> 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&mdash;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; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span>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&mdash;on the second day of the New Year&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>But now we must return upon our steps, if we would know "the truth of
+this."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</a></span>to the
+Other Half-Rome, may not have been) his only motive.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What? All that used to be, may be again?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What, the girl's dowry never was the girl's,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And unpaid yet, is never now to pay?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That used to be my own with her great eyes&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.<a name="FNanchor_130-1_20" id="FNanchor_130-1_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_130-1_20" class="fnanchor">[130:1]</a> 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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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."<a name="FNanchor_131-1_21" id="FNanchor_131-1_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_131-1_21" class="fnanchor">[131:1]</a> She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window;
+she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same
+stone strength of white despair":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How does it differ in aught, save degree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the terrible patience of God?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and more and more he hated her.</p>
+
+<p>But at last, at the theatre one night, Pompilia&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"<a name="FNanchor_131-2_22" id="FNanchor_131-2_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_131-2_22" class="fnanchor">[131:2]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank
+personable priest"<a name="FNanchor_131-3_23" id="FNanchor_131-3_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_131-3_23" class="fnanchor">[131:3]</a>&mdash;and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span><span class="i2h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Had there been a man like that,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To lift me with his strength out of all strife<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the calm!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suppose that man had been instead of this?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He was good enough for <i>that</i>, 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"&mdash;a fribble and a coxcomb, in
+short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span></p><p>&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There was the Rafael!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Looked our way, smiled the beautiful sad strange smile;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and thought the thought that we have learned&mdash;for instinctively and
+surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that
+man":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Silent, grave,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Solemn almost, he saw me, as I saw him."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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. <i>He</i>
+would not signify, but there was Pompilia:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Spare her, because he beats her as it is,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She's breaking her heart quite fast enough."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was the turning-point in Caponsacchi's life. He had no thought of
+pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse&mdash;he felt that he must
+leave Arezzo. All that hitherto had charmed him there <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span>was done
+with&mdash;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)</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thinking moreover .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. oh, thinking, if you like,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How utterly dissociated was I<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of Guido .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i5h">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I had a whole store of strengths<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Eating into my heart, which craved employ,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet there was no way in the wide world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To stretch out mine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read,
+and he sat thus&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span>trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered
+it in such a way that it would save <i>her</i> from all anger, and at the
+same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. What made you&mdash;may one ask?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Marry your hideous husband?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. At length there arrived a
+note in a different manner. This warned him <i>not</i> to come, to avoid the
+window for his life. At once he answered that the street was free&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile&mdash;turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed
+her&mdash;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 <i>her</i>, Margherita, as his pastime&mdash;ought
+she not at least to see the priest <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span>and warn him, if nothing more? Guido
+might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I know you cannot read&mdash;therefore, let me!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'<i>My idol</i>'"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 <i>Caponsacchi</i>. 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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. still she repudiated the
+servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Therefore while you profess to show him me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half
+through April, Pompilia learned what that something was.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span></p><p>But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce
+her slumber?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Up I sprang alive,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Light in me, light without me, everywhere<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Change!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The exquisite morning was there&mdash;the broad yellow sunbeams with their
+"myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the
+lattice-panes, the birds&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Always with one voice&mdash;where are two such joys?&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stood on the terrace&mdash;o'er the roofs such sky!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My heart sang, 'I too am to go away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I too have something I must care about,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"<a name="FNanchor_137-1_24" id="FNanchor_137-1_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_137-1_24" class="fnanchor">[137:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span></p><p>Pope Innocent XII&mdash;"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in
+the summary of Book I&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How the fine ear felt fall the first low word<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Thou, at first prompting of what I call God,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Accept the obligation laid on thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mother elect, to save the unborn child.<br /></span>
+<span class="i11h">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Go past me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And get thy praise&mdash;and be not far to seek<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Presently when I follow if I may!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred
+her to Caponsacchi&mdash;not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly,
+flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful
+sense to her ears .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and the Other Half-Rome thus <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span>images the moment in
+which she resolved to appeal to him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If then, all outlets thus secured save one,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At last she took to the open, stood and stared<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With her wan face to see where God might wait&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And there found Caponsacchi wait as well<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the precious something at perdition's edge,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He only was predestinate to save .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Whatever way in this strange world it was,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She at her window, he i' the street beneath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And understood each other at first look."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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)&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How plainly I perceived hell flash and fade<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O' the face of her&mdash;the doubt that first paled joy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then final reassurance I indeed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was caught now, never to be free again!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But she cared not; she felt herself strong for everything.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"After the Ave Maria, at first dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will be standing on the terrace, say!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe
+of the dusk" she started up&mdash;she "dared to say," in her dying speech,
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span>that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace&mdash;and there he waited
+her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>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&mdash;"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all
+ear."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i7h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Take me to Rome!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take me as you would take a dog, I think,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Masterless left for strangers to maltreat:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take me home like that&mdash;leave me in the house<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the father and mother are" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span></p><p>She tells his answer thus:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i30">"He replied&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The first word I heard ever from his lips,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All himself in it&mdash;an eternity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O' the soul that then broke silence&mdash;'I am yours.'"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church
+seemed to rebuke&mdash;the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now
+she changed her tone, it appeared:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now, when I found out first that life and death<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are means to an end, that passion uses both,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Indisputably mistress of the man<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But that soon passed: the word was God's; this was the true
+self-sacrifice.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But might it not injure her&mdash;scandal would hiss about
+her name. Would not God choose His own way to save her? And <i>he</i> might
+pray.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Two days passed thus. But he must go to counsel and to comfort
+her&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'I know you: when is it that you will come?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span></p><p>"To-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged&mdash;the
+place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the
+carriage, while he cried to the driver:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'By San Spirito,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To Rome, as if the road burned underneath!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>When she was dying of Guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how
+Pompilia thought of that long flight:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Holding my hand across the world .&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can I be calm?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he must be calm: he must show them that soul.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The glory of life, the beauty of the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The splendour of heaven .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. well, Sirs, does no one move?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p><p>&mdash;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"?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Men, for the last time, what do you want with me?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For if they had but seen <i>then</i> what Guido Franceschini was! If they
+would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Gasping away the latest breath of all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This minute, while I talk&mdash;not while you laugh?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown
+them what its beginning meant&mdash;but all in vain. He, the priest, had left
+her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying&mdash;"there and thus she
+lies!" Do they understand <i>now</i> that he was not unworthy of Christ when
+he tried to save her? His part is done&mdash;all that he had been able to do;
+he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The snow-white soul that angels fear to take<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Untenderly .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Sirs,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only seventeen!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Then he begins his story of</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Our flight from dusk to clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through day and night and day again to night<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span></p><p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You know this is not love, Sirs&mdash;it is faith,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The feeling that there's God."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look
+for the first time since they had started.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. At Foligno he urged her to
+take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The probing spear o' the huntsman,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Never to see a face nor hear a voice&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor face, I see it in the dark" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;such tranquillity was such heaven to her!</p>
+
+<p>"This one heart" (she said on her death-bed):</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span><span class="i0">"This one heart gave me all the spring!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I could believe himself by his strong will<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had woven around me what I thought the world<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We went along in .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For, through the journey, was it natural<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such comfort should arise from first to last?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As she looks back, new stars bud even while she seeks for old, and all
+is Caponsacchi:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Best of all her memories&mdash;"oh, the heart in that!"&mdash;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&mdash;would
+she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The garden; just to leave her free awhile .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I might have sat beside her on the bench<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where the children were: I wish the thing had been,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But soon,
+half-sleeping <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span>again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed
+to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"One who has only been made a saint&mdash;how long?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Tired out by this time&mdash;see my own five saints!"<a name="FNanchor_146-1_25" id="FNanchor_146-1_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_146-1_25" class="fnanchor">[146:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For "little Pompilia" had been given five names by her pretended
+parents:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. so many names for one poor child<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pompilia Comparini&mdash;laughable!"<a href="#Footnote_146-1_25" class="fnanchor">[146:1]</a> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was
+Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours&mdash;suddenly she
+cried out that she must not die:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He carried her,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As we priests carry the paten,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span></p><p>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.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, my foreboding! But I could not choose."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot,
+"filled with a sense of such impending woe" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and at the first pause of
+night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses&mdash;the last moment came,
+he must awaken her&mdash;he turned to go:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i9">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And there<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Faced me Count Guido."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But while
+he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling <i>her</i> his wife,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The minute, oh the misery, was gone;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;two police-officers stood beside, and Guido was ordering them to take
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Caponsacchi insisted that <i>he</i> 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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Between us and the mad dog howling there!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span></p><p>They all went up together. There she lay,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That filled the window with a light like blood."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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"&mdash;for he was standing against the window
+a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame
+from hell, since <i>he</i> was in it&mdash;and she cried to him to stand away, she
+chose hell rather than "embracing any more."</p>
+
+<p>Caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble
+pouring in at the noise&mdash;he was caught&mdash;"they heaped themselves upon
+me."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Came all the strength back in a sudden swell,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and she sprang at her husband, seized the sword that hung beside him,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O' the blade. 'Die,' cried she, 'devil, in God's name!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one<br /></span>
+<span class="i4h">.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Dead-white and disarmed she lay."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span><span class="i0">"You see, I will not have the service fail!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I say the angel saved me: I am safe!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What o' the way to the end?&mdash;the end crowns all"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My babe was given me! Yes, he saved my babe:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through that Arezzo noise and trouble .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the sweet peace cured all, and let me live<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And give my bird the life among the leaves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God meant him! Weeks and months of quietude,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I could lie in such peace and learn so much,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Know life a little, I should leave so soon.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Therefore, because this man restored my soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All has been right .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For as the weakness of my time drew nigh,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nobody did me one disservice more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I lay in the arms of, till my boy was born,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Vanish&mdash;one quarter of my life, you know."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In that room in the inn they parted. They were <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span>borne off to separate
+cells of the same ignoble prison, and, separate, thence to Rome.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The last time in this life: not one sight more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never another sight to be! And yet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I thought I had saved her .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It seems I simply sent her to her death.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You tell me she is dying now, or dead."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But then it flashes to his mind that this may be a trick to make him
+confess&mdash;it would be worthy of them; and the great cry breaks forth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That vision in the blood-red daybreak&mdash;that<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Leap to life of the pale electric sword<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Angels go armed with&mdash;that was not the last<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O' the lady! Come, I see through it, you find&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Know the man&oelig;uvre!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let me see for myself if it be so!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But it is true. Twenty-two dagger-thrusts&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Two days ago, when Guido, with the right,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hacked her to pieces" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span>it is all over. She is dying&mdash;dead
+perhaps. He has done with being judged&mdash;he is guiltless in thought,
+word, and deed; and she .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. For Pompilia&mdash;be advised,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Build churches, go pray! You will find me there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I know, if you come&mdash;and you will come, I know.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why, there's a judge weeping! Did not I say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You were good and true at bottom? You see the truth&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am glad I helped you: she helped me just so."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Once more he flashes forth in her defence, in rage against Guido&mdash;but
+the image of her, "so sweet and true and pure and beautiful," comes back
+to him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sirs, I am quiet again. You see we are<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So very pitiable, she and I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who had conceivably been otherwise"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and at the thought of <i>how</i> "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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+for she is dying, dead perhaps .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. the whole man breaks down, and he goes
+from the place with one wild, anguished call to heaven:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, great, just, good God! Miserable me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span>passionate and throbbing monologue; second,
+because to show this type of woman <i>through</i> 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 <i>is</i> with us&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;of marriage as a coin, "a
+dirty piece would purchase me the praise of those I loved"&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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 <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span>with Guido is a
+terrific dream: "It is the good of dreams&mdash;so soon they go!" Beautiful:
+but Browning could not leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity.
+She must philosophise:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This is the note of evil: for good lasts" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says
+it in that image of the dream&mdash;but she would have left it alone, she
+would have made no maxim out of it. And the maxim, when it <i>is</i> made,
+says no more than the image had said.</p>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So unaware, I only made things worse" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;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&mdash;for <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span>the plea is based on her awareness&mdash;blame
+herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could <i>she</i> 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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the
+new-made mother&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He was too young to smile and save himself;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at
+the heart of all her <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span>woe, that <i>he</i> would have been spared for that
+money's sake.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. That is not the way for a mother!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Therefore I wish someone will please to say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I looked already old, though I was young;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too
+is not a common one&mdash;that may help to keep apart</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A little the thing I am from what girls are."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But how hard for him to find out anything about her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No father that he ever knew at all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor never had&mdash;no, never had, I say!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone!
+Only his saint to guard him&mdash;that was why she chose the new one; <i>he</i>
+would not be tired of guarding namesakes.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. After all, she hopes her
+boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is
+dwindling fast to that:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sheer dreaming and impossibility&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Just in four days too! All the seventeen years,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not once did a suspicion visit me<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span><span class="i0">How very different a lot is mine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From any other woman's in the world.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The reason must be, 'twas by step and step<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It got to grow so terrible and strange.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I was found familiarised with fear."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and
+Violante. Then:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So with my husband&mdash;just such a surprise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such a mistake, in that relationship!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Everyone says that husbands love their wives,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You see how much of this comes true with me!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Next, "there is the friend."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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 .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You know the figures never were ourselves.<br /></span>
+<span class="i10"> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Thus all my life."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Her life is like a "fairy thing that fades and fades."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"&mdash;Even to my babe! I thought when he was born,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Something began for me that would not end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For evermore, eternally, quite mine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span></p><p>And hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even
+<i>he</i> "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." She fancies him grown big,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Frowns with the others: 'Poor imprudent child!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why did you venture out of the safe street?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why go so far from help to that lone house?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why open at the whisper and the knock?'"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, what a happy, friendly eve was that!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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&mdash;none was so fine as San Giovanni&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. When, at the door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A tap: we started up: you know the rest."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Pietro had done no harm; Violante had erred in telling the lie about her
+birth&mdash;certainly that was wrong, but it was done with love in it, and
+even the giving her to Guido had had love in it .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and at any rate it is
+all over now, and Pompilia has just been absolved, and thus there "seems
+not so much pain":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span><span class="i0">"Being right now, I am happy and colour things.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Softened and bettered; so with other sights:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>To me at least was never evening yet</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>But seemed far beautifuller than its day</i>,<a name="FNanchor_158-1_26" id="FNanchor_158-1_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_158-1_26" class="fnanchor">[158:1]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For past is past."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I shall believe she hoped in her poor heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I at least might try be good and pure .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And oh, my mother, it all came to this?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now she too is dying, and leaving her little one behind. But <i>she</i> is
+leaving him "outright to God":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All human plans and projects come to nought:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My life, and what I know of other lives<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Prove that: no plan nor project! God shall care!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. her last breath shall disperse the stain around
+the name of Caponsacchi.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. There,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strength comes already with the utterance!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now she tells what we know; some of it we <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span>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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No pause i' the leading and the light!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And this man, men call sinner? Jesus Christ!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But once more, mother-like, she reverts to her boy:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i13">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. We poor<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I was already using up my life&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This portion, now, should do him such a good,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This other go to keep off such an ill.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The great life: see, a breath, and it is gone!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. but even as she speaks, the flood of gratitude to her one
+friend again sweeps back, and she exclaims,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, and there is more! Yes, my end of breath<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall bear away my soul in being true!<a name="FNanchor_159-1_27" id="FNanchor_159-1_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_159-1_27" class="fnanchor">[159:1]</a><br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He is still here, not outside with the world,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here, here, I have him in his rightful place!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I feel for what I verily find&mdash;again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The face, again the eyes, again, through all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The heart and its immeasurable love<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span><span class="i0">Of my one friend, my only, all my own,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Who put his breast between the spears and me.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever with Caponsacchi!*nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No work begun shall ever pause for death!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love will be helpful to me more and more<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I' the coming course, the new path I must tread&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Not one faint fleck of failure! Why explain?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What I see, oh, he sees, and how much more!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say&mdash;I am all in flowers from head to foot!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Say&mdash;not one flower of all he said and did,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At this supreme of moments!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She has recognised the truth. This <i>is</i> love&mdash;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:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">In heaven we have the real and true and sure."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never
+married, no, nor given in marriage:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i3h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. They are man and wife at once<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the true time is .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span><span class="i0">So, let him wait God's instant men call years;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do out the duty! Through such souls alone<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">God, stooping, shows sufficient of his light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Et, rose, elle a v&eacute;cu ce que vivent les roses,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">L'espace d'un matin."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_126-1_19" id="Footnote_126-1_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_126-1_19"><span class="label">[126:1]</span></a> <i>Introduction to the Study of Browning</i>, 1886, p. 152.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_130-1_20" id="Footnote_130-1_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_130-1_20"><span class="label">[130:1]</span></a> Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was
+<i>this</i> 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131-1_21" id="Footnote_131-1_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131-1_21"><span class="label">[131:1]</span></a> Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in
+the hope that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131-2_22" id="Footnote_131-2_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131-2_22"><span class="label">[131:2]</span></a> Her dying speech.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_131-3_23" id="Footnote_131-3_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_131-3_23"><span class="label">[131:3]</span></a> Browning's summary. Book I.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_137-1_24" id="Footnote_137-1_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_137-1_24"><span class="label">[137:1]</span></a> 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"&mdash;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.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 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.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_146-1_25" id="Footnote_146-1_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_146-1_25"><span class="label">[146:1]</span></a> Her dying speech.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_158-1_26" id="Footnote_158-1_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_158-1_26"><span class="label">[158:1]</span></a> How wonderfully is the wistful nature of the girl
+summed up in these two lines!</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_159-1_27" id="Footnote_159-1_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_159-1_27"><span class="label">[159:1]</span></a> Caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will
+"burn his soul out in showing you the truth."</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PART II</h2>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image04.png" alt="The Great Lady" width="60%" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span></p>
+<h2>THE GREAT LADY</h2>
+
+<h3>"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"</h3>
+
+
+<p>For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the
+perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious
+than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things
+adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning,
+even a "lady" could be a woman&mdash;and remain a woman, even though she be
+turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted
+from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our
+poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but
+that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And
+especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material
+cares prevail not&mdash;where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers
+"not for bread alone."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his head?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span></p><p>He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul
+existed. True, that in <i>A Toccata of Galuppi's</i>,<a name="FNanchor_166-1_28" id="FNanchor_166-1_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_166-1_28" class="fnanchor">[166:1]</a> the soul <i>is</i>
+questioned:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The soul, doubtless, is immortal&mdash;where a soul can be discerned."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but
+those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire
+social epoch&mdash;the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in
+Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite
+the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile
+"simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature,
+since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness
+is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted,
+brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, and it was graceful of them&mdash;they'd break talk off and afford<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span></p><p>The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the
+listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so
+plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions:
+"Must we die?"&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Those commiserating sevenths&mdash;'Life might last! we can but try!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then
+come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must
+be answered to."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that <i>he</i>,
+learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. You know physics, something of geology,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Butterflies may dread extinction&mdash;you'll not die, it cannot be!<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[Pg 168]</a></span><span class="i0">As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What,
+"creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since
+he is neither deaf nor blind:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dear dead women, with such hair, too&mdash;what's become of all the gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not <i>only</i> the wise
+men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to
+that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this
+pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty,
+riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied&mdash;nay, shall
+kill some souls.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. This too Browning could perceive and show; and once
+more, loved to <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[Pg 169]</a></span>show in the person of a girl. There is something in true
+womanhood which transcends all <i>morgue</i>: it seems almost his foible to
+say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of <i>In a
+Balcony</i> (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble,
+yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all,
+in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is
+given us, and in two widely different environments&mdash;yet is (to my
+feeling) <i>one</i> loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her
+first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically;
+then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely
+back to earth&mdash;in <i>My Last Duchess</i> and <i>The Flight of the Duchess</i>
+respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree,
+in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have
+the lady dead.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, comes a picture&mdash;the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"
+of a dead Italian girl.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Looking as if she were alive. I call<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That piece a wonder, now: Fr&agrave; Pandolf's hands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Worked busily a day, and there she stands.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fr&agrave; Pandolf by design: for never read<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strangers like you that pictured countenance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The depth and passion of its earnest glance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But to myself they turned (since none puts by<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[Pg 170]</a></span><span class="i0">And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How such a glance came there; so, not the first<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are you to turn and ask thus."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"
+is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy
+from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a
+connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier
+rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that
+nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless
+art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even
+now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed
+her&mdash;nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that
+<i>he</i> could have been wrong. This Duchess&mdash;it would have been idle to
+"make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the
+exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other
+lesser being) without stooping&mdash;"and I choose never to stoop." Her error
+had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which
+Fr&agrave; Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it
+was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her
+cheek? It had <i>not</i> been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Fr&agrave;
+Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist&mdash;may have said,
+for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the
+"faint half-flush that died <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[Pg 171]</a></span>along her throat" was beyond the power of
+paint to reproduce.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i14">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Such stuff<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For calling up that spot of joy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to
+the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She had<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A heart&mdash;how shall I say?&mdash;too soon made glad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and
+accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly
+conveyed:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The dropping of the daylight in the west,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The bough of cherries some officious fool<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She rode with round the terrace&mdash;all and each<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Would draw from her alike the approving speech,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or blush, at least.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to
+the Duke, looking at the Duchess. We can see the quivering, glad, tender
+creature as though we also were at gaze on Fr&agrave; Pandolf's picture.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I
+call <i>this</i> piece a wonder, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[Pg 172]</a></span>now! Scarce one of the monologues is so
+packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most
+"simple"&mdash;even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they
+are, as Mr. Arthur Symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." Two lives
+are summed up in fifty-six lines. First, the ghastly Duke's; then,
+hers&mdash;but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Everything that
+came to her was transmuted into her own dearness&mdash;even his favour at her
+breast. We can figure to ourselves the giving of that "favour"&mdash;the high
+proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude: Sir Willoughby
+Patterne by intelligent anticipation. But then, though the approving
+speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with his bough of
+cherries&mdash;and speech and blush were given again! Absurder still, the
+spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">"Who'd stoop to blame<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This sort of trifling?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<p>Even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of
+ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's
+gift"&mdash;even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted"
+him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not
+have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made
+excuse) .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. even so (this must <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[Pg 173]</a></span>be impressed upon the envoy), it would
+have meant some stooping, and the Duke "chooses never to stoop."</p>
+
+<p>Still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the
+next Duchess!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. More and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued upon
+that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is sounding in
+his ear&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then all smiles stopped together."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There falls a curious, throbbing silence. The envoy still sits gazing.
+There she stands, <i>looking as if she were alive</i>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And almost he
+starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a
+meaning&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i8h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. There she stands<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if alive"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;the picture is a wonder!</p>
+
+<p>Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had
+just now sounded: "<i>Then all smiles stopped together</i>"?</p>
+
+<p>She stands there&mdash;smiling .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But the Duke grows weary of this pause
+before Fr&agrave; Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders.
+Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily
+in silence, taken: the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[Pg 174]</a></span>next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in
+the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Will't please you rise? We'll meet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The company below, then."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere,
+as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his
+master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair
+daughter's self" being nevertheless the object.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But in a hot
+resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such
+proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the
+due deference:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Nay, we'll go<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Together down, sir,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by <i>him</i>) the
+envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor
+has no eyes for "wonders" now&mdash;he has seen the wonder, has heard the
+horror.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can pass
+these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them, however,
+must be pointed out:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Notice Neptune, though,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[Pg 175]</a></span></p><p> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands,
+or <i>was</i>, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not
+where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by
+flame; has been snatched from <i>her</i> Duke, and borne away to joy and
+love&mdash;by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that
+came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved
+herself.</p>
+
+<p>The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller
+whom he calls his friend.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What a thing friendship is, world without end!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess
+all were young&mdash;if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up
+at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had
+been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and
+died there,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"At next year's end, in a velvet suit .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Petticoated like a herald,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a chamber next to an ante-room<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What he called stink, and they perfume."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[Pg 176]</a></span>boy to Paris, where she
+belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So
+the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were
+railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years
+were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And he came back the pertest little ape<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That ever affronted human shape;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Full of his travel, struck at himself.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Not he!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue,
+and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one
+good thing left in these evil days:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages
+were revived:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its
+origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs
+and length, all speed, no strength:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"They should have set him on red Berold,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mad with pride, like fire to manage!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the red eye slow consuming in fire,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[Pg 177]</a></span></p><p>Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He
+preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty
+Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. anything in
+the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And out of a convent, at the word,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Came the lady in time of spring.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad
+in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And so we saw the lady arrive;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She was the smallest lady alive,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Made in a piece of Nature's madness,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too small, almost, for the life and gladness<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That over-filled her."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle,
+where the Duke awaited her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Straight at the castle, that's best indeed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To look at from outside the walls"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and
+thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of
+gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who
+rode on her other hand, the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[Pg 178]</a></span>name of every bird that flew past: "Was
+that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"</p>
+
+<p>Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess&mdash;but
+she <i>is</i> the same!), the little lady rode forward:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When suddenly appeared the Duke."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the
+Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather
+aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick
+tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the
+background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky
+sullied by a chill wind,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The lady's face stopped its play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if her first hair had grown grey;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For such things must begin some one day."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if
+she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad
+in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the
+brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for
+a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman&mdash;and this huntsman, who has <i>had</i> a
+beloved wife, knows what he is saying.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[Pg 179]</a></span><span class="i0">"She was active, stirring, all fire&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could not rest, could not tire&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To a stone she might have given life!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And here was plenty to be done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she that could do it, great or small,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She was to do nothing at all."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted
+a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and
+out of it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At the proper place, in the proper minute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And die away the life between."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian
+girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing
+enough (the old huntsman remembers)&mdash;but for the grief that followed
+after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would
+find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a
+fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But
+"the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be
+contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly <i>make</i> it.
+Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic,
+for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose
+to stoop. <i>He</i> would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded
+applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's
+claws."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[Pg 180]</a></span><span class="i0">"So the little lady grew silent and thin,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Paling and ever paling."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>Then all smiles stopped together</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And the Duke, perceiving, said to
+himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way to
+deal with it.</p>
+
+<p>Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a
+little more than he can stand&mdash;but, unlike the envoy, he can express
+himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes
+on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many
+a year,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And the Duke's self .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. you shall hear."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season
+(he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"),
+found that a hunting party was indicated:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was
+properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron
+saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[Pg 181]</a></span></p><p>But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and
+jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's
+part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly
+announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And with water to wash the hands of her liege<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let her preside at the disemboweling."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even
+the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed&mdash;and only
+then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to
+his lady.</p>
+
+<p>And the little Duchess&mdash;paler and paler every day&mdash;said she would not
+go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their
+long lashes, as if too weary even for <i>him</i> to light them; and she duly
+acknowledged his forethought for her,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the weight by day and the watch by night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And much wrong now that used to be right;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."</p>
+
+<p>But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted:
+it was hardly the time .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[Pg 182]</a></span></p><p>The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room,
+because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside
+on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the
+casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep
+through also.</p>
+
+<p>Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a
+smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother
+to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it
+all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her
+whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture,
+passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin&mdash;at
+any rate, he showed a very stiff back.</p>
+
+<p>However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable&mdash;fog
+that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect
+sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the
+woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the
+courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with
+the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the
+Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes&mdash;presents for which an
+equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.</p>
+
+<p>And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with
+the earth, the ore, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[Pg 183]</a></span>the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can
+baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a
+swivel, bells for the sheep .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. all these are good, but what they can do
+with sand!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As if in pure water you dropped and let die<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A bruised black-blooded mulberry."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads
+distinct inside."</p>
+
+<p>These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the
+castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they
+reached the fosse, all stopped but one:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The oldest Gipsy then above ground."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew
+her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit&mdash;yet
+here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no
+use now but to gather brine."</p>
+
+<p>She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse
+reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual
+acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her;
+in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level
+whine," that as well as to bring <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[Pg 184]</a></span>the presents, she had come to pay her
+duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an
+idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face.
+Supposing he set <i>this</i> old woman to teach her, as the other had failed?
+What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his
+fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone?
+He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was
+approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The
+huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude
+of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth
+tightened, her brow brightened&mdash;it was as if she were promising to give
+the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse&mdash;and
+then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower,"
+that she might wile away an hour for her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Whose mind and body craved exertion,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet shrank from all better diversion."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then the Duke rode off.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins
+what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can
+read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can
+simply accept and understand <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[Pg 185]</a></span>it&mdash;leaving the rest to the
+"Browningites," of whom Browning declared that <i>he</i> was not.</p>
+
+<p>The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him&mdash;a
+little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke&mdash;saw
+something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure
+that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She
+looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily,
+no stooping nor hobbling&mdash;above all, no cringing! She was wholly
+changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had
+extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed
+edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we
+may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen.
+But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first
+he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but
+brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from
+their places&mdash;as a snail's horns come out after rain.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He accepted all
+this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and took
+the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For since last night, by the same token,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not a single word had the lady spoken."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the
+weather."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[Pg 186]</a></span></p><p>Jacynth never could tell him afterwards <i>how</i> she came to fall soundly
+asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the
+whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across
+the open country&mdash;for in those days he had a falcon eye&mdash;when, all in a
+moment, his ear was arrested by</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Was it singing, or was it saying,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or a strange musical instrument playing?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the
+lattice, pulled the curtain, and&mdash;first&mdash;saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep
+along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of
+the room, on the seat of state,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Was a queen&mdash;the Gipsy woman late!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat
+between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set
+on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old
+woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the
+lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining.
+She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion&mdash;and
+the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the
+rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's
+face.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[Pg 187]</a></span><span class="i0">"For it was life her eyes were drinking .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Life's pure fire, received without shrinking,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into the heart and breast whose heaving<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Told you no single drop they were leaving."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose
+over each shoulder,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Moving to the mystic measure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bounding as the bosom bounded."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all
+at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And I kept time to the wondrous chime,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Making out words and prose and rhyme,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till it seemed that the music furled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From under the words it first had propped."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"&mdash;and
+the Gipsy said:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And so at last we find my tribe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so I set thee in the midst .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I trace them the vein and the other vein<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That meet on thy brow and part again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Making our rapid mystic mark;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I bid my people prove and probe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Each eye's profound and glorious globe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till they detect the kindred spark<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In those depths so dear and dark .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And on that round young cheek of thine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I make them recognise the tinge .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[Pg 188]</a></span><span class="i0">For so I prove thee, to one and all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fit, when my people ope their breast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see the sign, and hear the call,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And take the vow, and stand the test<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Which adds one more child to the rest&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the world is left outside."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady
+if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of
+the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"So, trial after trial past,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Wilt thou fall at the very last<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Breathless, half in trance<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the thrill of the great deliverance,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Into our arms for evermore;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thou shalt know, those arms once curled<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">About thee, what we knew before,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>How love is the only good in the world</i>.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Henceforth be loved as heart can love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or brain devise, or hand approve!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stand up, look below,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is our life at thy feet we throw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To step with into light and joy;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not a power of life but we employ<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To satisfy thy nature's want."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and
+understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will
+do more than the world has done"&mdash;and the tribe <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[Pg 189]</a></span>will at least approach
+that end with this beloved woman. She says not <i>how</i>&mdash;whether by one
+man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by <i>her</i> giving "her
+wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I foresee and I could foretell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy future portion, sure and well;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let them say what thou shalt do!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with
+their blame, their praise:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Our shame to feel, our pride to show,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Glad, angry&mdash;but indifferent, no!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old
+age&mdash;will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and
+reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul"
+ .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be
+like the ending of a dream, when</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Death, with the might of his sunbeam,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music
+began again, the words grew indistinguishable .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. with a snap the charm
+broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised afresh
+that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the
+ground, and hurried <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[Pg 190]</a></span>round to the portal.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. In another minute he would
+have entered:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"When the door opened, and more than mortal<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stood, with a face where to my mind centred<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All beauties I ever saw or shall see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She was so different, happy and beautiful,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I felt at once that all was best" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was,
+in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her,
+"the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers
+to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she
+wanted&mdash;like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild
+creature's bidding was.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He went before her to the stable; she
+followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last&mdash;sunk back into her
+former self,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the
+castle&mdash;the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile
+from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and
+knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began
+to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")&mdash;not meaning to be
+obtrusive&mdash;she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of
+the head.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[Pg 191]</a></span>Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy
+behind her&mdash;and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready
+whenever God should please that she needed him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And she looked down</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. not a purse! If it
+had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone
+home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself&mdash;but it was not a
+purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each
+other in a convent:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This, see, which at my breast I wear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then&mdash;and then&mdash;to cut short&mdash;this is idle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">These are feelings it is not good to foster.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the palfrey bounded&mdash;and so we lost her."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to
+need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we
+like that <i>saves</i> us; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that
+crushes love.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love is the only good in the world."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[Pg 192]</a></span></p><p>And the love (though it <i>may</i> be) <i>need</i> not be the love of man for
+woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which
+made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home,
+and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the
+name of every bird&mdash;the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too
+easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she
+looked on, and her looks went everywhere" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. what was all this but
+love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must
+die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was
+neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not
+"fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing,
+nothing else&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And die away the life between."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must
+care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the
+disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the
+hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for
+the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. That night,
+even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without
+love, a world that did not want her&mdash;and <i>she</i> was here, and she must
+stay, until, until .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Which <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[Pg 193]</a></span>would the coming child be&mdash;herself again,
+or <i>him</i> again? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.</p>
+
+<p>And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"&mdash;they wanted
+her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to
+change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her
+cheek&mdash;they liked <i>her</i>. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true,"
+for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.</p>
+
+<p>It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation
+of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great
+tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his
+ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"&mdash;and to all of us, the
+Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for
+nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to
+compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the
+little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. <i>She</i> placed
+the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she
+beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And so at last we find my tribe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so I set thee in the midst .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Henceforth be loved as heart can love.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is our life at thy feet we throw<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To step with into light and joy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[Pg 194]</a></span></p><p>The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage&mdash;needed
+swift decision&mdash;needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she
+saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess
+heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was
+ordained to save her, could she hear it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And that she heard aright,
+that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives not, we
+know from the old huntsman:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So they made no search and small inquiry";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.</p>
+
+<p>Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of
+them.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn
+adorer. He had stayed at the castle:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I must see this fellow his sad life through&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He is our Duke, after all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go
+journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear
+the last news of her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And when that's told me, what's remaining?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard
+for his explaining, and so he <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[Pg 195]</a></span>hopes to find a snug corner under some
+hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep
+soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer
+be cast before swine that can't value them. "<i>Amen.</i>"</p>
+
+<p>But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little
+lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's
+play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there&mdash;just as one
+likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left
+precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke
+the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.</p>
+
+<p>And is it not good to think that almost immediately after <i>The Flight of
+the Duchess</i> was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted
+woman whom <i>he</i> snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been
+prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the
+Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill
+to read those lines of silenced prophecy:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I foresee and I could foretell<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thy future portion, sure and well:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let them say what thou shalt do!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_166-1_28" id="Footnote_166-1_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_166-1_28"><span class="label">[166:1]</span></a> The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the
+poet is by a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in
+1706, and died in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744.
+"He abounded" (says Vernon Lee, in her <i>Studies of the Eighteenth
+Century in Italy</i>) "in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in
+its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest
+beauty."</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[Pg 197]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PART III</h2>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image05.png" alt="The Lover" width="65%"/>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[Pg 199]</a></span></p>
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>LOVERS MEETING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life&mdash;the thing
+which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
+common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
+him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
+any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
+sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
+outlook&mdash;more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
+analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
+passion for humanity <i>as</i> humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
+trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
+us take them for granted&mdash;let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
+so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
+next to mankind, was art in all its branches&mdash;a correlative aspect, that
+is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
+aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
+expression of our subtlest inward life. Man <i>was</i>, for him, the proper
+study of mankind; of all great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[Pg 200]</a></span>poets, he was the most "social," and
+that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit&mdash;differing there from Byron,
+almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
+Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
+Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
+and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.</p>
+
+<p>In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
+inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
+flabbiness&mdash;there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
+ways. After <i>Pauline</i>&mdash;rejected utterance of his green-sickness&mdash;the
+wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
+withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
+"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
+love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
+<i>do all</i> for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
+something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
+other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
+but no <i>claim</i> shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
+faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more
+axiomatically than Browning ever said it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;but Browning's whole existence announced that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[Pg 201]</a></span>axiom, and triumphantly
+proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such
+was <i>his</i> marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man
+declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He
+understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!)
+conduct&mdash;what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he
+understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far
+hinders it&mdash;when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when
+by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for
+Browning, lay in loving greatly.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, for example, it is notable that, except <i>The Laboratory</i> and
+<i>Fifine at the Fair</i>, none of his poems of men and women turns upon
+jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in
+love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in <i>Fifine</i>), even the departure
+from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of
+insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be
+(she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and
+always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be
+deep and true as well as brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>For Browning, <i>how</i> love comes is not important. It may be by the
+high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely
+answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our
+dearest memory.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[Pg 202]</a></span><span class="i0">"What is he buzzing in my ears?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Now that I come to die,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ah, reverend sir, not I!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man
+"used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again&mdash;the
+"suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it
+were, with the bottles on the bedside table.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">There watched for me, one June,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">My poor mind's out of tune."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the
+details.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle
+labelled 'Ether,'"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And stole from stair to stair,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">We loved, Sir&mdash;used to meet:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How sad and mad and bad it was&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But then, how it was sweet!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other
+"confession"&mdash;if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life:
+that is all.</p>
+
+<p>In <i>Confessions</i>, the story is done; the man is dying. In <i>Love among
+the Ruins</i>, we have almost the great <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[Pg 203]</a></span>moment itself. The lover, alone,
+is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before
+him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of
+"a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful
+prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace,"
+a wall with a hundred gates&mdash;its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve
+men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Never was"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;as here,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Long ago;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Struck them tame;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And that glory and that shame alike, the gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Bought and sold."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part
+of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his
+minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the
+chariot-races.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as
+it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes
+and rills melt into one grey .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and he knows</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Waits me there<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[Pg 204]</a></span><span class="i0">In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">For the goal,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Till I come."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its
+temples and colonnades,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts&mdash;and then<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">All the men!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Either hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Of my face,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Each on each."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they
+built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a
+thousand chariots in reserve&mdash;all gold, of course.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Earth's returns<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Shut them in<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Love is best!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
+we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
+even from our love. The day is long and we must work in <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[Pg 205]</a></span>it; but we can
+meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
+off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
+at the other side of the bay:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Three fields to cross till a farm appears;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And blue spurt of a lighted match,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than the two hearts beating each to each!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes&mdash;we can meet at night.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But we must part at morning.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And straight was a path of gold for him,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the need of a world of men for me."<a name="FNanchor_205-1_29" id="FNanchor_205-1_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_205-1_29" class="fnanchor">[205:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
+describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
+he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
+lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
+his other <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[Pg 206]</a></span>love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
+another, which occupies him&mdash;the lovers who meet to part; those who love
+"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never <i>his</i> phrase); those who choose
+separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
+who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Dear, had the world in its caprice<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Have recognised your plighted troth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How many precious months and years<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Before we found it out at last,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The world, and what it fears?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">How much of priceless life were spent<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With men that every virtue decks,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And women models of their sex,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Society's true ornament&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere we dared wander, nights like this,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And feel the Boulevard break again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To warmth and light and bliss?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
+They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
+trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
+would have talked."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Well, people may talk now, but they <i>have</i> gained
+something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
+choose&mdash;rightly or wrongly, but at any rate <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[Pg 207]</a></span>it is not "the world" that
+sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
+happening, this very hour, in that environment&mdash;here, for instance, in
+the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
+Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
+signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
+courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
+leave respectability to its false standards. <i>They</i> are not
+included&mdash;they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"</p>
+
+<p>I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
+had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
+pleased to think. The world still counted for them&mdash;as it counts for all
+who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
+could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
+it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
+it recognises the true Contemner! To</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Feel the Boulevard break again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To warmth and light and bliss"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;on wild wet nights of wandering .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. this might even, through the
+example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes&mdash;we must refuse to be
+dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short&mdash;they
+could not <i>forget</i> the world.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[Pg 208]</a></span></p><p>Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
+to the dream-meetings&mdash;the great encounters which all of us feel might
+be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
+imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
+marvellously uttered in <i>Mesmerism</i>. Here, in these breathless
+stanzas,<a name="FNanchor_208-1_30" id="FNanchor_208-1_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_208-1_30" class="fnanchor">[208:1]</a> so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
+rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
+actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
+should find the terrifying glory true .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. here the man sits alone in his
+room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings his
+thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Till I seemed to have and hold<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">In the vacancy<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">'Twixt the walls and me<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To the foot in its muslin fold&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Have and hold, then and there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Her, from head to foot,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Breathing and mute,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Passive and yet aware,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the grasp of my steady stare&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[Pg 209]</a></span><span class="i0">Hold and have, there and then,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">All her body and soul<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">That completes my whole,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All that women add to men,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the clutch of my steady ken"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his
+hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he <i>must</i> draw her
+from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to
+suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Out of doors into the night!<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">On to the maze<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Of the wild wood-ways,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not turning to left nor right<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">From the pathway, blind with sight&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Swifter and still more swift,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">As the crowding peace<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Doth to joy increase<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the wild blind eyes uplift<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thro' the darkness and the drift!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he <i>will</i> sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be
+relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes
+shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even
+from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"&mdash;for the
+lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and
+spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[Pg 210]</a></span>and the
+arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes,
+comes .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Now&mdash;now'&mdash;the door is heard!<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Hark, the stairs! and near&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Nearer&mdash;and here&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Now!' and at call the third<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She enters without a word!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she
+not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?</p>
+
+<p>But in <i>Porphyria's Lover</i>, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too,
+sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes
+to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and
+rain&mdash;there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of
+passion's answering passion.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The rain set early in to-night,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The sullen wind was soon awake,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It tore the elm-tops down for spite,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And did its worst to vex the lake:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I listened with heart fit to break.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When glided in Porphyria."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
+kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
+she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[Pg 211]</a></span>the soiled
+gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And, last, she sat down by my side<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And called me. When no voice replied,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She put my arm about her waist,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And made her smooth white shoulder bare,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And all her yellow hair displaced,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And spread o'er all her yellow hair&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Murmuring how she loved me&mdash;she<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To set its struggling passion free<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From pride, and vainer ties dissever,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And give herself to me for ever."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
+there had seized her</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"A sudden thought of one so pale<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For love of her, and all in vain:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So, she was come through wind and rain."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
+fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
+was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
+grief&mdash;unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
+possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
+it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
+calls to him, and as even then he makes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[Pg 212]</a></span>no answer, sits down beside him
+and draws his head to her breast.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Be sure I looked up at her eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Happy and proud; at last I knew<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Porphyria worshipped me; surprise<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Made my heart swell, and still it grew<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">While I debated what to do.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">That moment she was mine, mine, fair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Perfectly pure and good: I found<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A thing to do, and all her hair<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In one long yellow string I wound<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Three times her little throat around,<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And strangled her."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
+to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
+loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
+beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head&mdash;this time <i>his</i>
+shoulder bore</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"The smiling rosy little head,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So glad it has its utmost will,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That all it scorned at once is fled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I, its love, am gained instead!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Porphyria's love: she guessed not how<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Her darling one wish would be heard.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And thus we sit together now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And all night long we have not stirred,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And yet God has not said a word!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[Pg 213]</a></span></p><p>This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse
+Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that
+it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But
+only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream,
+if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly
+happened on that night of wind and rain?&mdash;that night which <i>is</i> real,
+whatever else is not .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly matter?
+Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning&mdash;the sanity in the madness.
+As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the little
+cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the love at
+last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was <i>herself</i>.
+When in all the rest of life would such another moment come?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. How many
+lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could die <i>now</i>!"&mdash;nothing
+impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the sanity in the madness,
+the courage in the cowardice.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. So this lover felt, brooding in the
+"madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have been:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And thus we sit together now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yet God has not said a word!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Six poems of exultant love&mdash;and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the
+woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[Pg 214]</a></span><i>he</i> puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the
+nameless girl in <i>Count Gismond</i> and from Balaustion&mdash;these only&mdash;do we
+get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just
+now shown.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I
+think it is not at least <i>so</i> true, but true in some degree it must be,
+since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That
+the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like
+the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of
+love? Or that she understands them better?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Perhaps all of these
+things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the
+"tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love
+consists for woman.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_205-1_29" id="Footnote_205-1_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_205-1_29"><span class="label">[205:1]</span></a> Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza
+leaves in the minds of some. In Berdoe's <i>Browning Cyclop&aelig;dia</i> the
+difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He
+interprets the last line of <i>Parting at Morning</i> as meaning that the
+woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is
+the <i>man</i> who speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
+misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
+Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
+refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Here is
+an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_208-1_30" id="Footnote_208-1_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_208-1_30"><span class="label">[208:1]</span></a> Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem
+"fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a
+real break in sense or sound."</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[Pg 215]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S</h3>
+
+
+<h4>I.&mdash;THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"</h4>
+
+<p>Writing of the unnamed heroine of <i>Count Gismond</i>, I said that she had
+one of the characteristic Browning marks&mdash;that of trust in the sincerity
+of others. Here, in <i>The Glove</i>, we find a figure who resembles her in
+two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady&mdash;a lady of the
+Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
+<i>dis</i>-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
+earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
+prize-bloom of legend&mdash;that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
+lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Does this
+interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
+it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
+till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
+the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis&mdash;vanity! All the world
+knows the story; all the world, till this <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[Pg 216]</a></span>apologist arrived, condemned
+alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'Twas mere vanity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not love, set that task to humanity!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
+that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
+much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
+told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
+alone, to be older. <i>She had been longer at Court</i>; its lesson had
+penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had
+listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she
+watched <i>him</i>, hearkened <i>him</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and more and more misdoubted,
+hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck
+fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation,
+yielding, courage, into one quick impulse&mdash;and flung her glove to the
+lions! With the result which we know&mdash;of an instant and a fearless
+answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst
+she had dreaded.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened&mdash;the
+most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French
+knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in
+the air, and so was corruption; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[Pg 217]</a></span>poets, artists, worked in every corner,
+and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered
+the <i>Petite Bande</i>, the clique within a clique&mdash;"that troop of pretty
+women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"&mdash;led by his
+powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'&Eacute;tampes, friend of the Dauphin's
+neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de M&eacute;dicis&mdash;foe of that wife's
+so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande
+S&eacute;n&eacute;schale de Normandie."</p>
+
+<p>The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse
+d'&Eacute;tampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the
+Psalms of David into verse; La Grande S&eacute;n&eacute;schale, always supreme in
+taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard&mdash;and this was why Pierre sometimes
+found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in
+his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.</p>
+
+<p>That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been
+signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Caught thinking war the true pastime.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Is there a reason in metre?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give us your speech, master Peter!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words
+before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[Pg 218]</a></span></p><p>They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers
+mustered&mdash;lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset.
+Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge
+and the lady he was "adoring."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her, and the horrible pitside"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
+dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
+beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
+door had been opened .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. they all waited breathless, with beating
+hearts .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Then earth in a sudden contortion<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gave out to our gaze her abortion.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such a brute!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To see the black mane, vast and heapy,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The tail in the air stiff and straining,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
+noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
+and he was free again.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you saw by the flash on his forehead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He was leagues in the desert already."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[Pg 219]</a></span></p><p>The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
+Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this&mdash;he knew well that it
+were almost certain death:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
+a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
+the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
+been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
+balance."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the barrier
+and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he was still
+staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an one stare
+from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. De Lorge picked
+up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place where he had
+leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more, as all the
+world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye was on them.
+The King cried out in applause that <i>he</i> would have done the same:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. 'Twas mere vanity,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not love, set that task to humanity!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
+with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[Pg 220]</a></span></p><p>All but Peter Ronsard. <i>He</i> noticed that she retained undisturbed her
+self-possession amid the Court's mockery.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"As if from no pleasing experiment<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She rose, yet of pain not much heedful,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So long as the process was needful.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">She went out 'mid hooting and laughter;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added;
+"I must know human nature."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"She told me, 'Too long had I heard<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the deed proved alone by the word:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For my love&mdash;what De Lorge would not dare!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With my scorn&mdash;what De Lorge could compare!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the endless descriptions of death<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He would brave when my lip formed a breath,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I must reckon as braved'" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was
+understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the
+lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to
+that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to
+reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and
+the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And at
+this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for mere
+boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[Pg 221]</a></span>and leaped across,
+pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De Lorge
+here and now? For <i>now</i> she was still free; now she could find out what
+"death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break down
+her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then discover
+that it did not mean anything at all! So&mdash;she had thrown the glove.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'The blow a glove gives is but weak:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But when the heart suffers a blow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been
+capable of the public insult. The pain of <i>that</i>, had she loved him,
+must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of
+this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere
+vanity." Love then was nowhere&mdash;neither in his heart nor in hers.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a
+youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would
+pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as
+that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but
+there was no doubt what <i>he</i> would have done, "had our brute been
+Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it
+right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[Pg 222]</a></span><span class="i0">"And when, shortly after, she carried<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her shame from the Court, and they married,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To that marriage some happiness, maugre<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The voice of the Court, I dared augur."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and
+finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week.
+Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the
+King desired her presence and his absence&mdash;and never did he set off on
+that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell
+the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that
+he brought <i>hers</i> with no murmur.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in
+accepting De Lorge's "devotion"&mdash;not because De Lorge was worthless, but
+because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not
+love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we
+now perceive; but <i>only</i> love could excuse the test which love could
+never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless&mdash;no matter; the lady held no
+right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone
+her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.</p>
+
+<p>But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that
+love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so
+subtle a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[Pg 223]</a></span>woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and
+that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But I think
+there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of
+King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de
+Valois, sister of the King&mdash;we have only to consider the story of Diane
+de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise <i>that</i>
+most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it
+loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It
+scorns tests&mdash;too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again
+it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we
+gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to
+plunge among the lions for our gloves&mdash;but we should not be able to send
+them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits
+not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will
+have won the <i>heart</i> which doubts&mdash;and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the
+glove.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Utter the true word&mdash;out and away<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Escapes her soul." .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul
+will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas <i>not</i> love
+set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[Pg 224]</a></span>win her our full
+pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."</p>
+
+
+<h4>II.&mdash;D&Icirc;S ALITER VISUM; <span class="smcap">or</span>, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS</h4>
+
+<p>"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of
+the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood,
+and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand
+against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is
+assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of
+this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life&mdash;to their own
+disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the
+spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets
+again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them
+in a Paris drawing-room&mdash;married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still
+is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes
+to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost
+be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having
+rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married
+her<a name="FNanchor_224-1_31" id="FNanchor_224-1_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_224-1_31" class="fnanchor">[224:1]</a>&mdash;and in what did it result?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But that Browning should in
+any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[Pg 225]</a></span>Byron as anything but the
+most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who
+understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in
+perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in
+this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who
+doesn't"&mdash;hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one
+of the great disastrous marriages of the world.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known
+one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice
+had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged,
+and lamed":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Famous, however, for verse and worse,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious
+was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.</p>
+
+<p>She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a
+mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy&mdash;the typical "poor pretty
+thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read
+verse and thought she understood&mdash;at any rate, loved the Great, the
+Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully
+amateurish&mdash;him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could
+float wide <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[Pg 226]</a></span>and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull
+floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her
+"twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had
+chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it,
+so fine were the air and scenery&mdash;but it remained unvisited, and thus
+the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited
+her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back
+upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and
+made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt
+that he had guessed her secret, timid hope.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Now, recalling the
+episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she
+asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on
+him that day.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Did you determine, as we stepped<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her for myself, and what's the earth<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With all its art, verse, music, worth&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For she knows, and she knew that <i>he</i> knew, the prompt reply which would
+come if he "blurted out" a certain question&mdash;come in her instant
+silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow.
+They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers&mdash;he, old,
+famous, weary; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[Pg 227]</a></span>she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her
+wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all
+other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her
+choice!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. A perfect hour for both&mdash;while it lasted.</p>
+
+<p>But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not
+last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full
+time for both to reason and reflect.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And thus (still interpreting to
+him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice
+which had seemed to show her of the elect&mdash;for after all a poet <i>need</i>
+not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
+is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
+as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
+is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.</p>
+
+<p>For, if he <i>had</i> spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
+is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
+as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
+would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
+he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
+ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
+according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
+him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[Pg 228]</a></span>And what would his own
+reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
+clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
+very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
+foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
+side&mdash;she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
+can connect the action with its mental source. <i>His</i> reflection, then,
+would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
+he was and had been and might be&mdash;all his culture, knowledge of the
+world, guerdons of gold and great renown&mdash;for what? For "two cheeks
+freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. <i>Him</i>, in exchange for a
+nosegay!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That ended me."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
+scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
+they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
+general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
+really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
+civilisation as there was:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[Pg 229]</a></span></p><p>Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
+has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
+he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
+to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
+interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be
+patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has
+cried, in the words which open the poem:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Stop, let me have the truth of that!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is that all true?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of
+her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.</p>
+
+<p>For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood
+unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered&mdash;he has begun to "tell" her,
+to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing
+less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased,
+but they will talk of it in <i>her</i> way. So she cuts him short, and draws
+this acid, witty little sketch for him.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Has she not matured? might it
+not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But
+suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul,
+and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something
+greater in herself.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[Pg 230]</a></span><span class="i0">"Now I may speak: you fool, for all<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What was the sea for? What, the grey<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sad church, that solitary day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crosses and graves and swallows' call?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Was there nought better than to enjoy?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">No feat which, done, would make time break,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And let us pent-up creatures through<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Into eternity, our due?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No grasping at love, gaining a share<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">O' the sole spark from God's life at strife<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With death&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that
+the least&mdash;"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and
+sentimental&mdash;true; each might have missed something in the other; but
+completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that.
+Only earthbound creatures&mdash;like the star-fish, for instance&mdash;become all
+they <i>can</i> become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their
+souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she
+can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two
+souls&mdash;nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[Pg 231]</a></span>vilely last night,
+they say&mdash;will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her
+vogue has had its day"?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And what of the speaker herself? It takes but
+half a dozen words to indicate <i>her</i> lot:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Here comes my husband from his whist."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What is "the truth of that"?</p>
+
+<p>Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of <i>Youth and Art</i>:
+again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the
+fulfilling of the law&mdash;with all my heart; but was love here? Does love
+weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the
+lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant
+"that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a
+vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one
+might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful
+marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is
+not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further
+declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it
+is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul
+unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace
+the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the
+view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of <i>D&icirc;s Aliter
+Visum</i>. Mr. Symons says that <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[Pg 232]</a></span>the woman points out to the man "his fatal
+mistake."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging
+that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who
+argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than
+this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our
+standpoint. <i>That</i> is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law,
+and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental
+state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters&mdash;and the
+experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to
+act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she
+has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the
+unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be
+loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any
+ideal which may then have urged itself&mdash;not that both would certainly
+have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking
+elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can
+do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something
+too"&mdash;but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not
+be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern
+mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them
+more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a
+worldling. Witty as she has become, there still <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[Pg 233]</a></span>remain in her, I fear,
+some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. To sum up, for this
+"tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at his
+best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III.&mdash;THE LABORATORY</h4>
+
+<p>Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is
+not, and will not be, a victim.</p>
+
+<p>At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in
+such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into
+the soul of this woman in <i>The Laboratory</i>, Browning has penetrated till
+he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another
+fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the
+Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration.
+Every word counts, almost every comma&mdash;for, like Browning, we too seem
+to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the
+very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech
+is <i>our</i> pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression
+of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant
+and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>She is a Court lady of the <i>ancien r&eacute;gime</i>, in the great Brinvilliers
+poisoning-period, and she is buying <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[Pg 234]</a></span>from an old alchemist in his
+laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small,
+gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old
+wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there
+is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Now she must put on a
+glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes that
+curl whitely" are themselves poisonous&mdash;and she submits, and with all
+her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to peer
+through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent; even
+to him&mdash;and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!&mdash;she must
+pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and then:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out
+a cry:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He is with her, and they know that I know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where they are, what they do&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in
+the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps
+through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget <i>me</i>, she thinks,
+as all her sister-sufferers think.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Yet even in this hell, there is
+some solace. They must be remembering her, and</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[Pg 235]</a></span><span class="i9h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. they believe my tears flow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Empty church, to pray God in, for them!&mdash;I am here."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes, here&mdash;where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and
+mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and
+watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her
+restless, nervous anguish&mdash;the dagger in her heart, but this way, <i>this</i>
+way, to stanch the wound it makes!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That in the mortar&mdash;you call it a gum?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sure to taste sweetly&mdash;is that poison too?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a
+moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have <i>all</i> the
+old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that
+hateful Court where each knows of her misery.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in
+half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her
+breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But he is
+taking too long.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Quick&mdash;is it finished? The colour's too grim!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[Pg 236]</a></span></p><p>For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and
+dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift
+the goblet to her lips, and taste.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But one must be content: the old
+man knows&mdash;this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to the
+vessel again, a new doubt assails her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That's why she ensnared him: this never will free<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The soul from those masculine eyes&mdash;say, 'No!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For only last night, as they whispered, I brought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
+wants the other to <i>feel</i> death; more&mdash;she wants the proof of death to
+remain,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Brand, burn up, bite into its grace<a name="FNanchor_236-1_32" id="FNanchor_236-1_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_236-1_32" class="fnanchor">[236:1]</a>&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He is sure to remember her dying face!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must&mdash;nay, he need not
+look morose about it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[Pg 237]</a></span></p><p>There it lies&mdash;there.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
+is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
+might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
+thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the King's.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her passion, and,
+clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of those
+torments.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
+hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
+now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
+utterance, and it is here.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV.&mdash;IN A YEAR</h4>
+
+<p>Nay&mdash;here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
+"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
+even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of <i>The
+Laboratory</i> may have known, like <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[Pg 238]</a></span>the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
+at her lover's mutability.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Was it something said,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Something done,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vexed him? was it touch of hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Turn of head?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Strange! that very way<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love begun:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I as little understand<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love's decay."<a name="FNanchor_238-1_33" id="FNanchor_238-1_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_238-1_33" class="fnanchor">[238:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
+it all&mdash;not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
+abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
+greatly that still, still, she can dream:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Would he loved me yet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">On and on,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While I found some way undreamed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">&mdash;Paid my debt!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Gave more life and more,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Till, all gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He should smile, 'She never seemed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Mine before.'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
+too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[Pg 239]</a></span><span class="i0">"Well, this cold clay clod<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was man's heart:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crumble it, and what comes next?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is it God ?"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Dying for my sake&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">White and pink!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Can't we touch these bubbles then<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But they break?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
+hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
+since the world began, and will do till it ends.<a name="FNanchor_239-1_34" id="FNanchor_239-1_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_239-1_34" class="fnanchor">[239:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
+been between them, clearly he has not known that yet.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Again, the
+supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly <i>all</i> the love,
+can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams&mdash;yet
+after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
+loves truly?</p>
+
+<p>Yet indeed (she now muses) <i>has</i> she enough loved him?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I had wealth and ease,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Beauty, youth:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since my lover gave me love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I gave these.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[Pg 240]</a></span><span class="i0">That was all I meant<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">&mdash;To be just,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the passion I had raised<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To content.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since he chose to change<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Gold for dust,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I gave him what he praised,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was it strange?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
+herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
+"way undreamed" to pay her debt.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
+above:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"<i>And the passion I had raised</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>To content.</i>"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
+cries:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I, too, at love's brim<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Touched the sweet:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I would die if death bequeathed<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sweet to him."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
+regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
+express either the girl or her poet.</p>
+
+<p>The rest comes right and true&mdash;and more than all, perhaps, the second
+verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
+going is so subtly indicated.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[Pg 241]</a></span><span class="i0">"Strange! that very way<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love begun:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I <i>as little understand</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Love's decay."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should
+say love knows not reason&mdash;but love and God forbid that it should <i>aim</i>
+at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long&mdash;but will not
+die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with
+scorn upon that earlier self?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. We talk much now of "re-incarnation,"
+and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back to earth of a
+spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not re-incarnations
+of the still embodied spirit&mdash;is not re-incarnation, like eternity, with
+us here and now, as we "in this body" live and suffer and despair, and
+lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How many of us&mdash;grown, not
+changed&mdash;can pityingly look back at ourselves in some such dying moment
+as this poem shows us; for death it is to that "ourself." Hearts do not
+break, but hearts do die&mdash;<i>that</i> heart, <i>that</i> self: we pass into a
+Hades.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, this cold clay clod<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Was man's heart:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Crumble it, and what comes next?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Is it God?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[Pg 242]</a></span></p><p>Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from
+our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days&mdash;we call them back (a little,
+it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will
+endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Surely
+this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more
+clearly to a transition-state? We <i>have been</i> dead; but this "us" who
+comes back to the world we knew is still the same&mdash;the heart will answer
+as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.
+Only&mdash;this is the proof&mdash;both heart and spirit are <i>further on</i>; both
+have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of
+love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of
+"dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in
+scornful, pity&mdash;knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream,
+and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love
+that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_224-1_31" id="Footnote_224-1_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_224-1_31"><span class="label">[224:1]</span></a> The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch,
+be applied to Annabella Milbanke.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_236-1_32" id="Footnote_236-1_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_236-1_32"><span class="label">[236:1]</span></a> Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the
+alliteration in this line.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_238-1_33" id="Footnote_238-1_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_238-1_33"><span class="label">[238:1]</span></a> Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping
+thoughts. Only after much questioning can the answer come, as it were,
+in the "chime of the rhyme."</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_239-1_34" id="Footnote_239-1_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_239-1_34"><span class="label">[239:1]</span></a> And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no
+pluming of male feathers&mdash;if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on
+either side.</p></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[Pg 243]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PART IV</h2>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image06.png" alt="The Wife" width="65%" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[Pg 245]</a></span></p>
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h3>A WOMAN'S LAST WORD</h3>
+
+
+<p>They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does
+not, cannot, think as <i>he</i> thinks. But does thinking signify? She
+loves&mdash;is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at
+all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving,
+she shall achieve no more than that: to <i>say</i> nothing, to use no
+influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last word."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she contends no more?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What so wild as words are?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and that <i>they</i> should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds
+debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the
+hawk spies from a bough above.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"See the creature stalking<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">While we speak!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hush and hide the talking,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Cheek on cheek!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious
+effluence which falls on joy and kills <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[Pg 246]</a></span>it; and that may just as well be
+"talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way&mdash;or no: that is a
+paltry yielding. There shall <i>be</i> no way but his.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What so false as truth is,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">False to thee?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to
+"know":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Where the apple reddens<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Never pry&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lest we lose our Edens,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Eve and I.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Be a god and hold me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With a charm!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be a man and fold me<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With thine arm!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Teach me, only teach, Love!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As I ought<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will speak thy speech, Love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Think thy thought&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Meet, if thou require it,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Both demands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Laying flesh and spirit<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In thy hands."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice
+whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She
+hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it&mdash;since he can
+desire it. Since he <i>can</i> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[Pg 247]</a></span><span class="i0">"That shall be to-morrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not to-night:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I must bury sorrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Out of sight:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">&mdash;Must a little weep, Love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">(Foolish me!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so fall asleep, Love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Loved by thee."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
+"sleep"; all shall be as before.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong <i>she</i> is.
+For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
+silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
+otherwise. And so, <i>if</i> this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
+highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
+for the woman.</p>
+
+<p>By implication, Browning shows us that in <i>By the Fireside</i>, one of his
+three great songs of wedded love:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your heart anticipate my heart,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You must be just before, in fine,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">See and make me see, for your part,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">New depths of the divine!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Once more we can trace there his development from <i>Pauline</i>. She,
+looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
+lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
+the wife <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[Pg 248]</a></span>in the <i>Last Word</i> resolves to do.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. As the poet grew, so
+grew the man in Browning: we reach <i>By the Fireside</i> from these. For the
+woman in the <i>Last Word</i>, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
+thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring <i>that</i> husband
+to the place where stands the man in <i>By the Fireside</i>, when the "long
+dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
+back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
+they found each other once for all.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My perfect wife, my Leonor,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whom else could I dare look backward for,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With whom beside should I dare pursue<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The path grey heads abhor?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">My own, confirm me! If I tread<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This path back, is it not in pride<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To think how little I dreamed it led<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To an age so blest that, by its side,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Youth seems the waste instead?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And now read again:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Meet, <i>if thou require it</i>,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Both demands,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Laying flesh and spirit<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In thy hands."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
+yield, that backward-treading <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[Pg 249]</a></span>path is not for them&mdash;never shall <i>they</i>
+say to one another:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Come back with me to the first of all,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let us lean and love it over again,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let us now forget and now recall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Break the rosary in a pearly rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And gather what we let fall!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary&mdash;the wife who had begun
+so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!</p>
+
+<p>But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
+often wisely use. "Talking" <i>is</i> to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
+the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
+not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him&mdash;learning
+from him all the while&mdash;<i>not</i> to "require it": she, this same sweet,
+strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
+sure indenture of freedom.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That shall be to-morrow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Not to-night:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I must bury sorrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Out of sight."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
+highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
+so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! <i>This</i> tear shall be dried.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[Pg 250]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h3>JAMES LEE'S WIFE</h3>
+
+
+<p>In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
+heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
+"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
+The man has failed her&mdash;as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
+"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her&mdash;as it left the woman
+of <i>The Laboratory</i> and the girl of <i>In a Year</i>; she and her husband are
+at variance in the great things of life&mdash;like the couple, in <i>A Woman's
+last Word</i>. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
+upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
+would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
+gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
+she can do, and that is to leave him&mdash;"set him free."</p>
+
+<p>We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
+speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
+nine separate days&mdash;spread over what precise period of time we are not
+clearly shown, but it was certainly <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[Pg 251]</a></span>a year. These nine revealings show
+us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
+woe; then the battle with <i>that</i>&mdash;the hope that love may yet prevail;
+the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from
+"old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"
+since there is nothing else for her to be&mdash;and finally the flight, the
+whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere
+studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is <i>in excelsis</i>&mdash;for
+hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least
+could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live,
+remembering James Lee.</p>
+
+<p>Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name<a name="FNanchor_251-1_35" id="FNanchor_251-1_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_251-1_35" class="fnanchor">[251:1]</a> we may read a
+symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may
+watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed
+in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. <i>That</i>, as
+uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal&mdash;since she knows her
+husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet
+still can claim that he "set down to her"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love that was life, life that was love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A tenure of breath at your lips' decree,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A passion to stand as your thoughts approve,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">A rapture to fall where your foot might be."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[Pg 252]</a></span></p><p>More&mdash;or less&mdash;than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of
+"mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and
+resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the
+mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us,
+with so much at once of pity and of irony.</p>
+
+<p>James Lee's wife is a plain woman.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Why, fade you might to a thing like me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired,
+coarse-skinned .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we
+find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind&mdash;the
+passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the
+first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was
+passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too
+closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it
+could not "take for granted"&mdash;male synonym for married bliss! And of
+course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon:
+<i>she had no sense of humour!</i>&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. If he was incomplete, so too was she;
+and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation, never
+fails to fail&mdash;his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds. Thus
+she sums him:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[Pg 253]</a></span><span class="i0">"With much in you waste, with many a weed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And plenty of passions run to seed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But a little good grain too."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
+type in woman may, needs&mdash;not tyrannically, because unconsciously&mdash;a
+mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
+of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
+realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
+almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she <i>has</i>
+none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
+alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the <i>Last
+Word</i>&mdash;who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
+or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
+unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
+the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
+gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
+lovely women, and even in <i>them</i> bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
+curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
+amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.</p>
+
+<p>Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
+woman.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[Pg 254]</a></span>I.&mdash;SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW</h4>
+
+<p>He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
+Pornic&mdash;the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
+well. "Close to the sea&mdash;a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
+lonely&mdash;one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
+I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."<a name="FNanchor_254-1_36" id="FNanchor_254-1_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_254-1_36" class="fnanchor">[254:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>And at the window <i>she</i> sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
+it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
+always seems to come.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Ah, Love, but a day<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the world has changed!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sun's away,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the bird estranged;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The wind has dropped,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the sky's deranged:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Summer has stopped."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
+faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
+is bad enough that it <i>should</i> pass&mdash;we need not talk about it! Such
+annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
+Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us
+think of something else.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But she goes <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[Pg 255]</a></span>on, and now we shall not doubt
+that he is enervated, for this is what she says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Look in my eyes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wilt thou change too?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Should I fear surprise?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Shall I find aught new<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the old and dear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In the good and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the changing year?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The questions have come to her&mdash;come on what cold blast from heaven, or
+him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the
+man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the
+thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind.
+"I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And
+then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Thou art a man,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">But I am thy love.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the lake, its swan;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For the dell, its dove;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And for thee (oh, haste!)<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Me, to bend above,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Me, to hold embraced."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She does not <i>say</i>, "oh, haste!"&mdash;that is the silent comment (we must
+think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And when
+the embrace does come&mdash;the claimed embrace&mdash;we can figure to ourselves
+the all it lacks.</p>
+
+
+<h4><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[Pg 256]</a></span>II.&mdash;BY THE FIRESIDE</h4>
+
+<p>Summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. The
+blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits
+watching them. The wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck
+wood.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, for the ills half-understood,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">The dim dead woe<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Long ago<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Befallen this bitter coast of France!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, poor sailors took their chance;<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I take mine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be
+eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"O' the warm safe house and happy freight<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">&mdash;Thee and me."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships
+safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood
+that gnaw the heart to dust.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. "That is worse."</p>
+
+<p>And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men
+on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman
+before herself watch the man "with whom began <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[Pg 257]</a></span>love's voyage full-sail"
+ .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open
+beneath?</p>
+
+<p><i>This</i> mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too
+can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is
+given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been
+lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors
+drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house."
+That melancholy brooding&mdash;and if she but looked lovely while she
+broods.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+
+<h4>III.&mdash;IN THE DOORWAY</h4>
+
+<p>She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn
+landscape.<a name="FNanchor_257-1_37" id="FNanchor_257-1_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_257-1_37" class="fnanchor">[257:1]</a> It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like
+a snake"&mdash;olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the
+wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on
+the wing.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the
+golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its
+stake"&mdash;and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart
+"shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[Pg 258]</a></span></p><p>But courage, courage! Winter comes to all&mdash;not to them alone. And have
+they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms,
+and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to
+yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the
+magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one <i>does</i> alight, it
+seems an event), yet will again find food. But November&mdash;the chill month
+with its "rebuff"&mdash;will see both rabbits and magpies quite departed.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to mere material
+nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit His power to
+put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies external
+change:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the
+house, and the field .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and love.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IV.&mdash;ALONG THE BEACH</h4>
+
+<p>Rest and solace have departed: winter is come&mdash;to all. She walks alone
+on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
+for miles";<a name="FNanchor_258-1_38" id="FNanchor_258-1_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_258-1_38" class="fnanchor">[258:1]</a> and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
+they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Piteous
+phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[Pg 259]</a></span>why he
+is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she would
+not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
+almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
+woman.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She begins her "reasoning."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You wanted my love&mdash;is that much true?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And so I did love, so I do:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What has come of it all along?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">I took you&mdash;how could I otherwise?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">For a world to me, and more;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For all, love greatens and glorifies<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till God's aglow, to the loving eyes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In what was mere earth before.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Yes, earth&mdash;yes, mere ignoble earth!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Now do I mis-state, mistake?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Seal my sense up for your sake?<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You were just weak earth, I knew":<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our
+study.</p>
+
+<p>Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it
+is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she <i>has</i> been wise in
+one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"&mdash;that
+memorable phrase, so Browningesque!</p>
+
+<p>She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[Pg 260]</a></span>Thus far, then, kind and
+wise in her great passion.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But she should <i>forget</i> that she has seen
+through him&mdash;she should keep that vision in the background, not hold it
+ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is where she
+has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was&mdash;and did not
+he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that was as yet
+developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the more to
+come?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Well, and if none of these good things came,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">What did the failure prove?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The man was my whole world, all the same."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>That</i> is the fault in her:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"That I do love, watch too long,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And wait too well, and weary and wear;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And 'tis all an old story, and my despair<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fit subject for some new song."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the
+indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt&mdash;and such
+"light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a
+bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life,
+and <i>that</i> is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. So
+the songs have said and will say for all time&mdash;the new songs for the old
+despair.</p>
+
+<p>But though she knows all this (we seem to see), <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[Pg 261]</a></span>she will not be able to
+act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is
+a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her
+means&mdash;neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he
+resents, she still must do immutably&mdash;bound upon the wheel of her true
+self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.</p>
+
+<p>She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach&mdash;"on the edge of the
+low rocks by the sea, for miles."</p>
+
+
+<h4>V.&mdash;ON THE CLIFF</h4>
+
+<p>But still love is a power! Love can move mountains, for is not love the
+same as faith? And not a mountain is here, but a mere man's
+heart&mdash;already "moved," for he <i>has</i> loved her.</p>
+
+<p>It is summer again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry
+grass&mdash;if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the
+summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and
+flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell:
+"death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one
+another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the
+dead rock.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket! A
+cricket&mdash;only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real
+fairy, with wings all <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[Pg 262]</a></span>right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of
+fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">See, wonderful blue and red!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Shall there not then be other analogies? May not the minds of men,
+though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them,
+transfigured like them:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love settling unawares!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles
+happen every day.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VI.&mdash;READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF</h4>
+
+<p>These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.<a name="FNanchor_262-1_39" id="FNanchor_262-1_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_262-1_39" class="fnanchor">[262:1]</a> The
+singer asks what the wind wants of him&mdash;so instant does it seem in its
+appeal.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With falsehood&mdash;love, at last aware<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of scorn&mdash;hopes, early blighted&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'We have them; but I know not any tone<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost think men would go mad without a moan,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If they knew any way to borrow<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A pathos like thine own?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[Pg 263]</a></span></p><p>The splendid lines assail her.<a name="FNanchor_263-1_40" id="FNanchor_263-1_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_263-1_40" class="fnanchor">[263:1]</a> In her anguish of response she
+turns from them at last&mdash;they are too much. This power of perception is
+almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
+thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, <i>at last aware</i>
+of scorn," she flings the volume from her&mdash;rejecting him, detesting him,
+and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
+has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
+wrong: the wind does <i>not</i> mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
+interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
+suffering of others&mdash;failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment&mdash;is but
+the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
+her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
+phrase&mdash;like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
+woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
+dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
+how dare he know&mdash;and now her irony turns cruel:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Himself the undefeated that shall be:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">His triumph in eternity<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Too plainly manifest!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[Pg 264]</a></span></p><p>Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
+pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How <i>could</i> "the
+happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
+"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
+mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day&mdash;on a
+midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
+country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height&mdash;next minute
+must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
+earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"So low, so low, what shall it say but this?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'Here is the change beginning, here the lines<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The limit time assigns.'"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Change is the law of life: <i>that</i> is what the wind says.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Nothing can be as it has been before;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Better, so call it, only not the same.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And keep it changeless! Such our claim;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So answered: Never more!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">From change to change unceasingly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His soul's wings never furled!"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[Pg 265]</a></span></p><p>Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
+above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
+face&mdash;that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
+intensity of vision&mdash;she has found a better one; and for a while she
+rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
+still her pain?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
+moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
+imperiously again. The laws of nature?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That's a new question; still replies the fact,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We moan in acquiescence."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Only to acquiescence can we attain.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"God knows: endure his act!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the human loss, the human anguish.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Formulas touch not these, nor
+does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
+mutability must be&mdash;we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
+"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it&mdash;cannot engrave it, as
+it were, on our souls. And then we die&mdash;and it is gone for ever, and we
+would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it&mdash;but
+time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
+while we lived: the wind had begun <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[Pg 266]</a></span>"so low, so low" .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. and carried it
+away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and life
+may be probation for a better life&mdash;who knows? But if she could have
+engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband loved
+her.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VII.&mdash;AMONG THE ROCKS</h4>
+
+<p>Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
+is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
+that summer still may stay that we are tortured.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">This autumn morning!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
+earth. That is best.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. How he sets his bones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the ripple to run over in its mirth;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Listening the while, where on the heap of stones<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
+tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"&mdash;just this: the brown old
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>But soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[Pg 267]</a></span>of hers can never rest.
+What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over
+the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth
+smiles and knows":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If you loved only what were worth your love,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Make the low nature better by your throes!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I confess that I cannot follow this analogy. The lesson may be clear&mdash;of
+that later; the analogy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower
+nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this,
+what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her
+smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those
+less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." That seems to me to touch
+this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the
+unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, <i>here</i>, is
+getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in
+the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine
+simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I
+still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.</p>
+
+<p>And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say
+that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also
+self-sufficiency?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Make the low nature better by your throes."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[Pg 268]</a></span></p><p>It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live,
+despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may
+call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For
+human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may
+indeed have caused that scorn&mdash;but let there be no talk of love where it
+subsists.</p>
+
+<p>Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this
+strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must
+leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?
+But possibly it was not; and <i>if</i> not, this indeed is subtle.</p>
+
+
+<h4>VIII.&mdash;BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD</h4>
+
+<p>She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of
+a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da
+Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been
+happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped
+ardour.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Its beauty mounted into my brain,"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy&mdash;has taken the
+chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"With soul to help if the mere lips failed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still from one's soulless finger-tips."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[Pg 269]</a></span></p><p>This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
+it, by which one knows</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"That here at length a master found<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">His match, a proud lone soul its mate."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. how free, how fine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To fear almost!&mdash;of the limit-line."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>He</i>, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
+which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
+Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
+She will go back to the household cares&mdash;she has her lesson, and it is
+not the same as Da Vinci's.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Little girl with the poor coarse hand"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. this is <i>her</i> model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
+Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
+like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."</p>
+
+<p>But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
+with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
+Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
+laugh her woes to scorn.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The fool forsooth is all forlorn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Because the beauty she thinks best<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[Pg 270]</a></span><span class="i0">Lived long ago or was never born,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Because no beauty bears the test<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In this rough peasant hand!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
+years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
+but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Of flesh and bone and nerve that make<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The poorest coarsest human hand<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">An object worthy to be scanned<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">A whole life long for their sole sake."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Just the hand&mdash;and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
+of life&mdash;this incompleteness?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Now the parts and then the whole!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die&mdash;she,
+with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
+No beauty is there&mdash;but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'What use survives the beauty?'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.</p>
+
+<p>Then <i>this</i> shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
+daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
+husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
+will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
+she will gain cheer <i>that</i> way, since all the others fail her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[Pg 271]</a></span><span class="i0">"Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I have my lesson, shall understand."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is the last hope&mdash;to be of humble use; this the last formula for
+survival.</p>
+
+
+<h4>IX.&mdash;ON DECK</h4>
+
+<p>And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
+her away from him, she has found the last formula: <i>set him free</i>. Well,
+it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone&mdash;in every sense.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There is nothing to remember in me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nothing I ever said with a grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nothing I did that you care to see,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nothing I was that deserves a place<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No "<i>petite fleur dans la pens&eacute;e</i>"&mdash;none, none: she grants him all her
+dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too&mdash;now that she is
+gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
+have loved them so utterly? It <i>has</i> been: she knows that, and the more
+certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
+His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
+loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
+in his eyes as he is in hers!</p>
+
+<p>So strange it is to think of <i>that</i>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She can <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[Pg 272]</a></span>think anything when
+such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of <i>him</i> as the
+"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered&mdash;her
+ugliness&mdash;if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
+pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells&mdash;that is
+so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.</p>
+
+<p>Imagine it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
+hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
+hand in vain&mdash;that hand which will hold hers still, from over the sea .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+if, when <i>he</i> thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own should rise
+to his imagination&mdash;with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as bright a
+brow.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But it will not be&mdash;and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
+the joy would have killed her.</p>
+
+<p>Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing
+like her," with the coarse hair and skin .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You might turn myself!&mdash;should I know or care<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love that was life, life that was love";<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[Pg 273]</a></span></p><p>and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives
+his words and looks will circle round <i>her</i> memory. If she could fancy
+one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks again.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the little house with
+its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and vines&mdash;from the window,
+the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and cliff and rocks. All the
+formulas have failed but this one. This one will not fail. He is set
+free.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is
+too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have
+been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate;
+and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be
+different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was
+meant to be.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_251-1_35" id="Footnote_251-1_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_251-1_35"><span class="label">[251:1]</span></a> The poems were first called <i>James Lee</i> only.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_254-1_36" id="Footnote_254-1_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_254-1_36"><span class="label">[254:1]</span></a> <i>Life</i>, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_257-1_37" id="Footnote_257-1_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_257-1_37"><span class="label">[257:1]</span></a> "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the
+sea .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"&mdash;<i>Life</i>, p. 266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_258-1_38" id="Footnote_258-1_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_258-1_38"><span class="label">[258:1]</span></a> <i>Life</i>, p. 266.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_262-1_39" id="Footnote_262-1_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_262-1_39"><span class="label">[262:1]</span></a> These lines were published by Browning, separately, in
+1836, when he was twenty-six. <i>James Lee's Wife</i> was published in 1864.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_263-1_40" id="Footnote_263-1_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_263-1_40"><span class="label">[263:1]</span></a> Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first
+and second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind
+was enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a
+soul in 1863.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And yet, something is lost."</p></div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[Pg 275]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PART V</h2>
+
+<div class="img">
+<img src="images/image07.png" alt="The Trouble of Love" width="70%" />
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[Pg 277]</a></span></p>
+<h2>TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S</h2>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<h3>THE WOMAN UNWON</h3>
+
+<p>In the section entitled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of
+love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has
+assigned that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in
+suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman
+as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character
+through the utterances of men&mdash;and these are noble utterances, every
+one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his <i>Essays and Thoughts</i>, well remarks
+that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view
+and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine
+utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is
+imagined";<a name="FNanchor_277-1_41" id="FNanchor_277-1_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_277-1_41" class="fnanchor">[277:1]</a> and that in such utterances "we notice .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. an absolute
+want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love in an
+abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[Pg 278]</a></span></p><p>I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.
+Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on
+the idea of woman's accepted inferiority&mdash;her "tender, unaspiring
+love .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will be
+seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman should
+be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of things as
+they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish his
+purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over Nature":
+woman, we may suppose, being&mdash;as if she were not quite certainly <i>a
+person</i>&mdash;included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning should retain
+this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his "teaching" is
+clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence for man. But
+the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and myself&mdash;that,
+in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, <i>when expressing herself</i>,
+fail in breadth and imagination&mdash;may very well account for the obsolete
+gesture in this interpreter.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Can it be, then, that Browning was (as
+has frequently been said of him) very much less dramatic a writer than
+he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly for our purpose to frame
+the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did he merely guess at, and
+not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of women? This, if it be
+affirmed, will rob him of some glory&mdash;yet I think that affirmed it must
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[Pg 279]</a></span>be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart with regard to us; the
+glory of which he is robbed is after all but that of thaumaturgic
+power&mdash;it is but to say that he could not turn himself into a woman!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In what ways does Browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for
+man? First, of course, as loved and unwon. But though this be the most
+obvious of the ways, not obvious is Browning's treatment of it. To love
+"in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. No love is in vain. Grief,
+anguish even, may attend it, but never can its issue be futility. Nor is
+this merely the already familiar view that somehow, though rejected,
+love benignly works for the beloved. "That may be, that <i>is</i>" (he seems
+to say), "but it is not the truth which most inspires me." The glory of
+love for Browning resides most radiantly in what it does for the lover's
+own soul. It is "God's secret": one who loves is initiate.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained her;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's remainder.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and blended:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been ended."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[Pg 280]</a></span></p><p>That is the concluding stanza of <i>Cristina</i>, which might be called the
+companion-piece to <i>Porphyria's Lover</i>; for in each the woman belongs to
+a social world remote from her adorer's; in each she has, nevertheless,
+perceived him and been drawn to him&mdash;but in <i>Cristina</i> is caught back
+into the vortex, while in <i>Porphyria's Lover</i> the passion prevails, for
+the man, by killing her, has kept her folded in "God's secret" with
+himself.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"She should never have looked at me if she meant I should not love her!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There are plenty .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. men, you call such, I suppose .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. she may discover<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">All her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found them:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But I'm not so, and she knew it, when she fixed me, glancing round them."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is the lover's first impulsive cry on finding himself "thrown
+over." Why did she not leave him alone? Others tell him that that
+"fixing" of hers means nothing&mdash;that she is, simply, a coquette. But he
+"can't tell what her look said." Certainly not any "vile cant" about
+giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about
+lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the
+queen of women. Not <i>that</i>, whatever else!</p>
+
+<p>And now, so sure of this that he grows sure of other things as well, he
+declares that it was a moment <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[Pg 281]</a></span>of true revelation for her also&mdash;she
+<i>did</i> perceive in him the man she wanted.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk that moments,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That was what she had felt&mdash;the queen of women! A coquette, if they
+will, for others, but not for him; and, though cruel to him also in the
+event, not because she had not recognised him. She <i>had</i> recognised him,
+and more&mdash;she had recognised the great truth, had deeply felt that the
+soul "stops here" for but one end, the true end, sole and single: "this
+love-way."</p>
+
+<p>If the soul miss that way, it goes wrong. There may be better ends,
+there may even be deeper blisses, but that is the essential&mdash;that is the
+significant thing in life.</p>
+
+<p>But they need not smile at his fatuity! He sees that she "knew," but he
+can see the issue also.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in derision,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Trampled out the light for ever. Never fear but there's provision<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of the devil's to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in rapture"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[Pg 282]</a></span></p><p><i>That</i> must be reckoned with; but all it does to those who "catch God's
+secret" is simply to make them prize their capture so much the more:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained her;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;for though she has cast him off, he has grasped her soul, and will
+retain it. He has prevailed, and all the rest of his life shall prove
+him the victorious one&mdash;the one who has two souls to work with! He will
+prove all that such a pair can accomplish; and then death can come
+quickly: "this world's use will have been ended." She also knew this,
+but would not follow it to its issue. Thus she lost him&mdash;but he gained
+her, and that shall do as well.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>No loving "in vain" there! But this poem is the high-water mark of
+unsuccessful love exultant. Browning was too true a humanist to keep us
+always on so shining a peak; he knew that there are lower levels, where
+the wounded wings must rest&mdash;that mood, for instance, of wistful
+looking-back to things undreamed-of and now gone, yet once experienced:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"This is a spray the bird clung to,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Making it blossom with pleasure,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ere the high tree-top she sprung to,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Fit for her nest and her treasure.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, what a hope beyond measure<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[Pg 283]</a></span><span class="i0">Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">This is a heart the Queen leant on"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and in a stanza far less lovely than that of the bird, he shows forth
+the analogy. The Queen "went on"; but what a moment that heart had
+had!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Gratitude, we see always, for the gift of love in the heart, for
+God's secret. The lover was left alone, but he had known the thrill.
+"Better to have loved and lost"&mdash;nay, but "lost," for Browning, is not
+in the scheme. She is there, in the world, whether his or another's.</p>
+
+<p>Sometimes she has never been his at all, has never cared:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All June I bound the rose in sheaves.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And strew them where Pauline may pass.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She will not turn aside? Alas!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Let them lie. Suppose they die?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The chance was, they might take her eye."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then, for many a month, he tried to learn the lute to please her.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To-day I venture all I know.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She will not hear my music? So!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Break the string; fold music's wing:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus we gradually see that all his life he has been learning to love
+her. Now he has resolved to speak.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Heaven or hell?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[Pg 284]</a></span><span class="i0">"She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lose who may&mdash;I still can say<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Those who win heaven, blest are they!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Here again is Browning's typical lover. Never does he whine, never
+resent: she was free to choose, and she has not chosen <i>him</i>. That is
+pain; but of the "humiliation" commonly assigned to unsuccessful love,
+he never dreams: where can be humiliation in having caught God's
+secret?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And even if she have half-inclined to him, but found that not
+all herself can give herself&mdash;more pain in that, a nearer approach to
+"failure," perhaps&mdash;even so, he understands.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I said&mdash;Then dearest, since 'tis so,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since now at length my fate I know,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since nothing all my love avails,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Since this was written and needs must be&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My whole heart rises up to bless<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your name in pride and thankfulness!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Take back the hope you gave&mdash;I claim<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Only a memory of the same<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">&mdash;And this beside, if you will not blame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your leave for one more last ride with me."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The girl hesitates. Her proud dark eyes, half-pitiful, dwell on him for
+a moment&mdash;"with life or death in the balance," thinks he.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i11h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Right!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The blood replenished me again;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My last thought was at least not vain;<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[Pg 285]</a></span><span class="i0">I and my mistress, side by side<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall be together, breathe and ride;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So, one day more am I deified.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>Who knows but the world may end to-night?</i>"<a name="FNanchor_285-1_42" id="FNanchor_285-1_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_285-1_42" class="fnanchor">[285:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now the moment comes in which he lifts her to the saddle. It is as if he
+had drawn down upon his breast the fairest, most celestial cloud in
+evening-skies .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. a cloud touched gloriously at once by setting sun and
+rising moon and evening-star.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Down on you, near and yet more near,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till flesh must fade for heaven was here&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Thus leant she and lingered&mdash;joy and fear!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thus lay she a moment on my breast."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then they begin to ride. His soul smooths itself out&mdash;there shall be
+no repining, no questioning: he will take the whole of his hour.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Had I said that, had I done this,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So might I gain, so might I miss.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Might she have loved me? just as well<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">She might have hated, who can tell!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">And here we are riding, she and I."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>He</i> is not the only man who has failed. All men strive&mdash;who succeeds?
+His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe&mdash;everywhere the
+<i>done</i> is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men dream beyond their
+powers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I hoped she would love me; here we ride!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[Pg 286]</a></span></p><p>No one gains all. Hand and brain are never equal; hearts, when they can
+greatly conceive, fail in the greatest courage; nothing we do is just
+what we dreamed it might be. We are hedged in everywhere by the fleshly
+screen. But <i>they</i> two ride, and he sees her bosom lift and fall.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. To
+the rest, then, their crowns! To the statesman, ten lines, perhaps,
+which contain the fruit of all his life; to a soldier, a flag stuck on a
+heap of bones&mdash;and as guerdon for each, a name scratched on the Abbey
+stones.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"My riding is better, by their leave!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even our artists! The poet says the thing, but we feel it. Not one of us
+can express it like him; but has he <i>had</i> it? When he dies, will he have
+been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have
+never turned a line?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>(Note the fine irony here. The poet shall sing the joy of riding; this
+man <i>rides</i>.)</p>
+
+<p>The great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to Art:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And that's your Venus, whence we turn<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To yonder girl that fords the burn!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not
+pity him. The musician fares even worse. After <i>his</i> life's labours,
+they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention,
+but <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[Pg 287]</a></span>fashions change so quickly in music&mdash;he is out-of-date. He gave his
+youth? Well&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have
+for which to strive? We must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss
+to die for! If <i>he</i> had this glory-garland round his soul, what other
+joy could he ever so dimly descry?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride."<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching
+pace. It shall be best as she decrees. She rejects him: he will not
+whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him&mdash;<i>she</i> shall
+not be wrong! He has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of
+her&mdash;and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. That moment he
+has, whole and perfect:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Who knows but the world may end to-night!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes; they ride on&mdash;the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompass them;
+they are together. His soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from
+her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great
+paradox&mdash;almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union,
+and so silent.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But is she <i>not</i> there? and, being there, does she not
+now <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[Pg 288]</a></span>seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from her?
+She <i>is</i> there&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And yet&mdash;she has not spoke so long!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what
+his trance is&mdash;can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it
+mean?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What if
+this <i>be</i> heaven&mdash;what if she has found, caught up like him, that she
+does love?</p>
+
+<p>Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's
+flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide&mdash;she with
+him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And heaven just prove that I and she<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious
+love-song&mdash;surpassed, I think and many others think, by none in the
+world&mdash;I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has
+rushed on him again from her twin-silence&mdash;can she be at one with him in
+all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the
+pity&mdash;and the pride?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The wrong that has been done to Browning by his
+too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he must
+be, for them, the teacher. But he is the <i>poet</i>! He "sings, riding's <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[Pg 289]</a></span>a
+joy"&mdash;and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the "obvious
+human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who made that
+phrase<a name="FNanchor_289-1_43" id="FNanchor_289-1_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_289-1_43" class="fnanchor">[289:1]</a>&mdash;which might almost be his protest against the
+transcendentalists.</p>
+
+<p>Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to
+meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon
+this stanza of <i>The Last Ride</i> is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys
+himself with the hope that the highest bliss <i>may</i> be the change from
+the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean
+anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean <i>it</i>? I declare that it
+means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and
+know) each reader, reading it&mdash;not "studying" it&mdash;accepts as its best
+meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced
+mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the
+hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the strange <i>Numpholeptos</i> we find, by implication, the heart of
+Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.
+Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of <i>Obiter Dicta</i>, "were those
+unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades,
+caught a hasty <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[Pg 290]</a></span>glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose
+pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."</p>
+
+<p>The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly
+cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate
+purity and complete experience of life."<a name="FNanchor_290-1_44" id="FNanchor_290-1_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_290-1_44" class="fnanchor">[290:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these
+impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth
+shafts of coloured light&mdash;crimson, purple, yellow; and along these
+shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel&mdash;coming back
+to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet,
+beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience;
+he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And
+she&mdash;forgives him, but not loves him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What means the sad slow silver smile above<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My clay but pity, pardon?&mdash;at the best<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But acquiescence that I take my rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Contented to be clay?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She "smiles him slow forgiveness"&mdash;nothing more; he is dismissed, must
+travel forth again. <i>This</i> time he may return, untinged by the ray which
+he is to traverse. She sends him, deliberately; he must break through
+the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her&mdash;but he is to come back
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[Pg 291]</a></span>unsmirched. So she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed.</p>
+
+<p>And patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone&mdash;until this day. This
+day his patience fails him, and he speaks. Once more he had come
+back&mdash;once more been "pardoned." But the pity was so gentle&mdash;like a
+moon-beam. He had almost hoped the smile would pass the "pallid moonbeam
+limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." If she could
+pass that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay
+from gold's own self; "for gold means love."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But no; the "sad slow
+silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence
+in his lesserness for <i>him</i>. <i>She</i> acquiesced not; she keeps her love
+for the "spirit-seven" before God's throne.<a name="FNanchor_291-1_45" id="FNanchor_291-1_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_291-1_45" class="fnanchor">[291:1]</a></p>
+
+<p>He then made one supreme appeal for</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love, the love sole and whole without alloy."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[Pg 292]</a></span></p><p>Vainly! Such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." Her calm regard was
+unchanged&mdash;nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply
+disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his
+kissing of her feet&mdash;he <i>did</i> go forth again. This time he might return,
+immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He knew he
+could not, but&mdash;he <i>might</i>! She promises that he can: should he not
+trust her?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And now, to-day, once more he is returned. Still she stands, still she
+listens, still she smiles! But he protests at last:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Surely I had your sanction when I faced,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whence I retrack my steps?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back
+deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again
+for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of
+that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly:
+she <i>had</i> ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and
+body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and
+frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"&mdash;just as he had been
+with crimson, purple!</p>
+
+<p>She willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[Pg 293]</a></span>He pleads once more
+her own permission&mdash;nay, command! And, as before, she shows</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Scarce recognition, no approval, some<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mistrust, more wonder at a man become<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Monstrous in garb, nay&mdash;flesh-disguised as well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through his adventure."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must
+share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one
+way for <i>man</i> to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I pass into your presence, I receive<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his
+penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved,
+the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the
+experiment&mdash;and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i10h">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No, I say:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No fresh adventure! No more seeking love<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At end of toil, and finding, calm above<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">My passion, the old statuesque regard,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The sad petrific smile!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard
+and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You very woman with the pert pretence<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To match the male achievement!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[Pg 294]</a></span></p><p><i>Who</i> could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough
+effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper";
+when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that
+womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the
+truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as
+by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the
+very muck that made it!</p>
+
+<p>But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The true slave's querulous outbreak!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but
+<i>this</i> time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to
+that cold sad sweet smile&mdash;which he obeys?</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a
+nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal
+of love, accepted conventionally." <i>How</i> impossible he has shown not
+only here but everywhere&mdash;<i>how</i> conventionally accepted. This is not
+woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak&mdash;the "true
+slave's" outbreak&mdash;we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If
+women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[Pg 295]</a></span>they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There
+must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to
+shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the
+smooth"&mdash;not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the
+marrings which have made it possible.</p>
+
+<p>But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He
+accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what
+is <i>true</i> in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of
+the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a
+she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man
+could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays&mdash;of
+all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could
+explore, and not return "absurd as frightful."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. He cannot. Experience
+is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"&mdash;the colours! The
+shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there, hearted." True,
+but this is not <i>experience</i>, and she shall not conceit herself into
+believing it to be. She shall not set up the "pert pretence to match the
+male achievement": she shall learn that men make women "easy victors,"
+when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's sake. One or the
+other she must choose: knowledge and the right to judge, or ignorance
+and the duty to refrain from judgment.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And yet&mdash;he goes again; <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[Pg 296]</a></span>he
+obeys the silver smile! For the "crimson-quest may deepen to a sunrise";
+he <i>may</i> come back and find her waiting, "sunlight and salvation,"
+because she understands at last; and both shall look for stains from
+those long shafts, and see none there.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Maybe, maybe: he goes&mdash;will
+come again one day; and <i>that</i> at last may prove itself the day when
+"men are pure, and women brave."</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We pass from the unearthly atmosphere of <i>Numpholeptos</i>&mdash;well-nigh the
+most abstract of all Browning's poems&mdash;to the vivid, astonishing realism
+of <i>Too Late</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is
+musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which
+has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his
+absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who
+married the other." He had been wont to "sit and look at his life." That
+life, until he met her, had rippled and run like a river. But he met her
+and loved her and lost her&mdash;and it was as if a great stone had been cast
+by a devil into his life's mid-current. The waves strove about it&mdash;the
+waves that had "come for their joy, and found this horrible stone
+full-tide."</p>
+
+<p>The stone thwarted God. But the lover has had two ways of thinking about
+it. Though the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[Pg 297]</a></span>waves, in all their strength and fullness, could not win
+past, a thread of water might escape and run through the
+"evening-country," safe, untormented, silent, until it reached the sea.
+This would be his tender, acquiescent brooding on all she is to him, and
+the hope that still they may be united at the last, though time shall
+then have stilled his passion.</p>
+
+<p>The second way was better!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Or else I would think, 'Perhaps some night<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">When new things happen, a meteor-ball<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">May slip through the sky in a line of light,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And earth breathe hard, and landmarks fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And my waves no longer champ nor chafe,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Since a stone will have rolled from its place: let be!'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For the husband might die, and he, still young and vigorous, might try
+again to win her.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. That was how he had been wont to "sit and look at
+his life."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But, Edith dead! No doubting more!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>All the dreams are over; all the brooding days have been lived in vain.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But, dead! All's done with: wait who may,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Watch and wear and wonder who will.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, my whole life that ends to-day!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Oh, my soul's sentence, sounding still,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">'The woman is dead that was none of his;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the man that was none of hers may go!'<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There's only the past left: worry that!"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[Pg 298]</a></span></p><p>All that he was or could have been, she should have had for a word, a
+"want put into a look." She had not given that look; now she can never
+give it&mdash;and perhaps she <i>does</i> want him. He feels that she does&mdash;a
+"pulse in his cheek that stabs and stops" assures him that she "needs
+help in her grave, and finds none near"&mdash;that from his heart, precisely
+<i>his</i>, she now at last wants warmth. And he can only send it&mdash;so!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. His
+acquiescence then had been his error.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I ought to have done more: once my speech,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And once your answer, and there, the end,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And Edith was henceforth out of reach!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Why, men do more to deserve a friend,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be rid of a foe, get rich, grow wise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor, folding their arms, stare fate in the face.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Why, better even have burst like a thief<br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>And borne you away to a rock for us two,</i><br /></span>
+<span class="i1"><i>In a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief</i>"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Well, <i>he</i> had not done this. But&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"What did the other do? You be judge!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Give him his six whole years: I grudge<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">None of the life with you, nay, loathe<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Myself that I grudged his start in advance<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of me who could overtake and pass.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But, as if he loved you! No, not he,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is
+and was alone in his worship. <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[Pg 299]</a></span>He knows even that such worship of her
+was among unaccountable things. That <i>he</i>, young, prosperous, sane, and
+free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and
+held it forth to <i>her</i>, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the
+glass!"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. For&mdash;and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place
+this passionate love-song by itself in the world&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The others? No head that was turned, no heart<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a
+friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to
+believe that the peace of singleness <i>was</i> peace, and not&mdash;what they
+were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth
+about her was simply that</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"On the whole, you were let alone, I think."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who
+acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Loved you and doved you&mdash;did not I laugh?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of poets?&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+But, after all, she <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[Pg 300]</a></span>had chosen him, before <i>this</i> lover: they had both
+been tried.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Tekel</i>, found wanting, set aside,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Till comfort come, and the last be bled:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He? He is tagging your epitaph."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And now sounds that cry of the girl of <i>In a Year</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"If it could only come over again!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She <i>must</i> have loved him best. If there had been time.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She would
+have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched
+the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart,
+to find that only verses could spurt from it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And late it was easy; late, you walked<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where a friend might meet you; Edith's name<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If I heard good news, you heard the same;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">When I woke, I knew that your breath escaped;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I could bide my time, keep alive, alert."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now she is dead: "no doubting more."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. But somehow he will get his good
+of it! He will keep alive&mdash;and long, she shall see; but not like the
+others; there shall be no turning aside, and he will begin at once as he
+means to end. Those others <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[Pg 301]</a></span>may go on with the world&mdash;get gold, get
+women, betray their wives and their husbands and their friends.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There are two who decline, a woman and I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And enjoy our death in the darkness here."<a name="FNanchor_301-1_46" id="FNanchor_301-1_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_301-1_46" class="fnanchor">[301:1]</a><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And he recurs to her cherished, her dwelt-on, adored defects. Only <i>he</i>
+could have loved her so, in despite of them. The most complex mood of
+lovers, this! Humility and pride are mingled; one knows not which is
+which&mdash;the pride of love, humility of self. Only so could the loved one
+have declined to our level; only so could our love acquire value in
+those eyes&mdash;and yet "the others" did not love so, the defects <i>were</i>
+valid: there should be some recognition: "<i>I</i> loved, <i>quand m&ecirc;me</i>!" Why,
+it was almost the defects that brought the thrill:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I liked that way you had with your curls,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Wound to a ball in a net behind:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl's,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And your mouth&mdash;there was never, to my mind,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[Pg 302]</a></span><span class="i0">Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And the dented chin, too&mdash;what a chin!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There were certain ways when you spoke, some words<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">That you know you never could pronounce:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You were thin, however; like a bird's<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your hand seemed&mdash;some would say, the pounce<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of a scaly-footed hawk&mdash;all but!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The world was right when it called you thin.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">But I turn my back on the world: I take<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your hand, and kneel, and lay to my lips.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Bid me live, Edith!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;and she shall be queen indeed, shall have high observance, courtship
+made perfect. He seems to see her stand there&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Warm too, and white too: would this wine<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Had washed all over that body of yours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p> .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. The wine of his life, that she would not take&mdash;but she shall take it
+now! He will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by
+drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. Edith needs
+help in her grave and finds none near&mdash;wants warmth from his heart? He
+sends it&mdash;so.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>Assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. She
+was the man's whole <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[Pg 303]</a></span>life, and she has died. Then he dies too, that he
+may live.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There are two who decline, a woman and I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And enjoy our death in the darkness here."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for
+intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul
+endures."</p>
+
+<p>This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does
+courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart
+has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the
+loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with
+it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart
+will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late&mdash;it calls from the
+grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For God above creates the love to reward the love."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_277-1_41" id="Footnote_277-1_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_277-1_41"><span class="label">[277:1]</span></a> He excepts, of course, all through this passage, <i>Any
+Wife to any Husband</i>&mdash;a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_285-1_42" id="Footnote_285-1_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_285-1_42"><span class="label">[285:1]</span></a> No line which Browning has written is more
+characteristic than this&mdash;nor more famous.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_289-1_43" id="Footnote_289-1_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_289-1_43"><span class="label">[289:1]</span></a> In <i>By the Fireside</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_290-1_44" id="Footnote_290-1_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_290-1_44"><span class="label">[290:1]</span></a> Arthur Symons, <i>Introduction to the Study of Browning</i>,
+p. 198.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_291-1_45" id="Footnote_291-1_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_291-1_45"><span class="label">[291:1]</span></a> Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of
+the Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion
+which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'
+are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common image."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.
+"I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify wisdom, or
+philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the, after all,
+sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that <i>Numpholeptos</i> is "an
+allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted conventionally
+as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or twice had
+occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to the fact
+that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity are best
+obtained by achievement. Still more concisely:
+"Innocence&mdash;sin&mdash;virtue"&mdash;in the Hegelian chord of experience.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_301-1_46" id="Footnote_301-1_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_301-1_46"><span class="label">[301:1]</span></a> Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most
+renowned lyrics:&mdash;
+</p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In crazy dances they're leaping:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We two in the grave lie well, lie well,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I in thine arms am sleeping.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">To Heaven or Hell they're hieing:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We two care nothing, we two will stay<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Together quietly lying."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[Pg 304]</a></span></p>
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<h3>THE WOMAN WON</h3>
+
+
+<p>Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than
+now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she
+be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it),
+because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's&mdash;woman has
+never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is <i>because</i> men feel so
+keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the
+real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it.
+Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if
+love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come
+to an end of it&mdash;and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.</p>
+
+<p>But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are
+accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said
+of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what
+Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[Pg 305]</a></span><span class="i3">"Room after room,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I hunt the house through<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">We inhabit together.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Next time, herself!&mdash;not the trouble behind her<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she
+does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious&mdash;or, if conscious, blind
+to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses,
+<i>for fun</i>, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows
+nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room!
+How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when
+she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. if
+the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; <i>she</i> did not produce it!
+For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very
+inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear
+her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there
+seem to be for him.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Yet the day wears,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And door succeeds door;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I try the fresh fortune&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[Pg 306]</a></span><span class="i0">Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But 'tis twilight, you see&mdash;with such suites to explore,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is
+not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms:
+it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does <i>that</i>
+house contain&mdash;where is <i>she</i>? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out
+as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek
+at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!</p>
+
+<p>She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a
+secret. For she never meant to be&mdash;she cannot feel that she <i>is</i>; and
+thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always
+elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he
+quickly answers:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Escape me?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Never&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Beloved!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While I am I, and you are you,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So long as the world contains us both,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Me the loving and you the loth,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While the one eludes, must the other pursue."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find
+her. And this, in its turn, scares <i>him</i>.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[Pg 307]</a></span><span class="i0">"My life is a fault at last, I fear:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It seems too much like a fate, indeed!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. They look at one
+another, and he takes heart again.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"But what if I fail of my purpose here?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">It is but to keep the nerves at strain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And, baffled, get up and begin again&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she <i>wants</i> him
+to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Look but once from your farthest bound<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At me so deep in the dust and dark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">No sooner the old hope goes to ground<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">I shape me&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Ever<br /></span>
+<span class="i3">Removed!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each
+other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and
+fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I
+have seemed to make her) <i>speak</i> <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[Pg 308]</a></span>in either of these poems; but the
+thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover
+can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of
+<i>Love in a Life</i> (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the
+same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear
+that no material house<a name="FNanchor_308-1_47" id="FNanchor_308-1_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_308-1_47" class="fnanchor">[308:1]</a> is meant? They are both inhabiting the
+<i>body</i>; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various
+points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere&mdash;on the curtain,
+the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through <i>her</i> house he
+cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes
+him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension;
+she does not desire to "escape" him.</p>
+
+<p>The old enigma that is no enigma&mdash;the sphinx with the answer to the
+riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might
+be taken for granted.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. So the lips may tremble, but the answer is kept
+back:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"While the one eludes must the other pursue."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for
+the desire of the man."</p>
+
+<p>In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at
+one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous;
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[Pg 309]</a></span>the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart
+shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind
+her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the
+last resort, on <i>her</i>.</p>
+
+<p>But in <i>Two in the Campagna</i> a different lover is to deal with. What he
+wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to
+forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be
+done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her&mdash;and he cannot
+tell her, for he does not himself fully know.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I wonder do you feel to-day<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As I have felt since, hand in hand,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We sat down on the grass, to stray<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In spirit better through the land,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">This morn of Rome and May?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks
+and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No; it
+escapes, escapes.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Help me to hold it! First it left<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The yellowing fennel.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it&mdash;and the
+thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five
+green beetles are groping&mdash;but not there either <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[Pg 310]</a></span>does it rest .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. it is
+all about him: entangling, eluding:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Everywhere on the grassy slope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I traced it. Hold it fast!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The grassy slope may be the secret! That infinity of passion and
+peace&mdash;the Roman Campagna:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The champaign with its endless fleece<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Of feathery grasses everywhere!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Silence and passion, joy and peace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">An everlasting wash of air&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Rome's ghost since her decease."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And think of all that that plain even now stands for:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Such life here, through such lengths of hours,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such miracles performed in play,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Such primal naked forms of flowers,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Such letting nature have her way<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">While heaven looks from its towers!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot
+<i>they</i> "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"How say you? Let us, O my dove,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Let us be unashamed of soul,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As earth lies bare to heaven above!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">How is it under our control<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To love or not to love?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[Pg 311]</a></span></p><p>But always they stop short of one another. That is the dread mystery:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I would that you were all to me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">You that are just so much, no more.<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where does the fault lie? What the core<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">O' the wound, since wound must be?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He longs to yield his will, his whole being&mdash;to see with her eyes, set
+his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part
+his&mdash;<i>be</i> her.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"No. I yearn upward, touch you close,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Catch your soul's warmth&mdash;I pluck the rose<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And love it more than tongue can speak&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Then the good minute goes."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Goes&mdash;with such swiftness! Already he is "far out of it." And shall this
+never be different?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i5">".&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Must I go<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Onward, whenever light winds blow?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He must indeed, for already he is "off again":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Just when I seemed about to learn!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is
+lost again:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"The old trick! Only I discern&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Infinite passion, and the pain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of finite hearts that yearn."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[Pg 312]</a></span></p><p><i>No</i> contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are
+finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as
+they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the
+sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again&mdash;again they
+shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"</p>
+
+<p>For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna
+itself says that&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Rome's ghost since her decease."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms,
+they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old.
+<i>New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old</i>; and all the lovers have
+discerned, like him,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Infinite passion, and the pain<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of finite hearts that yearn."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the
+sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I <i>wonder</i> do you feel to-day<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">As I have felt&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>In the enchanting <i>Lovers' Quarrel</i> we find a less metaphysical pair
+than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken
+her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[Pg 313]</a></span>mystery of
+her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly
+and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have
+frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly
+he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them
+both at the same moment&mdash;games out of straws of their own devising;
+drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Free on each other's flaws,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">How we chattered like two church daws!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And then the <i>Times</i> would come in&mdash;and the Emperor has married his
+Mlle. de Montijo!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"There they sit ermine-stoled,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And she powders her hair with gold."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Or a travel-book arrives from the library&mdash;and the two heads are close
+together over the pictures.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Fancy the Pampas' sheen!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Miles and miles of gold and green<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Where the sunflowers blow<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">In a solid glow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And to break now and then the screen&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Black neck and eyeballs keen,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Up a wild horse leaps between!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. No picture in the book like that&mdash;what a genius he is! The book is
+pushed away; and there lies the table bare:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Try, will our table turn?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lay your hands there light, and yearn<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[Pg 314]</a></span><span class="i1">Till the yearning slips<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Thro' the finger-tips<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a fire which a few discern,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And a very few feel burn,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the rest, they may live and learn!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Then we would up and pace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For a change, about the place,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Each with arm o'er neck:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Tis our quarter-deck,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">We are seamen in woeful case.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Help in the ocean-space!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or, if no help, we'll embrace."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in
+that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing
+properly the parts:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"See how she looks now, dressed<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In a sledging-cap and vest!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">'Tis a huge fur cloak&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Like a reindeer's zoke<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Falls the lappet along the breast:<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Sleeves for her arms to rest,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Or to hang, as my Love likes best."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Now it is <i>his</i> turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the Spanish
+ladies can"&mdash;but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork
+moustache, and she "turns into such a man!"&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>All this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth
+and put it to sleep. Snow-time is love-time&mdash;for hearts can then show
+all:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[Pg 315]</a></span><span class="i0">"How is earth to know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?"<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Three months ago&mdash;and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! The
+March sun feels like May. He looks out upon it:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"All is blue again<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">After last night's rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Only, my Love's away!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I'd as lief that the blue were grey."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Yes&mdash;she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not
+take two to do that wretched deed, <i>she</i> has quarrelled. It was some
+little thing that he said&mdash;neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor
+taunt:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And the friends were friend and foe!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.</p>
+
+<p>One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was
+<i>not</i> so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless!
+This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour&mdash;that much is
+clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What <i>had</i> he said?
+Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting
+of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice
+can&mdash;for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or
+the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[Pg 316]</a></span>too-little.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly, she
+had gone, and still is gone&mdash;and he sits marvelling. Three months! Is
+she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a
+word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been <i>one</i> person!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Me, do you leave aghast<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">With the memories We amassed?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Just for "a moment's spite."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. She ought to have understood.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Love, if you knew the light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That your soul casts in my sight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">How I look to you<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">For the pure and true,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the beauteous and the right&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But so had she looked to <i>him</i>, and he had shown her "a moment's
+spite."&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this
+against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever
+happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred
+by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear.
+But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is
+different with love.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Wrong in the one thing rare&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, it is hard to bear!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be
+dancing down the dell,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Each with a tale to tell,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Could my Love but attend as well."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317">[Pg 317]</a></span></p><p>But as she cannot, he will not.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Only, things will get lovelier every
+day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand&mdash;the spring,
+when the almond-blossom blows.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"We shall have the word<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">In a minor third<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is none but the cuckoo knows:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Heaps of the guelder rose!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I must bear with it, I suppose."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back.
+Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as
+spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there,
+and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the
+heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is
+now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Heart, shall we live or die?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">The rest .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. settle by-and-bye!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow,
+the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Not to our ingle, though,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where we loved each the other so!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring,
+when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to
+love&mdash;and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318">[Pg 318]</a></span>and that guelder-rose
+which he will have to bear with .&nbsp;.&nbsp;.</p>
+
+<p>But, after all, it <i>is</i> November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his;
+she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were
+winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him <i>as before</i>" (thus we
+perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her
+before with that word which was <i>not</i> so many things!)&mdash;and what else is
+it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In
+March, too, there are storms&mdash;here is one beginning now, at noon, which
+shows that it will last.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Not yet, then, the too lovely spring!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"It is twelve o'clock:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I shall hear her knock<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the worst of a storm's uproar:<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">I shall pull her through the door,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I shall have her for evermore!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. I think she came back. She would want to see how well he understood
+the spring&mdash;he who could make that picture of the Pampas' sheen and the
+wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he not "say
+things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere <i>Times</i>
+news? And it <i>is</i> impossible to bear with the guelder-rose&mdash;the
+guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will
+efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the
+worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door!</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319">[Pg 319]</a></span></p><p>In <i>The Lost Mistress</i> it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We
+are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her&mdash;he who so
+tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see
+how much he suffers&mdash;he still can say the "little things" she liked.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"All's over, then: does truth sound bitter<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">As one at first believes?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">About your cottage eaves!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">I noticed that, to-day;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">One day more breaks them open fully<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">&mdash;You know the red turns grey."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">May I take your hand in mine?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Mere friends are we&mdash;well, friends the merest<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Keep much that I resign."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. <i>He</i> resigns.
+But the friends do not know what "he" knew.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For each glance of the eye so bright and black<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though I keep with heart's endeavour&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Though it stay in my soul for ever&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. Is this like a friend? But he accepts her bidding&mdash;very nearly.
+There are some things, <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[Pg 320]</a></span>perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not
+fear&mdash;he will try.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Yet I will but say what mere friends say,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or only a thought stronger;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I will hold your hand but as long as all may,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Or so very little longer!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Again we have the typical Browning lover, who will not reproach nor
+scorn nor whine. But I think that this one had perhaps a little excess
+of whimsical humour. She would herself have needed a good deal of such
+humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "<i>Does truth sound
+bitter, as one at first believes?</i>" Somewhat puzzling to her, it may be,
+that very philosophical reflection!&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. This has been called a noble,
+tender, an heroic, song of loss. For me there lurks a smile in it. I do
+not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather I a little
+wonder how she could have sent him away. But is it certain that she will
+not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? He means to hold her
+hand a little longer than the others do!</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p><i>The Worst of It</i> is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has
+left him for a lover. He cares for nothing else in the world; his whole
+heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her.
+But there is no way, for him. And the "worst of it" is that all has
+happened <i>through</i> him. She had given him herself, she had bound her
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[Pg 321]</a></span>soul by the "vows that damn"&mdash;and then had found that she must break
+them. And he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down!</p>
+
+<p>But <i>she</i>&mdash;the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of
+white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like
+myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! Is there to be no
+heaven for her&mdash;no crown for that brow? Shall other women be sainted,
+and not she, graced here beyond all saints?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Hardly! That must be understood!<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">The earth is your place of penance, then."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>But even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. If it
+had only been he that was false, not she! <i>He</i> could have borne all
+easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little
+difference. And he is nothing, while she is all.</p>
+
+<p>Too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against
+the woman. Instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that
+which he makes&mdash;though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not
+catch.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"And I to have tempted you"&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I to have tempted you! I, who tired<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[Pg 322]</a></span><span class="i0">I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And you meant to have hated and despised&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the
+beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and
+assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender,
+generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as
+some old writer called <i>anger</i>. All these wonderful and subtle reasons
+for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that
+awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even
+then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. all this is noble enough
+to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth is that
+such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer&mdash;almost they might be
+called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing stanzas of
+<i>The Worst of It</i>, and feel that no one should be doomed to suffer such
+forgiveness. What chance had <i>her</i> soul? At every turn it found itself
+forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all eternity.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I knew you once; but in Paradise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and
+passionate, was never given a <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[Pg 323]</a></span>chance, in this world, to be "placed" at
+all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that
+even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already
+that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of
+Judgment. And he <i>is</i> so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a
+Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous&mdash;perfectly right.&nbsp;.&nbsp;.&nbsp;. And
+sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious
+brow,&mdash;sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue,
+we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of
+shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We take our own method, the devil and I,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And the best we wish to what lives, is&mdash;death."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p><i>She</i> is better off; she has committed a fault and has done .&nbsp;.&nbsp;. now she
+can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes on
+to reflect&mdash;most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured
+too long:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"[You] have done no evil and want no aid,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Will live the old life out and chance the new.<br /></span>
+<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[Pg 324]</a></span><span class="i0">And your sentence is written all the same,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And I can do nothing&mdash;pray, perhaps:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But somehow the word pursues its game&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If I pray, if I curse&mdash;for better or worse:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Dear, I look from my hiding-place.<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Be happy! Add but the other grace,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I knew you once: but in Paradise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel,
+do we not? that <i>now</i> she is having her first opportunity to be both
+happy and good&mdash;free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband.
+And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost
+redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to
+woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many
+of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of
+the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in
+man. But not in <i>James Lee's Wife</i> is the top-note of magnanimity more
+strained than in <i>The Worst of It</i>. Moral gymnastics should not be
+practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than
+Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his
+warm, wise heart&mdash;too often he fell to the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[Pg 325]</a></span>lure of "situation," and
+forgot the truth. "A man and woman <i>might</i> feel so," he sometimes seems
+to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so
+felt."</p>
+
+<p>And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women&mdash;the worst of it. But
+oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a
+reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust
+and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great
+Epilogue:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Greet the unseen with a cheer."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+<h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_308-1_47" id="Footnote_308-1_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_308-1_47"><span class="label">[308:1]</span></a> Compare this passage with one in a letter to E. B. B.:
+"In this House of Life, where I go, you go&mdash;when I ascend, you run
+before&mdash;when I descend, it is after you."</p></div>
+
+<hr style="width: 90%;" />
+
+
+<p class="sectctr">THE END</p>
+
+
+<p class="sectctr">
+Printed by <span class="smcap">Ballantyne, Hanson &amp; Co.</span><br />
+at Paul's Work, Edinburgh<br />
+</p>
+
+
+<div class="notebox">
+<h2>Transcriber's Notes:</h2>
+
+
+<p>This text uses a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has
+been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem.
+They are indicated here by five asterisks:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i4">*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;*<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The number of periods in ellipses match the original.</p>
+
+<p>Thought breaks in the text are indicated by the following:</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The following words appear in the original with and without hyphens:</p>
+
+<p class="blockquot">commonplace/common-place<br />
+     disgrace/dis-grace<br />
+     moonbeam/moon-beam<br />
+     wellnigh/well-nigh</p>
+
+<p>Pages 2, 162, 164, 196, 198, 244, 274, and 276 are blank.  Those page
+numbers are not included.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Browning's Heroines
+
+Author: Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
+Illustrator: Maxwell Armfield
+
+Release Date: April 28, 2007 [EBook #21247]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BROWNING'S HEROINES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Ted Garvin, Michael Zeug, Lisa Reigel, and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[FRONTISPIECE: Pippa]
+
+
+
+
+BROWNING'S
+HEROINES
+
+
+BY ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE
+WITH FRONTISPIECE & DECORATIONS
+BY MAXWELL ARMFIELD
+
+
+LONDON
+CHATTO & WINDUS
+1913
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+When this book was projected, some one asked, "What is there to say
+about Browning's heroines beyond what he said himself?"--and the
+question, though it could not stay me, did chill momentarily my primal
+ardour. Soon, however, the restorative answer presented itself. "If
+there were nothing to say about Browning's heroines beyond what he said
+himself, it would be a bad mark against him." For to _suggest_--to open
+magic casements--surely is the office of our artists in every sort:
+thus, for them to say all that there is to say about anything is to show
+the casement stuck fast, as it were, and themselves battering somewhat
+desperately to open it. Saying the things "about" is the other people's
+function. It is as if we suddenly saw a princess come out upon her
+castle-walls, and hymned that fair emergence, which to herself is
+nothing.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Browning, I think, is "coming back," as stars come back. There has been
+the period of obscuration. Seventeen years ago, when the _Yellow Book_
+and the _National Observer_ were contending for _les jeunes_, Browning
+was, in the more "precious" coterie, king of modern poets. I can
+remember the editor of that golden Quarterly reading, declaiming,
+quoting, almost breathing, Browning! It was from Henry Harland that this
+reader learnt to read _The Ring and the Book_: "Leave out the lawyers
+and the Tertium Quid, and all after Guido until the Envoi." It was Henry
+Harland who would answer, if one asked him what he was thinking of:
+
+     "And thinking too--oh, thinking, if you like,
+     How utterly dissociated was I. . . ."
+
+--regardless of all aptitude in the allusion, making it simply because
+it "burned up in his brain," just as days "struck fierce 'mid many a day
+struck calm" were always _his_ days of excitement. . . . A hundred
+Browning verses sing themselves around my memories of the flat in
+Cromwell Road.
+
+_Misconceptions_ was swung forth with gesture that figured swaying
+branches:
+
+     "This is a spray the bird clung to. . . ."
+
+You were to notice how the rhythms bent and tossed like boughs in that
+first stanza--and to notice, also, how regrettable the second stanza
+was. Nor shall I easily let slip the memory of _Apparent Failure_, thus
+recited. He would begin at the second verse, the "Doric little Morgue"
+verse. You were not to miss the great "phrase" in
+
+     "The three men who did most abhor
+     Their lives in Paris yesterday. . . ."
+
+--but you were to feel, scarce less keenly, the dire descent to bathos
+in "So killed themselves." It was almost the show-example, he would tell
+you, of Browning's chief defect--over-statement.
+
+     "How did it happen, my poor boy?
+       You wanted to be Bonaparte,
+     And have the Tuileries for toy,
+       And could not, so it broke your heart. . . ."
+
+How compassionately he would give that forth! "A screen of glass, you're
+thankful for"; "Be quiet, and unclench your fist"; "Poor men God made,
+and all for this!"--the phrases (how alert we were for the "phrase" in
+those days) would fall grave and vibrant from the voice with its subtle
+foreign colouring: you could always infuriate "H. H." by telling him he
+had a foreign accent.
+
+Those were Browning days; and now these are, or soon shall be. Two or
+three years since, to quote him was, in the opinion of a _Standard_
+reviewer, to write yourself down a back-number, as they say. I preserve
+the cutting which damns with faint praise some thus antiquated short
+stories of 1910. Browning and Wagner were so obsolete! . . . How young
+that critic must have been--so young that he had never seen a star
+return. Quite differently they come back--or is it quite the same? Soon
+we shall be able to judge, for this star is returning, and--oh
+wonder!--is trailing clouds of glory of the very newest cut. The stars
+always do that, this watcher fancies, and certainly Browning, like the
+Jub-jub, was ages ahead of the fashion. His passport for to-day is dated
+up to the very hour--for though he could be so many other things
+besides, one of his achievements, for us, will prove to have been that
+he could be so "ugly." _That_ would not have been reckoned among his
+glories in the Yellow Book-room; but the wheel shall come full
+circle--we shall be saying all this, one day, the other way round. For,
+as Browning consoles, encourages, and warns us by showing in
+_Fifine_,[x:1] each age believes--and should believe--that to it alone
+the secret of true art has been whispered.
+
+                                               ETHEL COLBURN MAYNE.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[x:1] I write far from my books, but the passage will be easily found or
+recalled.
+
+
+11 HOLLAND ROAD,
+KENSINGTON, W.
+
+
+[Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+PART I
+
+GIRLHOOD
+
+                                                        PAGE
+INTRODUCTORY                                               3
+
+  I. THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"                          15
+
+ II. PIPPA PASSES
+        I. Dawn: Pippa                                    23
+       II. Morning: Ottima                                36
+      III. Noon: Phene                                    51
+       IV. Evening; Night: The Ending of the Day          67
+
+III. MILDRED TRESHAM                                      81
+
+ IV. BALAUSTION                                           93
+
+  V. POMPILIA                                            122
+
+
+PART II
+
+THE GREAT LADY
+
+"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"       165
+
+
+PART III
+
+THE LOVER
+
+  I. LOVERS MEETING                                      199
+
+ II. TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
+        I. The Lady in "The Glove"                       215
+       II. Dis Aliter Visum; or, Le Byron De Nos Jours   224
+      III. The Laboratory                                233
+       IV. In a Year                                     237
+
+
+PART IV
+
+THE WIFE
+
+  I. A WOMAN'S LAST WORD                                 245
+
+ II. JAMES LEE'S WIFE                                    250
+        I. She Speaks at the Window                      254
+       II. By the Fireside                               256
+      III. In the Doorway                                257
+       IV. Along the Beach                               258
+        V. On the Cliff                                  261
+       VI. Reading a Book, under the Cliff               262
+      VII. Among the Rocks                               265
+     VIII. Beside the Drawing-board                      268
+       IX. On Deck                                       271
+
+
+PART V
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
+
+  I. THE WOMAN UNWON                                     277
+
+ II. THE WOMAN WON                                       304
+
+
+
+
+PART I
+
+[Illustration: GIRLHOOD]
+
+
+
+
+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 _precis_--
+
+     "Whither went the lovely hoyden?
+       Disappeared in blessed 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-pares_. 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-pares_," 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 mediaeval 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 mediaeval turrets.--BERDOE, _Browning
+Cyclopaedia_, 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 _mievre_ 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. "Mediaeval" 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 Cyclopaedia._
+
+
+
+
+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 paean 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: "Petale, Phullis, Charope, 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 . . . Petale, Phullis, Charope, 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 Piraeus, 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
+Piraeus--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 AEgos Potamos was fought and
+lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's
+first words were, "Down with the Piraeus! 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 Piraeus 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 Piraeus 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 vecu 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."
+
+
+
+
+PART II
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT LADY]
+
+
+
+
+THE GREAT LADY
+
+"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"
+
+
+For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the
+perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious
+than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things
+adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning,
+even a "lady" could be a woman--and remain a woman, even though she be
+turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted
+from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our
+poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but
+that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And
+especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material
+cares prevail not--where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers
+"not for bread alone."
+
+     "Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red--
+     On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
+     O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his
+         head?"
+
+He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul
+existed. True, that in _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[166:1] the soul _is_
+questioned:
+
+     "Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice
+         earned.
+     The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."
+
+But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but
+those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire
+social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in
+Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite
+the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile
+"simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature,
+since even the animals and plants we cultivate into classes! The sadness
+is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted,
+brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.
+
+     "Well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and
+         afford
+     --She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword,
+     While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."
+
+The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the
+listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so
+plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions:
+"Must we die?"--
+
+     "Those commiserating sevenths--'Life might last! we can but try!'"
+
+The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then
+come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must
+be answered to."
+
+     "So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!
+     'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!
+     I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'
+     Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by
+         one,
+     Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well
+         undone,
+     Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."
+
+. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that
+_he_, learned and wise, shall not pass away like these:
+
+                   ". . . You know physics, something of geology,
+     Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree;
+     Butterflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be!
+     As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop,
+     Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the
+         crop:
+     What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to
+         stop?" . . .
+
+Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What,
+"creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since
+he is neither deaf nor blind:
+
+     "But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy
+         mind! . . .
+     'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
+     Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold
+     Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
+
+After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not _only_ the wise
+men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to
+that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this
+pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty,
+riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall
+kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and
+once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in
+true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible
+to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of _In a
+Balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble,
+yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all,
+in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is
+given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my
+feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her
+first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically;
+then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely
+back to earth--in _My Last Duchess_ and _The Flight of the Duchess_
+respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree,
+in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have
+the lady dead.
+
+First, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"
+of a dead Italian girl.
+
+     "That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
+     Looking as if she were alive. I call
+     That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
+     Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
+     Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
+     Fra Pandolf by design: for never read
+     Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
+     The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
+     But to myself they turned (since none puts by
+     The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
+     And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
+     How such a glance came there; so, not the first
+     Are you to turn and ask thus."
+
+The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"
+is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy
+from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a
+connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier
+rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that
+nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless
+art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even
+now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed
+her--nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that
+_he_ could have been wrong. This Duchess--it would have been idle to
+"make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the
+exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other
+lesser being) without stooping--"and I choose never to stoop." Her error
+had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which
+Fra Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it
+was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her
+cheek? It had _not_ been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Fra
+Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist--may have said,
+for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the
+"faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of
+paint to reproduce.
+
+                                      ". . . Such stuff
+     Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
+     For calling up that spot of joy."
+
+As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to
+the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement:
+
+                               ". . . She had
+     A heart--how shall I say?--too soon made glad,
+     Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
+     She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."
+
+Even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and
+accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly
+conveyed:
+
+     "Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast,
+     The dropping of the daylight in the west,
+     The bough of cherries some officious fool
+     Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
+     She rode with round the terrace--all and each
+     Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
+     Or blush, at least. . . ."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+We, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to
+the Duke, looking at the Duchess. We can see the quivering, glad, tender
+creature as though we also were at gaze on Fra Pandolf's picture. . . .
+I call _this_ piece a wonder, now! Scarce one of the monologues is so
+packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most
+"simple"--even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they
+are, as Mr. Arthur Symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." Two lives
+are summed up in fifty-six lines. First, the ghastly Duke's; then,
+hers--but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one. . . . Everything
+that came to her was transmuted into her own dearness--even his favour
+at her breast. We can figure to ourselves the giving of that
+"favour"--the high proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude:
+Sir Willoughby Patterne by intelligent anticipation. But then, though
+the approving speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with
+his bough of cherries--and speech and blush were given again! Absurder
+still, the spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule . . .
+
+                         "Who'd stoop to blame
+     This sort of trifling?"
+
+Even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of
+ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's
+gift"--even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted"
+him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not
+have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made
+excuse) . . . even so (this must be impressed upon the envoy), it would
+have meant some stooping, and the Duke "chooses never to stoop."
+
+Still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the
+next Duchess! . . . More and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued
+upon that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is
+sounding in his ear--
+
+              ". . . Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt,
+     Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
+     Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
+     Then all smiles stopped together."
+
+There falls a curious, throbbing silence. The envoy still sits gazing.
+There she stands, _looking as if she were alive_. . . . And almost he
+starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a
+meaning--
+
+                                ". . . There she stands
+     As if alive"
+
+--the picture is a wonder!
+
+Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had
+just now sounded: "_Then all smiles stopped together_"?
+
+She stands there--smiling . . . But the Duke grows weary of this pause
+before Fra Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders.
+Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily
+in silence, taken: the next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in
+the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:
+
+     "Will't please you rise? We'll meet
+     The company below, then."
+
+The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere,
+as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his
+master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair
+daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . But in a hot
+resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such
+proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . .
+Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the
+due deference:
+
+                         ". . . Nay, we'll go
+     Together down, sir,"
+
+--and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by _him_) the
+envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor
+has no eyes for "wonders" now--he has seen the wonder, has heard the
+horror. . . . His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can
+pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them,
+however, must be pointed out:
+
+                   ". . . Notice Neptune, though,
+     Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
+     Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."
+
+. . . Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands,
+or _was_, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not
+where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by
+flame; has been snatched from _her_ Duke, and borne away to joy and
+love--by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that
+came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved
+herself.
+
+The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller
+whom he calls his friend.
+
+     "What a thing friendship is, world without end!"
+
+It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess
+all were young--if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up
+at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had
+been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and
+died there,
+
+     "At next year's end, in a velvet suit . . .
+     Petticoated like a herald,
+     In a chamber next to an ante-room
+     Where he breathed the breath of page and groom,
+     What he called stink, and they perfume."
+
+The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the boy to Paris, where she
+belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So
+the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were
+railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years
+were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."
+
+     "And he came back the pertest little ape
+     That ever affronted human shape;
+     Full of his travel, struck at himself.
+     You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways?
+     --Not he!"
+
+--for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue,
+and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one
+good thing left in these evil days:
+
+     "So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it,
+     This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."
+
+It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages
+were revived:
+
+     "The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."
+
+The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its
+origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs
+and length, all speed, no strength:
+
+     "They should have set him on red Berold,
+     Mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . .
+     With the red eye slow consuming in fire,
+     And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"
+
+Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He
+preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty
+Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" . . . anything in
+the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.
+
+     "Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard:
+     And out of a convent, at the word,
+     Came the lady in time of spring.
+     --Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"
+
+Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad
+in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:
+
+     "And so we saw the lady arrive;
+     My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger!
+     She was the smallest lady alive,
+     Made in a piece of Nature's madness,
+     Too small, almost, for the life and gladness
+     That over-filled her."
+
+She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle,
+where the Duke awaited her.
+
+     "Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead,
+     Straight at the castle, that's best indeed
+     To look at from outside the walls"
+
+--and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and
+thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of
+gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who
+rode on her other hand, the name of every bird that flew past: "Was
+that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"
+
+Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess--but
+she _is_ the same!), the little lady rode forward:
+
+     "When suddenly appeared the Duke."
+
+She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the
+Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather
+aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick
+tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the
+background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky
+sullied by a chill wind,
+
+     "The lady's face stopped its play,
+     As if her first hair had grown grey;
+     For such things must begin some one day."
+
+But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if
+she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad
+in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the
+brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for
+a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman--and this huntsman, who has _had_ a
+beloved wife, knows what he is saying.
+
+     "She was active, stirring, all fire--
+     Could not rest, could not tire--
+     To a stone she might have given life! . . .
+     And here was plenty to be done,
+     And she that could do it, great or small,
+     She was to do nothing at all."
+
+For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted
+a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and
+out of it:
+
+     "To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen
+     At the proper place, in the proper minute,
+     And die away the life between."
+
+The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian
+girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing
+enough (the old huntsman remembers)--but for the grief that followed
+after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would
+find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a
+fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But
+"the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be
+contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly _make_ it.
+Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic,
+for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose
+to stoop. _He_ would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded
+applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's
+claws."
+
+     "So the little lady grew silent and thin,
+     Paling and ever paling."
+
+_Then all smiles stopped together_ . . . And the Duke, perceiving, said
+to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way
+to deal with it.
+
+Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a
+little more than he can stand--but, unlike the envoy, he can express
+himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes
+on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many
+a year,
+
+     "And the Duke's self . . . you shall hear."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+     "Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning,
+     When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning,
+     A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"
+
+it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season
+(he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"),
+found that a hunting party was indicated:
+
+     "Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"
+
+Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was
+properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron
+saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,
+
+     "And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"
+
+But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and
+jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's
+part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly
+announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:
+
+     "When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege,
+     Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet,
+     And with water to wash the hands of her liege
+     In a clean ewer with a fair toweling,
+     Let her preside at the disemboweling."
+
+All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even
+the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed--and only
+then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to
+his lady.
+
+And the little Duchess--paler and paler every day--said she would not
+go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their
+long lashes, as if too weary even for _him_ to light them; and she duly
+acknowledged his forethought for her,
+
+     "But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught,
+     Of the weight by day and the watch by night,
+     And much wrong now that used to be right;"
+
+and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."
+
+But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted:
+it was hardly the time . . .
+
+The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room,
+because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside
+on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the
+casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep
+through also.
+
+Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a
+smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother
+to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it
+all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her
+whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture,
+passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin--at
+any rate, he showed a very stiff back.
+
+However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable--fog
+that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect
+sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the
+woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the
+courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with
+the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the
+Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes--presents for which an
+equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.
+
+And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with
+the earth, the ore, the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can
+baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a
+swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can
+do with sand!
+
+     "Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear,
+     Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear,
+     As if in pure water you dropped and let die
+     A bruised black-blooded mulberry."
+
+And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads
+distinct inside."
+
+These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the
+castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they
+reached the fosse, all stopped but one:
+
+     "The oldest Gipsy then above ground."
+
+This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew
+her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit--yet
+here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no
+use now but to gather brine."
+
+She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse
+reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual
+acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her;
+in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level
+whine," that as well as to bring the presents, she had come to pay her
+duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an
+idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face.
+Supposing he set _this_ old woman to teach her, as the other had failed?
+What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his
+fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone?
+He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was
+approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The
+huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude
+of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth
+tightened, her brow brightened--it was as if she were promising to give
+the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse--and
+then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower,"
+that she might wile away an hour for her:
+
+     "Whose mind and body craved exertion,
+     And yet shrank from all better diversion."
+
+And then the Duke rode off.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins
+what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can
+read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can
+simply accept and understand it--leaving the rest to the
+"Browningites," of whom Browning declared that _he_ was not.
+
+The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him--a
+little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke--saw
+something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure
+that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She
+looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily,
+no stooping nor hobbling--above all, no cringing! She was wholly
+changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had
+extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed
+edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we
+may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen.
+But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first
+he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but
+brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from
+their places--as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . He accepted
+all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and
+took the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.
+
+     "And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one,
+     For since last night, by the same token,
+     Not a single word had the lady spoken."
+
+The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the
+weather."
+
+Jacynth never could tell him afterwards _how_ she came to fall soundly
+asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the
+whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across
+the open country--for in those days he had a falcon eye--when, all in a
+moment, his ear was arrested by
+
+     "Was it singing, or was it saying,
+     Or a strange musical instrument playing?"
+
+It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the
+lattice, pulled the curtain, and--first--saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep
+along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of
+the room, on the seat of state,
+
+     "Was a queen--the Gipsy woman late!"
+
+She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat
+between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set
+on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old
+woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the
+lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining.
+She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion--and
+the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the
+rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's
+face.
+
+     "For it was life her eyes were drinking . . .
+     Life's pure fire, received without shrinking,
+     Into the heart and breast whose heaving
+     Told you no single drop they were leaving."
+
+The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose
+over each shoulder,
+
+     "And the very tresses shared in the pleasure,
+     Moving to the mystic measure,
+     Bounding as the bosom bounded."
+
+He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all
+at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:
+
+     "And I kept time to the wondrous chime,
+     Making out words and prose and rhyme,
+     Till it seemed that the music furled
+     Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped
+     From under the words it first had propped."
+
+He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"--and
+the Gipsy said:
+
+     "And so at last we find my tribe,
+     And so I set thee in the midst . . .
+     I trace them the vein and the other vein
+     That meet on thy brow and part again,
+     Making our rapid mystic mark;
+     And I bid my people prove and probe
+     Each eye's profound and glorious globe
+     Till they detect the kindred spark
+     In those depths so dear and dark . . .
+     And on that round young cheek of thine
+     I make them recognise the tinge . . .
+     For so I prove thee, to one and all,
+     Fit, when my people ope their breast,
+     To see the sign, and hear the call,
+     And take the vow, and stand the test
+     Which adds one more child to the rest--
+     When the breast is bare and the arms are wide,
+     And the world is left outside."
+
+There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady
+if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of
+the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:
+
+     "So, trial after trial past,
+     Wilt thou fall at the very last
+     Breathless, half in trance
+     With the thrill of the great deliverance,
+     Into our arms for evermore;
+     And thou shalt know, those arms once curled
+     About thee, what we knew before,
+     _How love is the only good in the world_.
+     Henceforth be loved as heart can love,
+     Or brain devise, or hand approve!
+     Stand up, look below,
+     It is our life at thy feet we throw
+     To step with into light and joy;
+     Not a power of life but we employ
+     To satisfy thy nature's want."
+
+The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and
+understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will
+do more than the world has done"--and the tribe will at least approach
+that end with this beloved woman. She says not _how_--whether by one
+man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by _her_ giving "her
+wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . .
+
+     "I foresee and I could foretell
+     Thy future portion, sure and well;
+     But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
+     Let them say what thou shalt do!"
+
+But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with
+their blame, their praise:
+
+     "Our shame to feel, our pride to show,
+     Glad, angry--but indifferent, no!"
+
+And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old
+age--will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and
+reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul"
+. . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be
+like the ending of a dream, when
+
+     "Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
+     Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."
+
+With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music
+began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the
+charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised
+afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the
+ground, and hurried round to the portal. . . . In another minute he
+would have entered:
+
+     "When the door opened, and more than mortal
+     Stood, with a face where to my mind centred
+     All beauties I ever saw or shall see,
+     The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy.
+     She was so different, happy and beautiful,
+     I felt at once that all was best" . . .
+
+And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was,
+in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her,
+"the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers
+to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she
+wanted--like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild
+creature's bidding was. . . . He went before her to the stable; she
+followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last--sunk back into her
+former self,
+
+     "Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."
+
+He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the
+castle--the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile
+from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and
+knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began
+to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")--not meaning to be
+obtrusive--she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of
+the head. . . . Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy
+behind her--and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready
+whenever God should please that she needed him. . . . And she looked
+down
+
+     "With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"
+
+and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! If it
+had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone
+home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself--but it was not a
+purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each
+other in a convent:
+
+     "This, see, which at my breast I wear,
+     Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment)
+     And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment.
+     And then--and then--to cut short--this is idle,
+     These are feelings it is not good to foster.
+     I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle,
+     And the palfrey bounded--and so we lost her."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to
+need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we
+like that _saves_ us; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that
+crushes love.
+
+     "Love is the only good in the world."
+
+And the love (though it _may_ be) _need_ not be the love of man for
+woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which
+made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home,
+and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the
+name of every bird--the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too
+easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she
+looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but
+love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must
+die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was
+neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not
+"fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing,
+nothing else--
+
+     "And die away the life between."
+
+And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must
+care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the
+disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the
+hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for
+the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . That night,
+even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without
+love, a world that did not want her--and _she_ was here, and she must
+stay, until, until . . . Which would the coming child be--herself again,
+or _him_ again? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.
+
+And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"--they wanted
+her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to
+change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her
+cheek--they liked _her_. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true,"
+for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.
+
+It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation
+of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great
+tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his
+ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"--and to all of us, the
+Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for
+nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to
+compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the
+little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. _She_ placed
+the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she
+beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.
+
+     "And so at last we find my tribe,
+     And so I set thee in the midst . . .
+     Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . .
+     It is our life at thy feet we throw
+     To step with into light and joy."
+
+The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage--needed
+swift decision--needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she
+saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess
+heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was
+ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard
+aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives
+not, we know from the old huntsman:
+
+     "For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery;
+     So they made no search and small inquiry";
+
+and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.
+
+Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of
+them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn
+adorer. He had stayed at the castle:
+
+     "I must see this fellow his sad life through--
+     He is our Duke, after all,
+     And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";
+
+--but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go
+journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear
+the last news of her:
+
+     "And when that's told me, what's remaining?"
+
+For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard
+for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some
+hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep
+soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer
+be cast before swine that can't value them. "_Amen._"
+
+But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little
+lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's
+play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there--just as one
+likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left
+precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke
+the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.
+
+And is it not good to think that almost immediately after _The Flight of
+the Duchess_ was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted
+woman whom _he_ snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been
+prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the
+Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill
+to read those lines of silenced prophecy:
+
+     "I foresee and I could foretell
+     Thy future portion, sure and well:
+     But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true,
+     Let them say what thou shalt do!"
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by
+a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died
+in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded"
+(says Vernon Lee, in her _Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy_)
+"in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme
+simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."
+
+
+
+
+PART III
+
+[Illustration: THE LOVER]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+LOVERS MEETING
+
+
+Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing
+which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
+common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
+him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
+any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
+sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
+outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
+analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
+passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
+trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
+us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
+so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
+next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that
+is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
+aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
+expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper
+study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and
+that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron,
+almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
+Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
+Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
+and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.
+
+In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
+inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
+flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
+ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the
+wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
+withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
+"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
+love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
+_do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
+something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
+other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
+but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
+faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more
+axiomatically than Browning ever said it:
+
+     "He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"
+
+--but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly
+proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such
+was _his_ marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man
+declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He
+understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!)
+conduct--what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he
+understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far
+hinders it--when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when
+by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for
+Browning, lay in loving greatly.
+
+Thus, for example, it is notable that, except _The Laboratory_ and
+_Fifine at the Fair_, none of his poems of men and women turns upon
+jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in
+love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in _Fifine_), even the departure
+from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of
+insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be
+(she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and
+always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be
+deep and true as well as brilliant.
+
+For Browning, _how_ love comes is not important. It may be by the
+high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely
+answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our
+dearest memory.
+
+     "What is he buzzing in my ears?
+       'Now that I come to die,
+     Do I view the world as a vale of tears?'
+       Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
+
+And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man
+"used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again--the
+"suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it
+were, with the bottles on the bedside table.
+
+     "At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper,
+       There watched for me, one June,
+     A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper,
+       My poor mind's out of tune."
+
+Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the
+details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle
+labelled 'Ether,'"
+
+     "And stole from stair to stair,
+
+     And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
+       We loved, Sir--used to meet:
+     How sad and mad and bad it was--
+       But then, how it was sweet!"
+
+They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other
+"confession"--if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life:
+that is all.
+
+In _Confessions_, the story is done; the man is dying. In _Love among
+the Ruins_, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone,
+is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before
+him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of
+"a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful
+prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace,"
+a wall with a hundred gates--its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve
+men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:
+
+     "And such glory and perfection, see, of grass
+             Never was"
+
+--as here,
+
+     "Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
+             Long ago;
+     Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
+             Struck them tame;
+     And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
+             Bought and sold."
+
+Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part
+of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his
+minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the
+chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles
+as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes
+and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows
+
+     "That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
+             Waits me there
+     In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
+             For the goal,
+     When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
+             Till I come."
+
+That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its
+temples and colonnades,
+
+     "All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts--and then
+             All the men!
+     When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
+             Either hand
+     On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
+             Of my face,
+     Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
+             Each on each."
+
+A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they
+built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a
+thousand chariots in reserve--all gold, of course. . . .
+
+     "Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
+             Earth's returns
+     For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin.
+             Shut them in
+     With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
+             Love is best!"
+
+But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all;
+we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us,
+even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can
+meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put
+off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand
+at the other side of the bay:
+
+     "Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
+     Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
+     A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
+     And blue spurt of a lighted match,
+     And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
+     Than the two hearts beating each to each!"
+
+Yes--we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.
+
+     "Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,
+     And the sun looked over the mountain's rim;
+     And straight was a path of gold for him,
+     And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]
+
+These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so
+describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When
+he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other
+lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all
+his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or
+another, which occupies him--the lovers who meet to part; those who love
+"in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never _his_ phrase); those who choose
+separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those
+who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.
+
+     "Dear, had the world in its caprice
+       Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both,
+       Have recognised your plighted troth,
+     Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'--
+     How many precious months and years
+       Of youth had passed, that speed so fast,
+       Before we found it out at last,
+     The world, and what it fears?
+
+     How much of priceless life were spent
+       With men that every virtue decks,
+       And women models of their sex,
+     Society's true ornament--
+     Ere we dared wander, nights like this,
+       Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine,
+       And feel the Boulevard break again
+     To warmth and light and bliss?"
+
+That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"!
+They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the
+trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People
+would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they _have_
+gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they
+choose--rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that
+sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is
+happening, this very hour, in that environment--here, for instance, in
+the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives
+Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly
+signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the
+courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and
+leave respectability to its false standards. _They_ are not
+included--they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"
+
+I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers
+had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were
+pleased to think. The world still counted for them--as it counts for all
+who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they
+could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting
+it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once
+it recognises the true Contemner! To
+
+     "Feel the Boulevard break again
+     To warmth and light and bliss"
+
+--on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the
+example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes--we must refuse to be
+dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short--they
+could not _forget_ the world.
+
+Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn
+to the dream-meetings--the great encounters which all of us feel might
+be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that
+imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so
+marvellously uttered in _Mesmerism_. Here, in these breathless
+stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or
+rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the
+actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we
+should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in
+his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings
+his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":
+
+     "Till I seemed to have and hold
+           In the vacancy
+           'Twixt the walls and me
+     From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold
+     To the foot in its muslin fold--
+
+     Have and hold, then and there,
+           Her, from head to foot,
+           Breathing and mute,
+     Passive and yet aware,
+     In the grasp of my steady stare--
+
+     Hold and have, there and then,
+           All her body and soul
+           That completes my whole,
+     All that women add to men,
+     In the clutch of my steady ken"--
+
+. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of
+his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he _must_ draw
+her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to
+suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:
+
+     "Out of doors into the night!
+           On to the maze
+           Of the wild wood-ways,
+     Not turning to left nor right
+     From the pathway, blind with sight--
+
+     Swifter and still more swift,
+           As the crowding peace
+           Doth to joy increase
+     In the wild blind eyes uplift
+     Thro' the darkness and the drift!"
+
+And he _will_ sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be
+relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes
+shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even
+from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"--for the
+lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and
+spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the
+arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes,
+comes . . .
+
+     "'Now--now'--the door is heard!
+           Hark, the stairs! and near--
+           Nearer--and here--
+     'Now!' and at call the third
+     She enters without a word!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she
+not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?
+
+But in _Porphyria's Lover_, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too,
+sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes
+to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and
+rain--there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of
+passion's answering passion.
+
+     "The rain set early in to-night,
+       The sullen wind was soon awake,
+     It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
+       And did its worst to vex the lake:
+       I listened with heart fit to break.
+     When glided in Porphyria." . . .
+
+She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then
+kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm,
+she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled
+gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,
+
+     "And, last, she sat down by my side
+     And called me. When no voice replied,
+
+     She put my arm about her waist,
+       And made her smooth white shoulder bare,
+     And all her yellow hair displaced,
+       And, stooping, made my cheek lie there,
+       And spread o'er all her yellow hair--
+
+     Murmuring how she loved me--she
+       Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour,
+     To set its struggling passion free
+       From pride, and vainer ties dissever,
+       And give herself to me for ever."
+
+But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's,
+there had seized her
+
+     "A sudden thought of one so pale
+       For love of her, and all in vain:
+       So, she was come through wind and rain."
+
+She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart
+fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she
+was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his
+grief--unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it
+possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and
+it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she
+calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him
+and draws his head to her breast.
+
+     "Be sure I looked up at her eyes
+       Happy and proud; at last I knew
+     Porphyria worshipped me; surprise
+       Made my heart swell, and still it grew
+       While I debated what to do.
+
+     That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
+       Perfectly pure and good: I found
+     A thing to do, and all her hair
+       In one long yellow string I wound
+       Three times her little throat around,
+
+     And strangled her." . . .
+
+But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids
+to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He
+loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek
+beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head--this time _his_
+shoulder bore
+
+       "The smiling rosy little head,
+     So glad it has its utmost will,
+       That all it scorned at once is fled,
+       And I, its love, am gained instead!
+
+     Porphyria's love: she guessed not how
+       Her darling one wish would be heard.
+     And thus we sit together now,
+       And all night long we have not stirred,
+       And yet God has not said a word!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse
+Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that
+it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But
+only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream,
+if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly
+happened on that night of wind and rain?--that night which _is_ real,
+whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly
+matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning--the sanity in the
+madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the
+little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the
+love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was
+_herself_. When in all the rest of life would such another moment
+come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could
+die _now_!"--nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the
+sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover
+felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have
+been:
+
+     "And thus we sit together now,
+     And yet God has not said a word!"
+
+Six poems of exultant love--and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the
+woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even
+_he_ puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the
+nameless girl in _Count Gismond_ and from Balaustion--these only--do we
+get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just
+now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I
+think it is not at least _so_ true, but true in some degree it must be,
+since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That
+the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like
+the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of
+love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these
+things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the
+"tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love
+consists for woman.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the
+minds of some. In Berdoe's _Browning Cyclopaedia_ the difficulty is
+frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the
+last line of _Parting at Morning_ as meaning that the woman "desires
+more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the _man_ who
+speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a
+misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him."
+Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him"
+refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is
+an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.
+
+[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen
+stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break
+in sense or sound."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S
+
+
+I.--THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"
+
+Writing of the unnamed heroine of _Count Gismond_, I said that she had
+one of the characteristic Browning marks--that of trust in the sincerity
+of others. Here, in _The Glove_, we find a figure who resembles her in
+two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady--a lady of the
+Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training:
+_dis_-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the
+earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very
+prize-bloom of legend--that famous incident of the glove thrown into the
+lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this
+interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of
+it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which,
+till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but
+the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis--vanity! All the world
+knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned
+alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:
+
+                               ". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
+     Not love, set that task to humanity!"
+
+But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in
+that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so
+much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are
+told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this
+alone, to be older. _She had been longer at Court_; its lesson had
+penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had
+listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she
+watched _him_, hearkened _him_ . . . and more and more misdoubted,
+hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck
+fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation,
+yielding, courage, into one quick impulse--and flung her glove to the
+lions! With the result which we know--of an instant and a fearless
+answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst
+she had dreaded.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened--the
+most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French
+knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in
+the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner,
+and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered
+the _Petite Bande_, the clique within a clique--"that troop of pretty
+women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"--led by his
+powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Etampes, friend of the Dauphin's
+neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Medicis--foe of that wife's
+so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande
+Seneschale de Normandie."
+
+The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse
+d'Etampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the
+Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Seneschale, always supreme in
+taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard--and this was why Pierre sometimes
+found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in
+his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.
+
+That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been
+signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:
+
+     "Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm
+     Caught thinking war the true pastime.
+     Is there a reason in metre?
+     Give us your speech, master Peter!"
+
+Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words
+before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"
+
+They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers
+mustered--lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset.
+Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge
+and the lady he was "adoring."
+
+     "Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed
+     Her, and the horrible pitside"
+
+--for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions'
+dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great
+beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose
+door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating
+hearts . . .
+
+     "Then earth in a sudden contortion
+     Gave out to our gaze her abortion.
+     Such a brute! . . .
+     One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy
+     To see the black mane, vast and heapy,
+     The tail in the air stiff and straining,
+     The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."
+
+And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of
+noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered,
+and he was free again.
+
+     "Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead!
+     And you saw by the flash on his forehead,
+     By the hope in those eyes wide and steady,
+     He was leagues in the desert already."
+
+The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave
+Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this--he knew well that it
+were almost certain death:
+
+     "Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"
+
+But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows)
+a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was
+the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had
+been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a
+balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the
+barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he
+was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an
+one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De
+Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place
+where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more,
+as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye
+was on them. The King cried out in applause that _he_ would have done
+the same:
+
+                               ". . . 'Twas mere vanity,
+     Not love, set that task to humanity!"
+
+--and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned
+with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."
+
+All but Peter Ronsard. _He_ noticed that she retained undisturbed her
+self-possession amid the Court's mockery.
+
+     "As if from no pleasing experiment
+     She rose, yet of pain not much heedful,
+     So long as the process was needful.
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     She went out 'mid hooting and laughter;
+     Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."
+
+Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added;
+"I must know human nature."
+
+     "She told me, 'Too long had I heard
+     Of the deed proved alone by the word:
+     For my love--what De Lorge would not dare!
+     With my scorn--what De Lorge could compare!
+     And the endless descriptions of death
+     He would brave when my lip formed a breath,
+     I must reckon as braved'" . . .
+
+--and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was
+understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the
+lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to
+that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to
+reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and
+the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And
+at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for
+mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped
+across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De
+Lorge here and now? For _now_ she was still free; now she could find out
+what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break
+down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then
+discover that it did not mean anything at all! So--she had thrown the
+glove.
+
+     "'The blow a glove gives is but weak:
+     Does the mark yet discolour my cheek?
+     But when the heart suffers a blow,
+     Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been
+capable of the public insult. The pain of _that_, had she loved him,
+must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of
+this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere
+vanity." Love then was nowhere--neither in his heart nor in hers. . . .
+Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a
+youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would
+pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as
+that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but
+there was no doubt what _he_ would have done, "had our brute been
+Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it
+right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.
+
+     "And when, shortly after, she carried
+     Her shame from the Court, and they married,
+     To that marriage some happiness, maugre
+     The voice of the Court, I dared augur."
+
+De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and
+finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week.
+Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the
+King desired her presence and his absence--and never did he set off on
+that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell
+the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that
+he brought _hers_ with no murmur.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in
+accepting De Lorge's "devotion"--not because De Lorge was worthless, but
+because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not
+love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we
+now perceive; but _only_ love could excuse the test which love could
+never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless--no matter; the lady held no
+right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone
+her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.
+
+But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that
+love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so
+subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and
+that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think
+there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of
+King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de
+Valois, sister of the King--we have only to consider the story of Diane
+de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise _that_
+most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it
+loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It
+scorns tests--too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again
+it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we
+gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to
+plunge among the lions for our gloves--but we should not be able to send
+them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits
+not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will
+have won the _heart_ which doubts--and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the
+glove.
+
+     "Utter the true word--out and away
+     Escapes her soul." . . .
+
+Gloves flung to lions are not the answer which that enfranchised soul
+will give! And so the Lady thought right and did wrong: 'twas _not_ love
+set that task to humanity. Even Browning cannot win her our full
+pardon; we devote not many kerchiefs to drying this "tear."
+
+
+II.--DIS ALITER VISUM; OR, LE BYRON DE NOS JOURS
+
+"The gods saw it otherwise." Thus we may translate the first clause of
+the title; the second, the reference to Byron, I have never understood,
+and I think shall never understand. Of all the accusations which stand
+against him, that of letting opportunity in this sort slip by is
+assuredly not one. Such "poor pretty thoughtful things" as the lady of
+this poem played their parts most notably in Byron's life--to their own
+disaster, it is true, but never because he weighed their worth in the
+spirit of this French poet, so bitterly at last accused, who meets
+again, ten years after the day of his cogitations, the subject of them
+in a Paris drawing-room--married, and as dissatisfied as he, who still
+is free. Reading the poem, indeed, with Byron in mind, the fancy comes
+to me that if it had been by any other man but Browning, it might almost
+be regarded as a sidelong vindication of the Frenchman for having
+rejected the "poor pretty thoughtful thing." For Byron married
+her[224:1]--and in what did it result? . . . But that Browning should in
+any fashion, however sidelong, acknowledge Byron as anything but the
+most despicable of mortals, cannot for a moment be imagined; he who
+understood so many complex beings failed entirely here. Thus, ever in
+perplexity, I must abjure the theory of Byronic merit. There lurks in
+this poem no hidden plea for abstention, for the "man who
+doesn't"--hinted at through compassionate use of his name who made one
+of the great disastrous marriages of the world.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Ten years before this meeting in Paris, the two of the poem had known
+one another, though not with any high degree of intimacy, for only twice
+had they "walked and talked" together. He was even then "bent, wigged,
+and lamed":
+
+     "Famous, however, for verse and worse,
+     Sure of the Fortieth spare Arm-chair"
+
+--that is, the next vacancy at the French Academy, for so illustrious
+was he that his secondary reputation would not injure him.
+
+She who now accuses him was then a "young beauty, round and sound as a
+mountain-apple," ingenuous, ardent, wealthy--the typical "poor pretty
+thoughtful thing" with aspirations, for she tried to sing and draw, read
+verse and thought she understood--at any rate, loved the Great, the
+Good, and the Beautiful. But to him her "culture" seemed pitifully
+amateurish--him who took the arts in his stride, as it were, who could
+float wide and free over the whole province of them, as the sea-gull
+floats over the waters. Nevertheless he had walked and talked with her
+"twice" at the little remote, unspoilt seaside resort where they had
+chanced to meet. It was strange that more people had not discovered it,
+so fine were the air and scenery--but it remained unvisited, and thus
+the two were thrown together. One scorching noon they met; he invited
+her to a stroll on the cliff-road. She took his arm, and (looking back
+upon it now) remembers that as she took it she smiled "sillily," and
+made some banal speech about the blazing, brazen sea below. For she felt
+that he had guessed her secret, timid hope. . . . Now, recalling the
+episode (it is he who has given the signal for such reminiscence), she
+asks him what effect his divination of her trembling heart had had on
+him that day.
+
+     "Did you determine, as we stepped
+       O'er the lone stone fence, 'Let me get
+     Her for myself, and what's the earth
+       With all its art, verse, music, worth--
+     Compared with love, found, gained, and kept?'"
+
+For she knows, and she knew that _he_ knew, the prompt reply which would
+come if he "blurted out" a certain question--come in her instant
+silence, her downward look, the rush of colour to her cheek and brow.
+They would have returned from that walk as plighted lovers--he, old,
+famous, weary; she with her youth and beauty, her ardour and her
+wealth, all rapturously given, and with the happy prospect added to all
+other joys of being certain of applause for the distinction shown in her
+choice! . . . A perfect hour for both--while it lasted.
+
+But (so she now reads his gone-by cogitations for him) it would not
+last. The daily life would reclaim them; Paris would follow, with full
+time for both to reason and reflect. . . . And thus (still interpreting
+to him the imagined outcome of his musings) she would regret that choice
+which had seemed to show her of the elect--for after all a poet _need_
+not be fifty! Young men can be poets too, and though they blunder, there
+is something endearing in their blunders; moreover, one day they will be
+as "firm, quiet, and gay" as he, as expert in deceiving the world, which
+is all, in the last analysis, that such a man does.
+
+For, if he _had_ spoken to her that day, what would he have said? (She
+is still expounding to him the situation of this potential married pair,
+as she has divined in her long musings that he then foresaw it.) He
+would not have said, like a boy, "Love me or I die." But neither would
+he have said the truth, which was simply that he wished to use her young
+ardour and vitality to help his age. Such was the demand which she (as,
+according to her, he then reasoned it out) would in time have accused
+him, tacitly or not, of having made upon her. . . . And what would his
+own reflections have been? She is ready to use her disconcerting
+clairvoyance for these also; nay, she can do more, she can tell him the
+very moment at which he acted upon them in advance! For as they
+foreshadowed themselves, he had ceased to press gently her arm to his
+side--she remembers well the stopping of that tender pressure, and now
+can connect the action with its mental source. _His_ reflection, then,
+would have been simply that he had thrown himself away, had bartered all
+he was and had been and might be--all his culture, knowledge of the
+world, guerdons of gold and great renown--for what? For "two cheeks
+freshened by youth and sea": a mere nosegay. _Him_, in exchange for a
+nosegay!
+
+     "That ended me." . . .
+
+They duly admired the "grey sad church," on the cliff-top, with its
+scattered graveyard crosses, its garlands where the swallows perched;
+they "took their look" at the sea and sky, wondering afresh at the
+general ignorance of so attractive a little hole; then, finding the sun
+really too scorching, they descended, got back to the baths, to such
+civilisation as there was:
+
+       "And then, good-bye! Ten years since then:
+     Ten years! We meet: you tell me, now,
+       By a window-seat for that cliff-brow,
+     On carpet-stripes for those sand-paths."
+
+Ten years. He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she
+has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood,
+he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love
+to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually
+interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer be
+patronisingly summed up in "poor pretty thoughtful thing." And she has
+cried, in the words which open the poem:
+
+     "Stop, let me have the truth of that!
+       Is that all true?"
+
+--and at first, between jest and bitterness, has given him the sum of
+her musings on that moment when he decided to drop the nosegay.
+
+For ten years he has had, tacitly, the last word: his decision has stood
+unchallenged. Nor shall it now be altered--he has begun to "tell" her,
+to meander sentimentally around that episode, but she will have nothing
+less than the truth; they will talk of it, yes, since he has so pleased,
+but they will talk of it in _her_ way. So she cuts him short, and draws
+this acid, witty little sketch for him. . . . Has she not matured? might
+it not have "done," after all? The nosegay was not so insipid! . . . But
+suddenly, while she mocks, the deeper "truth of that" invades her soul,
+and she must cease from cynic gibes, and yield the word to something
+greater in herself.
+
+     "Now I may speak: you fool, for all
+       Your lore! Who made things plain in vain?
+     What was the sea for? What, the grey
+       Sad church, that solitary day,
+     Crosses and graves and swallows' call?
+
+     Was there nought better than to enjoy?
+       No feat which, done, would make time break,
+     And let us pent-up creatures through
+       Into eternity, our due?
+     No forcing earth teach heaven's employ?
+
+     No grasping at love, gaining a share
+       O' the sole spark from God's life at strife
+     With death . . . ?"
+
+He calls his decision wisdom? It is one kind of wisdom only, and that
+the least--"worldly" wisdom. He was old, and she was raw and
+sentimental--true; each might have missed something in the other; but
+completeness is not for our existence here, we await heaven for that.
+Only earthbound creatures--like the star-fish, for instance--become all
+they _can_ become in this sphere; man's soul must evolve. Have their
+souls evolved? And she cries that they have not:
+
+     "The devil laughed at you in his sleeve!"
+
+Of course he "did not know" (as he now seems feebly to interpolate); she
+can well believe that, for if he had known, he would have saved two
+souls--nay, four. What of his Stephanie, who danced vilely last night,
+they say--will he not soon, like the public, abandon her now that "her
+vogue has had its day"? . . . And what of the speaker herself? It takes
+but half a dozen words to indicate _her_ lot:
+
+     "Here comes my husband from his whist."
+
+What is "the truth of that"?
+
+Again, I think, something of what I said in writing of _Youth and Art_:
+again not quite what Browning seems to wish us to accept. Love is the
+fulfilling of the law--with all my heart; but was love here? Does love
+weigh worth, as the poet did? does love marry the next comer, as the
+lady did? Mrs. Orr, devouter votary than I, explains that Browning meant
+"that everything which disturbs the equal balance of human life gives a
+vital impulse to the soul." Did one wish merely to be humorous, one
+might say that this was the most optimistic view of unsuccessful
+marriage which has yet found expression! But merely to be humorous is
+not what I wish: we must consider this belief, which Mrs. Orr further
+declares to be the expression of Browning's "poetic self." Assuredly it
+is true that stereotyped monotony, even if happy, does leave the soul
+unstirred to deepest depth. We may hesitate, nevertheless, to embrace
+the view that "only our mistakes are our experience"; and this is the
+view which seems to prevail in Mrs. Orr's interpretation of _Dis Aliter
+Visum_. Mr. Symons says that the woman points out to the man "his fatal
+mistake." . . . But was it really a mistake at all? I do not, in urging
+that question, commit myself to the crass commonplace of Berdoe, who
+argues that "a more unreasonable match could hardly be imagined than
+this one would have been"! The "match" standpoint is not here our
+standpoint. _That_ is, simply, that love is the fulfilling of the law,
+and that these two people did not love. They were in the sentimental
+state which frequently results from pleasant chance encounters--and the
+experienced, subtle man of the world was able to perceive that, and to
+act upon it. That he has pursued his wonted way of life, and that she
+has married lovelessly (for a husband who plays whist is, by the
+unwritten law of romance, a husband who can by no possibility be
+loved!), proves merely that each has fallen away in the pursuit of any
+ideal which may then have urged itself--not that both would certainly
+have "saved their souls" if they had married one another. Speaking
+elsewhere in this book of Browning's theory of love, I said: "Love can
+do all, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something
+too"--but even love can do nothing if it is not there! Ideals need not
+be abandoned because they are not full-realised; and, were we in stern
+mood, it would be possible to declare that this lady had abandoned them
+more definitely than her poet had, since he at all times was frankly a
+worldling. Witty as she has become, there still remain in her, I fear,
+some traces of the poor pretty thoughtful thing. . . . To sum up, for
+this "tear" also we have but semi-sympathy; and Browning is again not at
+his best when he makes the Victim speak for herself.
+
+
+III.--THE LABORATORY
+
+Now let us see how he can make a woman speak when she suffers, but is
+not, and will not be, a victim.
+
+At once she is a completely realised human creature, uttering herself in
+such abandonment of all pretence as never fails to compass majesty. Into
+the soul of this woman in _The Laboratory_, Browning has penetrated till
+he seems to breathe with her breath. I question if there is another
+fictive utterance to surpass this one in authenticity. It bears the
+Great Seal. Not Shakespeare has outdone it in power and concentration.
+Every word counts, almost every comma--for, like Browning, we too seem
+to breathe with this woman's panting breath, our hearts to beat with the
+very pain and rage of hers, and every pause she comes to in her speech
+is _our_ pause, so intense is the evocation, so unerring the expression
+of an impulse which, whether or no it be atrophied in our more hesitant
+and civilised consciousness, is at any rate effectively inhibited.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She is a Court lady of the _ancien regime_, in the great Brinvilliers
+poisoning-period, and she is buying from an old alchemist in his
+laboratory the draught which is to kill her triumphant rival. Small,
+gorgeous, and intense, she sits in the strange den and watches the old
+wizard set about his work. She is due to dance at the King's, but there
+is no hurry: he may take as long as he chooses. . . . Now she must put
+on a glass mask like his, the old man tells her, for these "faint smokes
+that curl whitely" are themselves poisonous--and she submits, and with
+all her intensity at work, ties it on "tightly"; then sits again, to
+peer through the fumes of the devil's-smithy. But she cannot be silent;
+even to him--and after all, is such an one as he quite truly a man!--she
+must pour forth the anguish of her soul. Questions relieve her now and
+then:
+
+     "Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?"
+
+--but not long can she be merely curious; every minute there breaks out
+a cry:
+
+     "He is with her, and they know that I know
+     Where they are, what they do . . ."
+
+--the pitiful self-consciousness of such torment, unable to believe in
+the oblivion (familiar as it has been in past good hours) which sweeps
+through lovers in their bliss. They could not forget _me_, she thinks,
+as all her sister-sufferers think. . . . Yet even in this hell, there is
+some solace. They must be remembering her, and
+
+                             ". . . they believe my tears flow
+     While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
+     Empty church, to pray God in, for them!--I am here."
+
+Yes, here--where the old man works for her: grinding, moistening, and
+mashing his paste, pounding at his powder. It is better to sit here and
+watch him than go dance at the King's; and she looks round in her
+restless, nervous anguish--the dagger in her heart, but this way, _this_
+way, to stanch the wound it makes!
+
+     "That in the mortar--you call it a gum?
+     Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
+     And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
+     Sure to taste sweetly--is that poison too?"
+
+But, maddened by the deadlier drug of wretchedness, she loses for a
+moment the single vision of her rival: it were good to have _all_ the
+old man's treasures, for the joy of dealing death around her at that
+hateful Court where each knows of her misery.
+
+     "To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
+     A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!"
+
+She need but give a lozenge "at the King's," and Pauline should die in
+half an hour; or light a pastille, and Elise, "with her head and her
+breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead." . . . But he is
+taking too long.
+
+     "Quick--is it finished? The colour's too grim!
+     Why not soft like the phial's, enticing and dim?"
+
+For if it were, she could watch that other stir it into her drink, and
+dally with "the exquisite blue," and then, great glowing creature, lift
+the goblet to her lips, and taste. . . . But one must be content: the
+old man knows--this grim drug is the deadly drug; only, as she bends to
+the vessel again, a new doubt assails her.
+
+     "What a drop! She's not little, no minion like me--
+     That's why she ensnared him: this never will free
+     The soul from those masculine eyes--say, 'No!'
+     To that pulse's magnificent come-and-go.
+
+     For only last night, as they whispered, I brought
+     My own eyes to bear on her so, that I thought
+     Could I keep them one half minute fixed, she would fall,
+     Shrivelled; she fell not; yet this does it all!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+But it is not painless in its working? She does not desire that: she
+wants the other to _feel_ death; more--she wants the proof of death to
+remain,
+
+     "Brand, burn up, bite into its grace[236:1]--
+     He is sure to remember her dying face!"
+
+Is it done? Then he must take off her mask; he must--nay, he need not
+look morose about it:
+
+     "It kills her, and this prevents seeing it close."
+
+She is not afraid to dispense with the protecting vizor:
+
+     "_If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?_"
+
+There it lies--there. . . .
+
+     "Now, take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill,
+     You may kiss me, old man, on the mouth if you will!"
+
+--and, looking her last look round the den, she prepares to go; but what
+is that mark on her gorgeous gown? Brush it off! Brush off that dust! It
+might bring horror down on her in an instant, before she knows or
+thinks, and she is going straight from here to dance at the
+King's. . . . She is gone, with her jealousy and her anguish and her
+passion, and, clutched to her heart, the phial that shall end but one of
+those torments.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She is gone, and she remains for ever. Her age is past, but not the
+hearts that ached in it. We curb those hearts to-day; we do not poison
+now; but have we forgotten the mood for poisoning?
+
+     "If it hurts her, beside, can it ever hurt me?"
+
+Such fiercenesses are silenced now; but, silent, they have still their
+utterance, and it is here.
+
+
+IV.--IN A YEAR
+
+Nay--here we have the heart unsilenced yet unfierce, the gentle, not the
+"dreadful," heart of woman: as true to type, so true indeed that we can
+even figure to ourselves the other hours in which the lady of _The
+Laboratory_ may have known, like the girl here, only dim, aching wonder
+at her lover's mutability.
+
+     "Was it something said,
+       Something done,
+     Vexed him? was it touch of hand,
+       Turn of head?
+     Strange! that very way
+       Love begun:
+     I as little understand
+       Love's decay."[238:1]
+
+Here, again, is full authenticity. Girl-like, she sits and broods upon
+it all--not angry, not even wholly wretched, for, though now she is
+abandoned, she has not loved "in vain," since she loved greatly. So
+greatly that still, still, she can dream:
+
+     "Would he loved me yet,
+       On and on,
+     While I found some way undreamed
+       --Paid my debt!
+     Gave more life and more,
+       Till, all gone,
+     He should smile, 'She never seemed
+       Mine before.'"
+
+But this will not be; in a year it is over for him; and for her "over"
+too, though not yet ended. How will it end for her?
+
+     "Well, this cold clay clod
+       Was man's heart:
+     Crumble it, and what comes next?
+       Is it God ?" . . .
+
+The dream, the silly dream, of each forsaken child!
+
+     "'Dying for my sake--
+       White and pink!
+     Can't we touch these bubbles then
+       But they break?'"
+
+That is what he will say to himself, in his high male fashion, when he
+hears that she is dead; she sits and dreams of it, as women have done
+since the world began, and will do till it ends.[239:1]
+
+Then, at last, he will know how she loved him; since, for all that has
+been between them, clearly he has not known that yet. . . . Again, the
+supreme conviction of our souls that who does know truly _all_ the love,
+can never turn away from it. Most pitiful, most deceived, of dreams--yet
+after all, perhaps the horn-gate dream, for who knows "truly" but who
+loves truly?
+
+Yet indeed (she now muses) _has_ she enough loved him?
+
+     "I had wealth and ease,
+       Beauty, youth:
+     Since my lover gave me love,
+       I gave these.
+
+     That was all I meant
+       --To be just,
+     And the passion I had raised
+       To content.
+     Since he chose to change
+       Gold for dust,
+     If I gave him what he praised,
+       Was it strange?"
+
+And after all it was not enough! "Justice" was not enough, the giving of
+herself was not enough. If she could try again, if she could find that
+"way undreamed" to pay her debt. . . .
+
+I should like to omit two lines from the second of the stanzas quoted
+above:
+
+     "_And the passion I had raised
+       To content._"
+
+From Browning, those words come oddly: moreover, elsewhere the girl
+cries:
+
+     "I, too, at love's brim
+       Touched the sweet:
+     I would die if death bequeathed
+       Sweet to him."
+
+This is more than to "content" the "passion she had raised." Let us
+regard that phrase as unwritten: it is not authentic, it does not
+express either the girl or her poet.
+
+The rest comes right and true--and more than all, perhaps, the second
+verse, where the mystery of passion in its coming no less than in its
+going is so subtly indicated.
+
+     "Strange! that very way
+       Love begun:
+     I _as little understand_
+       Love's decay."
+
+We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should
+say love knows not reason--but love and God forbid that it should _aim_
+at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long--but will not
+die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with
+scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of
+"re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back
+to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not
+re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit--is not re-incarnation,
+like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and
+suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How
+many of us--grown, not changed--can pityingly look back at ourselves in
+some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that
+"ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die--_that_ heart, _that_
+self: we pass into a Hades.
+
+     "Well, this cold clay clod
+       Was man's heart:
+     Crumble it, and what comes next?
+       Is it God?"
+
+Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from
+our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days--we call them back (a little,
+it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will
+endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . .
+Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more
+clearly to a transition-state? We _have been_ dead; but this "us" who
+comes back to the world we knew is still the same--the heart will answer
+as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled.
+Only--this is the proof--both heart and spirit are _further on_; both
+have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of
+love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of
+"dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in
+scornful, pity--knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream,
+and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love
+that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be
+applied to Annabella Milbanke.
+
+[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the
+alliteration in this line.
+
+[238:1] Mark how the deferred rhymes paint the groping thoughts. Only
+after much questioning can the answer come, as it were, in the "chime of
+the rhyme."
+
+[239:1] And men also, I hasten to add, that there may be no pluming of
+male feathers--if indeed this be an occasion for pluming on either side.
+
+
+
+
+PART IV
+
+[Illustration: THE WIFE]
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+A WOMAN'S LAST WORD
+
+
+They are married, and they have come to a spiritual crisis. She does
+not, cannot, think as _he_ thinks. But does thinking signify? She
+loves--is not that enough? Can she not have done with thinking, or at
+all events with talking about thinking? Perhaps, with every striving,
+she shall achieve no more than that: to _say_ nothing, to use no
+influence, to yield the sanctioned woman's trophy of the "last
+word." . . . Shall she, then, be yielding aught of value, if she
+contends no more?
+
+     "What so wild as words are?"
+
+--and that _they_ should strive and argue! Why, it is as when birds
+debate about some tiny marvel of those marvellous tiny lives, while the
+hawk spies from a bough above.
+
+     "See the creature stalking
+       While we speak!
+     Hush and hide the talking,
+       Cheek on cheek!"
+
+For that hawk is ever watching life: it stands for the mysterious
+effluence which falls on joy and kills it; and that may just as well be
+"talking" as aught else! He shall have his own way--or no: that is a
+paltry yielding. There shall _be_ no way but his.
+
+     "What so false as truth is,
+       False to thee?"
+
+She abandons then the cold abstraction; she does not even wish to
+"know":
+
+     "Where the apple reddens
+       Never pry--
+     Lest we lose our Edens,
+       Eve and I.
+
+     Be a god and hold me
+       With a charm!
+     Be a man and fold me
+       With thine arm!
+
+     Teach me, only teach, Love!
+       As I ought
+     I will speak thy speech, Love,
+       Think thy thought--
+
+     Meet, if thou require it,
+       Both demands,
+     Laying flesh and spirit
+       In thy hands."
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+But even as she measures and exults in the abjection of herself, a voice
+whispers in her soul that this is not the way. Something is wrong. She
+hears, but cannot heed. It must be so, since he desires it--since he can
+desire it. Since he _can_ . . .
+
+     "That shall be to-morrow,
+       Not to-night:
+     I must bury sorrow
+       Out of sight:
+
+     --Must a little weep, Love,
+       (Foolish me!)
+     And so fall asleep, Love,
+       Loved by thee."
+
+He does not wish to know the real Herself. Then the real herself shall
+"sleep"; all shall be as before.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Will this endure? All depends upon the woman: upon how strong _she_ is.
+For is not this the sheer denial of her husband's moral force? By her
+silence, her abjection, her suppression, he shall prevail: not
+otherwise. And so, _if_ this endure, what shall the issue prove? Not the
+highest good of married life for either, and still less for the man than
+for the woman.
+
+By implication, Browning shows us that in _By the Fireside_, one of his
+three great songs of wedded love:
+
+     "Oh, I must feel your brain prompt mine,
+       Your heart anticipate my heart,
+     You must be just before, in fine,
+       See and make me see, for your part,
+     New depths of the divine!"
+
+Once more we can trace there his development from _Pauline_. She,
+looking up "as I might kill her and be loved the more," had, to the
+lover's thinking, laid her flesh and spirit in his hands, precisely as
+the wife in the _Last Word_ resolves to do. . . . As the poet grew, so
+grew the man in Browning: we reach _By the Fireside_ from these. For the
+woman in the _Last Word_, strong to lay aside herself, to "think his
+thought," could with that strength, used otherwise, bring _that_ husband
+to the place where stands the man in _By the Fireside_, when the "long
+dark autumn evenings" are come, and together with his wife he treads
+back the path to their youth, to the "moment, one and infinite" in which
+they found each other once for all.
+
+     "My perfect wife, my Leonor,
+       Oh heart, my own, oh eyes, mine too,
+     Whom else could I dare look backward for,
+       With whom beside should I dare pursue
+     The path grey heads abhor?
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     My own, confirm me! If I tread
+       This path back, is it not in pride
+     To think how little I dreamed it led
+       To an age so blest that, by its side,
+     Youth seems the waste instead?"
+
+And now read again:
+
+     "Meet, _if thou require it_,
+       Both demands,
+     Laying flesh and spirit
+       In thy hands."
+
+A lower note there, is it not? And shall he so require, and she so
+yield, that backward-treading path is not for them--never shall _they_
+say to one another:
+
+     "Come back with me to the first of all,
+       Let us lean and love it over again,
+     Let us now forget and now recall,
+       Break the rosary in a pearly rain,
+     And gather what we let fall!"
+
+Too many tears would fall on that wife's rosary--the wife who had begun
+so soon to know that Edens shall be lost by thinking Eves!
+
+But let me not enforce a moral. The mood is one that women know, and
+often wisely use. "Talking" _is_ to be hidden, "cheek on cheek," from
+the hawk on the bough: but talking, as this wife will quickly see, is
+not the sum of individuality's expression. She can teach him--learning
+from him all the while--_not_ to "require it": she, this same sweet,
+strong-souled woman, for to be able to speak as she speaks here is her
+sure indenture of freedom.
+
+     "That shall be to-morrow,
+       Not to-night:
+     I must bury sorrow
+       Out of sight."
+
+The "sorrow" is for him, not for herself: he has fallen below his
+highest in the tyranny of to-night. Then be sure that she, so loving and
+so seeing, shall lift him up to-morrow! _This_ tear shall be dried.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+JAMES LEE'S WIFE
+
+
+In this song-cycle of nine poems we are shown the death of a woman's
+heart. James Lee's wife sums up in herself, as it were, all those
+"troubles of love" which we have considered in the earlier monologues.
+The man has failed her--as De Lorge failed his lady, as the poet the
+"poor, pretty thoughtful thing"; love has left her--as it left the woman
+of _The Laboratory_ and the girl of _In a Year_; she and her husband are
+at variance in the great things of life--like the couple, in _A Woman's
+last Word_. But even the complete surrender of individuality resolved
+upon by the wife in that poem would not now avail, if indeed it ever
+would have availed, the wife of James Lee. All is over, and, as she
+gradually realises, over with such finality that there is only one thing
+she can do, and that is to leave him--"set him free."
+
+We learn the mournful story from the wife's lips only; the husband never
+speaks, and is but once present. All we actually see are the moods of
+nine separate days--spread over what precise period of time we are not
+clearly shown, but it was certainly a year. These nine revealings show
+us every stage from the first faint pang of apprehension to the accepted
+woe; then the battle with _that_--the hope that love may yet prevail;
+the clutch at some high stoicism drawn from the laws of nature, or from
+"old earth's" genial wisdom; next, the less exalted plan to be "of use,"
+since there is nothing else for her to be--and finally the flight, the
+whole renunciation. Echoes hover from all sad women's stories elsewhere
+studied: the Tear reigns supreme, the Victim is _in excelsis_--for
+hardly did Pompilia suffer such excess of misery, since she at least
+could die, remembering Caponsacchi. James Lee's wife will live,
+remembering James Lee.
+
+Into the chosen commonplace of the man's name[251:1] we may read a
+symbolism. "This is every-day's news," the poet seems to say; "you may
+watch the drama for yourselves whenever you so please." And only indeed
+in the depth of the woman's passion is there aught unusual. _That_, as
+uttered in the final poem, seems more than normal--since she knows her
+husband for (as she so strangely says of him) "mere ignoble earth"; yet
+still can claim that he "set down to her"
+
+     "Love that was life, life that was love,
+       A tenure of breath at your lips' decree,
+     A passion to stand as your thoughts approve,
+       A rapture to fall where your foot might be."
+
+More--or less--than dog-like is such love, for dogs are unaware of
+"mere ignoble earth," dogs do not judge and analyse and patronise, and
+resolve to "make the low nature better for their throes." Never has the
+mistaken idea, the inept conduct, of passion been so subtly shown us,
+with so much at once of pity and of irony.
+
+James Lee's wife is a plain woman.
+
+     "Why, fade you might to a thing like me,
+       And your hair grow these coarse hanks of hair,
+     Your skin, this bark of a gnarled tree" . . .
+
+So she cries in the painful concluding poem. Faded, coarse-haired,
+coarse-skinned . . . is all said? But he had married her. In what, do we
+find the word of that enigma? In the beauties of her heart and mind--the
+passionate, devoted heart, the subtle, brooding mind. These had done the
+first work; and alas! they have done the second also. The heart was
+passionate and devoted, but it analysed too closely, and then clung too
+closely; the mind was subtle and intense, but it could not rest, it
+could not "take for granted"--male synonym for married bliss! And of
+course we shall not dare deny James Lee his trustiest, sturdiest weapon:
+_she had no sense of humour!_ . . . If he was incomplete, so too was
+she; and her incompleteness was of the kind that, in this relation,
+never fails to fail--his, of the kind that more often than not succeeds.
+Thus she sums him:
+
+     "With much in you waste, with many a weed,
+     And plenty of passions run to seed,
+       But a little good grain too."
+
+This man, who may be reckoned in his thousands, as the corresponding
+type in woman may, needs--not tyrannically, because unconsciously--a
+mate who far excels him in all that makes nobility; and, nine times out
+of ten, obtains her. "Mrs. James Lee" (how quaintly difficult it is to
+realise that sequence!) is, on the contrary, of the type that one might
+almost say inevitably fails to find the "true" mate. Perhaps she _has_
+none. Perhaps, to be long loved, to be even long endured, this type must
+alter itself by modification or suppression, like the wife in the _Last
+Word_--who was not of it! For here is the very heart of the problem: can
+or cannot character be altered? James Lee's wife is of the morbid, the
+unbalanced, the unlovely: these, if they are to "survive," must learn
+the lore of self-suppression. Not for them exactingness, caprice, the
+gay or grave analysis of love and lover: such moods charm alone in
+lovely women, and even in _them_ bring risks along. The Mrs. Lees must
+curb them wholly. As the whims of unwedded love, they may perchance
+amuse or interest; marriage, for such, comports them not at all.
+
+Let us trace, compassionately if ironically, the mistakes of this sad
+woman.
+
+
+I.--SHE SPEAKS AT THE WINDOW
+
+He is coming back to their seaside home at Sainte-Marie, near
+Pornic--the Breton "wild little place" which Browning knew and loved so
+well. "Close to the sea--a hamlet of a dozen houses, perfectly
+lonely--one may walk on the edge of the low rocks by the sea for miles.
+I feel out of the earth sometimes as I sit here at the window."[254:1]
+
+And at the window _she_ sits, watching for James Lee's return. Yesterday
+it was summer, but the strange sudden "stop" has come, eerily, as it
+always seems to come.
+
+     "Ah, Love, but a day
+       And the world has changed!
+     The sun's away,
+       And the bird estranged;
+     The wind has dropped,
+       And the sky's deranged:
+     Summer has stopped."
+
+We can picture him as he arrives and listens to her: is there already a
+faint annoyance? Need she so drearily depict the passing of summer? It
+is bad enough that it _should_ pass--we need not talk about it! Such
+annoyance we all have felt with the relentless chroniclers of change.
+Enough, enough; since summer is gone and we cannot bring it back, let us
+think of something else. . . . But she goes on, and now we shall not\
+doubt that he is enervated, for this is what she says:
+
+     "Look in my eyes!
+       Wilt thou change too?
+     Should I fear surprise?
+       Shall I find aught new
+     In the old and dear,
+       In the good and true,
+     With the changing year?"
+
+The questions have come to her--come on what cold blast from heaven, or
+him? But in pity for herself, let her not ask them! We seem to see the
+man turn from her, not "looking in her eyes," and seem to catch the
+thought, so puerile yet so instinctive, that flashes through his mind.
+"I never meant to 'change'; why does she put it into my head." . . . And
+then, doomed blunderer, she goes on:
+
+     "Thou art a man,
+       But I am thy love.
+     For the lake, its swan;
+       For the dell, its dove;
+     And for thee (oh, haste!)
+       Me, to bend above,
+     Me, to hold embraced."
+
+She does not _say_, "oh, haste!"--that is the silent comment (we must
+think) on her not instantly answered plea for his embrace. . . . And
+when the embrace does come--the claimed embrace--we can figure to
+ourselves the all it lacks.
+
+
+II.--BY THE FIRESIDE
+
+Summer now indeed is gone; they are sitting by their fire of wood. The
+blue and purple flames leap up and die and leap again, and she sits
+watching them. The wood that makes those coloured flames is shipwreck
+wood. . . .
+
+     "Oh, for the ills half-understood,
+         The dim dead woe
+         Long ago
+     Befallen this bitter coast of France!"
+
+And then, ever the morbid analogy, the fixed idea:
+
+     "Well, poor sailors took their chance;
+         I take mine."
+
+Out there on the sea even now, some of those "poor sailors" may be
+eyeing the ruddy casement and gnashing their teeth for envy and hate,
+
+     "O' the warm safe house and happy freight
+         --Thee and me."
+
+The irony of it seizes her. Those sailors need not curse them! Ships
+safe in port have their own perils of rot and rust and worms in the wood
+that gnaw the heart to dust. . . . "That is worse."
+
+And how long the house has stood here, to anger the drenched, stark men
+on the sea! Who lived here before this couple came? Did another woman
+before herself watch the man "with whom began love's voyage full-sail"
+. . . watch him and see the planks of love's ship start, and hell open
+beneath?
+
+_This_ mood she speaks not, only sits and broods upon. And he? Men too
+can watch, and struggle with themselves, and feel that little help is
+given them. Some sailors come safe home, and these would have been
+lighted by the ruddy casement. But she thinks only of the sailors
+drowning, and gnashing their teeth for hate of the "warm safe house."
+That melancholy brooding--and if she but looked lovely while she
+broods. . . .
+
+
+III.--IN THE DOORWAY
+
+She stands alone in the doorway, and looks out upon the dreary autumn
+landscape.[257:1] It is a grey October day; the sea is in "stripes like
+a snake"--olive-pale near the land, black and "spotted white with the
+wind" in the distance. How ominous it shows: good fortune is surely on
+the wing.
+
+     "Hark, the wind with its wants and its infinite wail!"
+
+As she gazes, her heart dies within her. Their fig-tree has lost all the
+golden glint of summer; the vines "writhe in rows, each impaled on its
+stake"--and like the leaves of the tree, and like the vines, her heart
+"shrivels up and her spirit shrinks curled."
+
+But courage, courage! Winter comes to all--not to them alone. And have
+they not love, and a house big enough to hold them, with its four rooms,
+and the field there, red and rough, not yielding now, but again to
+yield? Rabbits and magpies, though now they find no food there (the
+magpies already have well-nigh deserted it; when one _does_ alight, it
+seems an event), yet will again find food. But November--the chill month
+with its "rebuff"--will see both rabbits and magpies quite
+departed. . . . No! This shall not be her mood. Winter comes indeed to
+mere material nature; God means precisely that the spirit shall inherit
+His power to put life into the darkness and the cold. The spirit defies
+external change:
+
+     "Whom Summer made friends of, let Winter estrange!"
+
+And she turns to go in, for the hour at rest and solaced. They have the
+house, and the field . . . and love.
+
+
+IV.--ALONG THE BEACH
+
+Rest and solace have departed: winter is come--to all. She walks alone
+on the beach; one may do that, "on the edge of the low rocks by the sea,
+for miles";[258:1] and broods once more. She figures him beside her;
+they are speaking frankly of her pain. She "will be quiet." . . .
+Piteous phrase of all unquiet women! She will be quiet; she will "reason
+why he is wrong." Well for her that the talk is but a fancied one; she
+would not win far with such a preamble, were it real! It is thus that in
+almost every word we can trace the destined failure of this loving
+woman. . . . She begins her "reasoning."
+
+     "You wanted my love--is that much true?
+     And so I did love, so I do:
+       What has come of it all along?
+
+     I took you--how could I otherwise?
+       For a world to me, and more;
+     For all, love greatens and glorifies
+     Till God's aglow, to the loving eyes,
+       In what was mere earth before.
+
+     Yes, earth--yes, mere ignoble earth!
+       Now do I mis-state, mistake?
+     Do I wrong your weakness and call it worth?
+     Expect all harvest, dread no dearth,
+       Seal my sense up for your sake?
+
+     Oh, Love, Love, no, Love! Not so, indeed!
+       You were just weak earth, I knew":
+
+--and then, pursuing, she sums him up as we saw at the beginning of our
+study.
+
+Well for her, I say again, that this is but a fancied talk! And since it
+is, we can accord her a measure of wisdom. For she _has_ been wise in
+one thing: she has not "wronged his weakness and called it worth"--that
+memorable phrase, so Browningesque!
+
+She has "seen through" him, yet she loves him. Thus far, then, kind and
+wise in her great passion. . . . But she should _forget_ that she has
+seen through him--she should keep that vision in the background, not
+hold it ever in her sight. And now herself begins to see that this is
+where she has not been wise. She took him for hers, just as he was--and
+did not he, thus accepted, find her his? Has she not watched all that
+was as yet developed in him, and waited patiently, wonderingly, for the
+more to come?
+
+     "Well, and if none of these good things came,
+       What did the failure prove?
+     The man was my whole world, all the same."
+
+_That_ is the fault in her:
+
+       "That I do love, watch too long,
+     And wait too well, and weary and wear;
+     And 'tis all an old story, and my despair
+       Fit subject for some new song."
+
+She has shown him too much love and indulgence and hope implied in the
+indulgence: this was the wrong way. The "bond" has been felt--and such
+"light, light love" as his has wings to fly at the mere suspicion of a
+bond. He has grown weary of her "wisdom"; pleasure is his aim in life,
+and _that_ is always ready to "turn up next in a laughing eye." . . . So
+the songs have said and will say for all time--the new songs for the old
+despair.
+
+But though she knows all this (we seem to see), she will not be able to
+act upon it. Always she will watch too long, and wait too well. Hers is
+a nature as simple as it is intense. No sort of subterfuge is within her
+means--neither the gay deception nor the grave. What she knows that he
+resents, she still must do immutably--bound upon the wheel of her true
+self. For only one "self" she has, and that the wrong one.
+
+She turns back, she walks homeward along the beach--"on the edge of the
+low rocks by the sea, for miles."
+
+
+V.--ON THE CLIFF
+
+But still love is a power! Love can move mountains, for is not love the
+same as faith? And not a mountain is here, but a mere man's
+heart--already "moved," for he _has_ loved her.
+
+It is summer again. She sits on the cliff, leaning back on the short dry
+grass--if one still can call it grass, so "deep was done the work of the
+summer sun." And there near by is the rock, baked dry as the grass, and
+flat as an anvil's face. "No iron like that!" Not a weed nor a shell:
+"death's altar by the lone shore." The drear analogies succeed one
+another; she sees them everywhere, in everything. The dead grass, the
+dead rock. . . . But now, what is this on the turf? A gay blue cricket!
+A cricket--only that? Nay, a war-horse, a magic little steed, a "real
+fairy, with wings all right." And there too on the rock, like a drop of
+fire, that gorgeous-coloured butterfly.
+
+     "No turf, no rock: in their ugly stead,
+     See, wonderful blue and red!"
+
+Shall there not then be other analogies? May not the minds of men,
+though burnt and bare as the turf and the rock, be changed like them,
+transfigured like them:
+
+     "With such a blue-and-red grace, not theirs--
+     Love settling unawares!"
+
+It was almost a miracle, was it not? the way they changed. Such miracles
+happen every day.
+
+
+VI.--READING A BOOK, UNDER THE CLIFF
+
+These clever young men! She is reading a poem of the wind.[262:1] The
+singer asks what the wind wants of him--so instant does it seem in its
+appeal.
+
+     "'Art thou a dumb wronged thing that would be righted,
+       Entrusting thus thy cause to me? Forbear!
+     No tongue can mend such pleadings; faith requited
+       With falsehood--love, at last aware
+     Of scorn--hopes, early blighted--
+
+     'We have them; but I know not any tone
+       So fit as thine to falter forth a sorrow;
+     Dost think men would go mad without a moan,
+       If they knew any way to borrow
+     A pathos like thine own?'"
+
+The splendid lines assail her.[263:1] In her anguish of response she
+turns from them at last--they are too much. This power of perception is
+almost a baseness! And bitterly resentful of the young diviner who can
+thus show forth her inmost woe with his phrase of "love, _at last aware_
+of scorn," she flings the volume from her--rejecting him, detesting him,
+and finding ultimately through her stung sense the way to refute him who
+has dared, with his mere boy's eyes, to discern such anguish. He is
+wrong: the wind does _not_ mean what he fancies by its moaning. He thus
+interprets it, because he thinks only of himself, and of how the
+suffering of others--failure, mistake, disgrace, relinquishment--is but
+the example for his use, the help to his path untried! Such agonies as
+her own are mere instances for him to recognise and put into a
+phrase--like that one, which stings the spirit, and sets the heart to
+woe-fullest aching, and brims the eyes with bitter, bitterest tears. How
+dare he, with his crude boy's heart, embody grief like hers in words,
+how dare he know--and now her irony turns cruel:
+
+     "Oh, he knows what defeat means, and the rest!
+       Himself the undefeated that shall be:
+     Failure, disgrace, he flings them you to test--
+       His triumph in eternity
+     Too plainly manifest!"
+
+Of course he does not know! The wind means something else. And as the
+pain grows fainter, she finds it easier to forgive him. How _could_ "the
+happy, prompt instinctive way of youth" discover the wind's secret? Only
+"the kind, calm years, exacting their accompt of pain" can mature the
+mind. This young poet, grown older, will learn the truth one day--on a
+midsummer morning, at daybreak, looking over some "sparkling foreign
+country," at its height of gloom and gloss. At its height--next minute
+must begin, then, the work of destruction; and what shall be the
+earliest sign? That very wind beginning among the vines:
+
+       "So low, so low, what shall it say but this?
+     'Here is the change beginning, here the lines
+       Circumscribe beauty, set to bliss
+     The limit time assigns.'" . . .
+
+Change is the law of life: _that_ is what the wind says.
+
+     "Nothing can be as it has been before;
+       Better, so call it, only not the same.
+     To draw one beauty into our hearts' core,
+       And keep it changeless! Such our claim;
+     So answered: Never more!
+
+     Simple? Why, this is the old woe of the world;
+       Tune, to whose rise and fall we live and die.
+     Rise with it then! Rejoice that man is hurled
+       From change to change unceasingly,
+     His soul's wings never furled!"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Her rejection of the "young man's pride" has raised her for an instant
+above her own suffering. Flinging back his interpretation in his
+face--that interpretation which had pierced her to the quick with its
+intensity of vision--she has found a better one; and for a while she
+rests in this. "The laws of nature": shall not that be the formula to
+still her pain? . . . Not yet, not yet; the heart was numbed but for a
+moment. Stung to such fresh life as it has been but now, it cries
+imperiously again. The laws of nature?
+
+     "That's a new question; still replies the fact,
+       Nothing endures: the wind moans, saying so;
+     We moan in acquiescence."
+
+Only to acquiescence can we attain.
+
+     "God knows: endure his act!"
+
+But the human loss, the human anguish. . . . Formulas touch not these,
+nor does acquiescence mitigate. Tell ourselves as wisely as we may that
+mutability must be--we yet discern where the woe lies. We cannot fix the
+"one fair good wise thing" just as we grasped it--cannot engrave it, as
+it were, on our souls. And then we die--and it is gone for ever, and we
+would have sunk beneath death's wave, as we sink now, to save it--but
+time washed over it ere death mercifully came. It was abolished even
+while we lived: the wind had begun "so low, so low" . . . and carried
+it away on its moaning voice. Change is the very essence of life; and
+life may be probation for a better life--who knows? But if she could
+have engraved, immutable, on her soul, the hours in which her husband
+loved her. . . .
+
+
+VII.--AMONG THE ROCKS
+
+Such anguish must, at least, "change" with the rest! And now that autumn
+is fully come, the loss of summer is more bearable. It is while we hope
+that summer still may stay that we are tortured.
+
+     "Oh, good gigantic smile o' the brown old earth,
+       This autumn morning!"
+
+She will forget the "laws of nature": she will unreflectingly watch
+earth. That is best.
+
+                     ". . . How he sets his bones
+     To bask i' the sun, and thrusts out knees and feet
+     For the ripple to run over in its mirth;
+       Listening the while, where on the heap of stones
+     The white breast of the sea-lark twitters sweet."
+
+The geniality of earth! She will sink her troubled soul into the vast
+tranquillity. No science, no "cosmic whole"--just this: the brown old
+earth.
+
+But soon the analogy-hunting begins: that soul of hers can never rest.
+What does "this," then, show forth? Her love in its tide can flow over
+the lower nature, as the waves flow over the basking rocks. "Old earth
+smiles and knows":
+
+     "If you loved only what were worth your love,
+     Love were clear gain, and wholly well for you:
+       Make the low nature better by your throes!
+     Give earth yourself, go up for gain above!"
+
+I confess that I cannot follow this analogy. The lesson may be clear--of
+that later; the analogy escapes me. Who says that rocks are of lower
+nature than the sea which washes them? But if it does not mean this,
+what does it mean? Mrs. Orr interprets thus: "As earth blesses her
+smallest creatures with her smile, so should love devote itself to those
+less worthy beings who may be ennobled by it." That seems to me to touch
+this instance not at all. It is the earth who has set "himself" (in the
+unusual personification) to bask in the sun; the earth, _here_, is
+getting, not giving. Or rather, all is one: each element wholly joys in
+the other. And watching this, the woman wrings from it "the doctrine
+simple, ancient, true," that love is self-sacrifice. Let that be true, I
+still cannot see how the symbol aids the doctrine.
+
+And the doctrine? Grant that love is self-sacrifice (I had rather say
+that self-sacrifice is a part, and but a part, of love): is love also
+self-sufficiency?
+
+     "Make the low nature better by your throes."
+
+It is a strange love, surely, which so speaks? Shall a man live,
+despised, in harmony with her who despises him? James Lee's wife may
+call this love, but we absolve James Lee, I think, if he does not! For
+human beings feel most subtly when scorn dwells near them; they may
+indeed have caused that scorn--but let there be no talk of love where it
+subsists.
+
+Even bitterness were less destructive to the woman's hope than this
+strange counting of the cost, this self-sufficiency. Our sympathy must
+leave her at this phase; and sympathy for her was surely Browning's aim?
+But possibly it was not; and _if_ not, this indeed is subtle.
+
+
+VIII.--BESIDE THE DRAWING-BOARD
+
+She had turned wearily from the household cares, the daily direction of
+a little peasant-servant, to her drawing-board. A cast from Leonardo da
+Vinci of a woman's hand is her model, and for an hour she has been
+happily working. She has failed; but that has not clouded joy nor damped
+ardour.
+
+     "Its beauty mounted into my brain,"
+
+and, effacing the failures, she has yielded to a fancy--has taken the
+chalk between her lips, instead of her fingers:
+
+     "With soul to help if the mere lips failed,
+     I kissed all right where the drawing ailed,
+     Kissed fast the grace that somehow slips
+     Still from one's soulless finger-tips."
+
+This hand was that of a worshipped woman. Her fancy sets the ring on
+it, by which one knows
+
+     "That here at length a master found
+     His match, a proud lone soul its mate."
+
+Not even Da Vinci's pencil had been able to trace all the beauty--
+
+                   ". . . how free, how fine
+     To fear almost!--of the limit-line."
+
+_He_, like her, had suffered some defeat. But think of the minutes in
+which, with her he worshipped, he "looked and loved, learned and drew,
+Drew and learned and loved again!" Such moments are not for such as she.
+She will go back to the household cares--she has her lesson, and it is
+not the same as Da Vinci's.
+
+     "Little girl with the poor coarse hand"
+
+. . . this is _her_ model, from whom she had turned to a cold clay cast.
+Her business is to understand, not the almost fearful beauty of a thing
+like this, but "the worth of flesh and blood."
+
+But was not that Da Vinci's business too? Would he not, could she speak
+with him, proudly tell her so? "Nothing but beauty in a hand." Would the
+Master have turned from this peasant one? No: she hears him condemn her,
+laugh her woes to scorn.
+
+     "The fool forsooth is all forlorn
+     Because the beauty she thinks best
+     Lived long ago or was never born,
+     Because no beauty bears the test
+     In this rough peasant hand!"
+
+It was not long before Da Vinci threw aside the faulty pencil, and spent
+years instead of hours in studying, not the mere external loveliness,
+but the anatomy of the hand, learning the veritable use
+
+     "Of flesh and bone and nerve that make
+       The poorest coarsest human hand
+       An object worthy to be scanned
+     A whole life long for their sole sake."
+
+Just the hand--and all the body still to learn. Is not this the lesson
+of life--this incompleteness?
+
+     "Now the parts and then the whole!"
+
+And here is she, declaring that if she is not loved, she must die--she,
+with her stinted soul and stunted body! Look again at the peasant hand.
+No beauty is there--but it can spin the wool and bake the bread:
+
+     "'What use survives the beauty?'"
+
+Yes: Da Vinci would proclaim her fool.
+
+Then _this_ shall be the new formula. She will be of use; will do the
+daily task, forgetting the unattainable ideals. She cannot keep her
+husband's love, any more than she can draw the perfect hand; then she
+will not waste her life in sighing for either gift. She will be useful;
+she will gain cheer _that_ way, since all the others fail her.
+
+     "Go, little girl with the poor coarse hand!
+     I have my lesson, shall understand."
+
+This is the last hope--to be of humble use; this the last formula for
+survival.
+
+
+IX.--ON DECK
+
+And this has failed like the rest. She is on board the boat that carries
+her away from him, she has found the last formula: _set him free_. Well,
+it in its turn has been followed: she is gone. Gone--in every sense.
+
+     "There is nothing to remember in me,
+       Nothing I ever said with a grace,
+     Nothing I did that you care to see,
+       Nothing I was that deserves a place
+     In your mind, now I leave you, set you free."
+
+No "_petite fleur dans la pensee_"--none, none: she grants him all her
+dis-grace. But will he not grant her something too--now that she is
+gone? Will he not grant that men have loved such women, when the women
+have loved them so utterly? It _has_ been: she knows that, and the more
+certainly now that she has yielded finally her claim to a like miracle.
+His soul is locked fast; but, "love for a key" (if he could but have
+loved her!), what might not have happened? She might have grown the same
+in his eyes as he is in hers!
+
+So strange it is to think of _that_. . . . She can think anything when
+such imagining is once possible to her. She can think of _him_ as the
+"harsh, ill-favoured one!" For what would it have mattered--her
+ugliness--if he had loved her? They would have been "like as pea and
+pea." Ever since the world began, love has worked such spells--that is
+so true that she has warrant to work out this strange, new dream.
+
+Imagine it. . . . If he had all her in his heart, as she has all him in
+hers! He, whose least word brought gloom or glee, who never lifted his
+hand in vain--that hand which will hold hers still, from over the
+sea . . . if, when _he_ thinks of her, a face as beautiful as his own
+should rise to his imagination--with eyes as dear, a mouth like that, as
+bright a brow. . . .
+
+     "Till you saw yourself, while you cried ''Tis she!'"
+
+But it will not be--and if it could be, she would not know or care, for
+the joy would have killed her.
+
+Or turn it again the converse way. Supposing he could "fade to a thing
+like her," with the coarse hair and skin . . .
+
+     "You might turn myself!--should I know or care
+     When I should be dead of joy, James Lee?"
+
+Either way it would kill her, so she may as well be gone, with her
+
+     "Love that was life, life that was love";
+
+and there is nothing at all to remember in her. As long as she lives
+his words and looks will circle round _her_ memory. If she could fancy
+one touch of love for her once coming in those words and looks
+again. . . . But the boat moves on, farther, ever farther from the
+little house with its four rooms and its field and fig-tree and
+vines--from the window, the fireside, the doorway, from the beach and
+cliff and rocks. All the formulas have failed but this one. This one
+will not fail. He is set free.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+She had to go; and neither him nor her can we condemn. "One near one is
+too far." She saw and loved too well: one or the other she should have
+been wise enough to hide from him. But she could not. Character is fate;
+and two characters are two fates. Neither, with that other, could be
+different; each might, with another "other," have been all that each was
+meant to be.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[251:1] The poems were first called _James Lee_ only.
+
+[254:1] _Life_, Mrs. Orr, p. 266.
+
+[257:1] "The little church, a field, a few houses, and the sea . . .
+Such a soft sea, and such a mournful wind!"--_Life_, p. 266.
+
+[258:1] _Life_, p. 266.
+
+[262:1] These lines were published by Browning, separately, in 1836,
+when he was twenty-six. _James Lee's Wife_ was published in 1864.
+
+[263:1] Nettleship well says: "The difference between the first and
+second parts of this section is that, while the plaint of the wind was
+enough to make Browning write in 1836, he must have the plaint of a soul
+in 1863. . . . And yet, something is lost."
+
+
+
+
+PART V
+
+[Illustration: THE TROUBLE OF LOVE]
+
+
+
+
+TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE MAN'S
+
+
+I
+
+THE WOMAN UNWON
+
+In the section entitled "Lovers Meeting" we saw the exultant mood of
+love in man, and I there pointed out how seldom even Browning has
+assigned that mood to woman. But he does not show her as alone in
+suffering love's pain. The lyrics we are now to consider give us woman
+as the maker of love's pain for man; we learn her in this character
+through the utterances of men--and these are noble utterances, every
+one. Mr. J. T. Nettleship, in his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks
+that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view
+and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine
+utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is
+imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an
+absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love
+in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."
+
+I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.
+Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on
+the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring
+love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will
+be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman
+should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of
+things as they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish
+his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over
+Nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite
+certainly _a person_--included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning
+should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his
+"teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence
+for man. But the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and
+myself--that, in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when
+expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well
+account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . Can it be,
+then, that Browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much
+less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly
+for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did
+he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of
+women? This, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet I think
+that affirmed it must be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart
+with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that
+of thaumaturgic power--it is but to say that he could not turn himself
+into a woman!
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In what ways does Browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for
+man? First, of course, as loved and unwon. But though this be the most
+obvious of the ways, not obvious is Browning's treatment of it. To love
+"in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. No love is in vain. Grief,
+anguish even, may attend it, but never can its issue be futility. Nor is
+this merely the already familiar view that somehow, though rejected,
+love benignly works for the beloved. "That may be, that _is_" (he seems
+to say), "but it is not the truth which most inspires me." The glory of
+love for Browning resides most radiantly in what it does for the lover's
+own soul. It is "God's secret": one who loves is initiate.
+
+     "Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
+         her;
+     Her soul's mine: and thus, grown perfect, I shall pass my life's
+         remainder.
+     Life will just hold out the proving both our powers, alone and
+         blended:
+     And then, come next life quickly! This world's use will have been
+         ended."
+
+That is the concluding stanza of _Cristina_, which might be called the
+companion-piece to _Porphyria's Lover_; for in each the woman belongs to
+a social world remote from her adorer's; in each she has, nevertheless,
+perceived him and been drawn to him--but in _Cristina_ is caught back
+into the vortex, while in _Porphyria's Lover_ the passion prevails, for
+the man, by killing her, has kept her folded in "God's secret" with
+himself.
+
+     "She should never have looked at me if she meant I should not love
+         her!
+     There are plenty . . . men, you call such, I suppose . . . she may
+         discover
+     All her soul to, if she pleases, and yet leave much as she found
+         them:
+     But I'm not so, and she knew it, when she fixed me, glancing round
+         them."
+
+That is the lover's first impulsive cry on finding himself "thrown
+over." Why did she not leave him alone? Others tell him that that
+"fixing" of hers means nothing--that she is, simply, a coquette. But he
+"can't tell what her look said." Certainly not any "vile cant" about
+giving her heart to him because she saw him sad and solitary, about
+lavishing all that she was on him because he was obscure, and she the
+queen of women. Not _that_, whatever else!
+
+And now, so sure of this that he grows sure of other things as well, he
+declares that it was a moment of true revelation for her also--she
+_did_ perceive in him the man she wanted.
+
+     "Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows! but not quite so sunk that
+         moments,
+     Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, when the spirit's true endowments
+     Stand out plainly from its false ones, and apprise it if pursuing
+     Or the right way or the wrong way, to its triumph or undoing."
+
+That was what she had felt--the queen of women! A coquette, if they
+will, for others, but not for him; and, though cruel to him also in the
+event, not because she had not recognised him. She _had_ recognised him,
+and more--she had recognised the great truth, had deeply felt that the
+soul "stops here" for but one end, the true end, sole and single: "this
+love-way."
+
+If the soul miss that way, it goes wrong. There may be better ends,
+there may even be deeper blisses, but that is the essential--that is the
+significant thing in life.
+
+But they need not smile at his fatuity! He sees that she "knew," but he
+can see the issue also.
+
+     "Oh, observe! of course, next moment, the world's honours, in
+         derision,
+     Trampled out the light for ever. Never fear but there's provision
+     Of the devil's to quench knowledge, lest we walk the earth in
+         rapture" . . .
+
+_That_ must be reckoned with; but all it does to those who "catch God's
+secret" is simply to make them prize their capture so much the more:
+
+     "Such am I: the secret's mine now! She has lost me, I have gained
+         her;"
+
+--for though she has cast him off, he has grasped her soul, and will
+retain it. He has prevailed, and all the rest of his life shall prove
+him the victorious one--the one who has two souls to work with! He will
+prove all that such a pair can accomplish; and then death can come
+quickly: "this world's use will have been ended." She also knew this,
+but would not follow it to its issue. Thus she lost him--but he gained
+her, and that shall do as well.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+No loving "in vain" there! But this poem is the high-water mark of
+unsuccessful love exultant. Browning was too true a humanist to keep us
+always on so shining a peak; he knew that there are lower levels, where
+the wounded wings must rest--that mood, for instance, of wistful
+looking-back to things undreamed-of and now gone, yet once experienced:
+
+     "This is a spray the bird clung to,
+       Making it blossom with pleasure,
+     Ere the high tree-top she sprung to,
+       Fit for her nest and her treasure.
+       Oh, what a hope beyond measure
+     Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to--
+     So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!
+
+     This is a heart the Queen leant on" . . .
+
+--and in a stanza far less lovely than that of the bird, he shows forth
+the analogy. The Queen "went on"; but what a moment that heart had
+had! . . . Gratitude, we see always, for the gift of love in the heart,
+for God's secret. The lover was left alone, but he had known the thrill.
+"Better to have loved and lost"--nay, but "lost," for Browning, is not
+in the scheme. She is there, in the world, whether his or another's.
+
+Sometimes she has never been his at all, has never cared:
+
+     "All June I bound the rose in sheaves.
+     Now, rose by rose, I strip the leaves
+     And strew them where Pauline may pass.
+     She will not turn aside? Alas!
+     Let them lie. Suppose they die?
+     The chance was, they might take her eye."
+
+And then, for many a month, he tried to learn the lute to please her.
+
+     "To-day I venture all I know.
+     She will not hear my music? So!
+     Break the string; fold music's wing:
+     Suppose Pauline had bade me sing!"
+
+Thus we gradually see that all his life he has been learning to love
+her. Now he has resolved to speak. . . . Heaven or hell?
+
+     "She will not give me heaven? 'Tis well!
+     Lose who may--I still can say
+     Those who win heaven, blest are they!"
+
+Here again is Browning's typical lover. Never does he whine, never
+resent: she was free to choose, and she has not chosen _him_. That is
+pain; but of the "humiliation" commonly assigned to unsuccessful love,
+he never dreams: where can be humiliation in having caught God's
+secret? . . . And even if she have half-inclined to him, but found that
+not all herself can give herself--more pain in that, a nearer approach
+to "failure," perhaps--even so, he understands.
+
+     "I said--Then dearest, since 'tis so,
+     Since now at length my fate I know,
+     Since nothing all my love avails,
+     Since all, my life seemed meant for, fails,
+       Since this was written and needs must be--
+     My whole heart rises up to bless
+     Your name in pride and thankfulness!
+     Take back the hope you gave--I claim
+     Only a memory of the same
+     --And this beside, if you will not blame,
+       Your leave for one more last ride with me."
+
+The girl hesitates. Her proud dark eyes, half-pitiful, dwell on him for
+a moment--"with life or death in the balance," thinks he.
+
+                                   ". . . Right!
+     The blood replenished me again;
+     My last thought was at least not vain;
+     I and my mistress, side by side
+     Shall be together, breathe and ride;
+     So, one day more am I deified.
+       _Who knows but the world may end to-night?_"[285:1]
+
+Now the moment comes in which he lifts her to the saddle. It is as if he
+had drawn down upon his breast the fairest, most celestial cloud in
+evening-skies . . . a cloud touched gloriously at once by setting sun
+and rising moon and evening-star.
+
+     "Down on you, near and yet more near,
+     Till flesh must fade for heaven was here--
+     Thus leant she and lingered--joy and fear!
+       Thus lay she a moment on my breast."
+
+And then they begin to ride. His soul smooths itself out--there shall be
+no repining, no questioning: he will take the whole of his hour.
+
+     "Had I said that, had I done this,
+     So might I gain, so might I miss.
+     Might she have loved me? just as well
+     She might have hated, who can tell!
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+       And here we are riding, she and I."
+
+_He_ is not the only man who has failed. All men strive--who succeeds?
+His enfranchised spirit seems to range the universe--everywhere the
+_done_ is petty, the undone vast; everywhere men dream beyond their
+powers:
+
+     "I hoped she would love me; here we ride!"
+
+No one gains all. Hand and brain are never equal; hearts, when they can
+greatly conceive, fail in the greatest courage; nothing we do is just
+what we dreamed it might be. We are hedged in everywhere by the fleshly
+screen. But _they_ two ride, and he sees her bosom lift and fall. . . .
+To the rest, then, their crowns! To the statesman, ten lines, perhaps,
+which contain the fruit of all his life; to a soldier, a flag stuck on a
+heap of bones--and as guerdon for each, a name scratched on the Abbey
+stones.
+
+     "My riding is better, by their leave!"
+
+Even our artists! The poet says the thing, but we feel it. Not one of us
+can express it like him; but has he _had_ it? When he dies, will he have
+been a whit nearer his own sublimities than the lesser spirits who have
+never turned a line?
+
+     "Sing, riding's a joy! For me, I ride."
+
+(Note the fine irony here. The poet shall sing the joy of riding; this
+man _rides_.)
+
+The great sculptor, too, with his twenty years' slavery to Art:
+
+     "And that's your Venus, whence we turn
+     To yonder girl that fords the burn!"
+
+But the sculptor, with his insight, acquiesces, so this man need not
+pity him. The musician fares even worse. After _his_ life's labours,
+they say (even his friends say) that the opera is great in intention,
+but fashions change so quickly in music--he is out-of-date. He gave his
+youth? Well--
+
+     "I gave my youth; but we ride, in fine."
+
+Supposing we could know perfect bliss in this world, what should we have
+for which to strive? We must lead some life beyond, we must have a bliss
+to die for! If _he_ had this glory-garland round his soul, what other
+joy could he ever so dimly descry?
+
+     "Earth being so good, would heaven seem best?
+       Now, heaven and she are beyond this ride."
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Thus he has mused, riding beside her, to the horses' rhythmic stretching
+pace. It shall be best as she decrees. She rejects him: he will not
+whine; what she does shall somehow have its good for him--_she_ shall
+not be wrong! He has the thought of her in his soul, and the memory of
+her--and there will be, as well, the memory of this ride. That moment he
+has, whole and perfect:
+
+     "Who knows but the world may end to-night!"
+
+Yes; they ride on--the sights, the sounds, the thoughts, encompass them;
+they are together. His soul, all hers, has yet been half-withdrawn from
+her, so deeply has he mused on what she is to him: it is the great
+paradox--almost one forgets that she is there, so intimate the union,
+and so silent. . . . But is she _not_ there? and, being there, does she
+not now seem to give him something strange and wonderful to take from
+her? She _is_ there--
+
+     "And yet--she has not spoke so long!"
+
+She is as silent as he. They might both be in a trance. He knows what
+his trance is--can it be that hers is the same? Then what would it
+mean? . . . And the hope so manfully resigned floods back on him. What
+if this _be_ heaven--what if she has found, caught up like him, that she
+does love?
+
+Can it mean that, gazing both, now in this glorious moment, at life's
+flower of love, they both are fixed so, ever shall so abide--she with
+him, as he with her? Can it mean that the instant is made eternity--
+
+     "And heaven just prove that I and she
+       Ride, ride together, for ever ride?"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Despite the transcendental interpretations of this glorious
+love-song--surpassed, I think and many others think, by none in the
+world--I believe that the concluding stanza means just that. Hope has
+rushed on him again from her twin-silence--can she be at one with him in
+all, as she is in this? Will the proud dark eyes have forgotten the
+pity--and the pride? . . . The wrong that has been done to Browning by
+his too-subtle "interpreters" is, in my view, incalculable. Always he
+must be, for them, the teacher. But he is the _poet_! He "sings,
+riding's a joy"--and such joy brings hope along with it, hope for the
+"obvious human bliss." People seem to forget that it was Browning who
+made that phrase[289:1]--which might almost be his protest against the
+transcendentalists.
+
+Much of his finest work has been thus falsified, thus strained to
+meanings so "profound" as to be none at all. Mr. Nettleship's gloss upon
+this stanza of _The Last Ride_ is a case in point. "[The lover] buoys
+himself with the hope that the highest bliss _may_ be the change from
+the minute's joy to an eternal fulfilment of joy." Does this mean
+anything? And if it did, does that stanza mean _it_? I declare that it
+means nothing, and that the stanza means what instinctively (I feel and
+know) each reader, reading it--not "studying" it--accepts as its best
+meaning: the human one, the true following of the so subtly-induced
+mood. And that is, simply, the invigoration, the joy, of riding; and the
+hope which comes along with that invigoration and that joy.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In the strange _Numpholeptos_ we find, by implication, the heart of
+Browning's "message" for women. "The nympholepts of old," explains Mr.
+Augustine Birrell in one of the volumes of _Obiter Dicta_, "were those
+unfortunates who, whilst carelessly strolling among sylvan shades,
+caught a hasty glimpse of some spiritual inmate of the woods, in whose
+pursuit their whole lives were ever afterwards fruitlessly spent."
+
+The man here has fallen in love with "an angelically pure and inhumanly
+cold woman, who requires in him an unattainable union of immaculate
+purity and complete experience of life."[290:1]
+
+She does not reject his love, but will wholly accept it only on these
+impossible terms. Herself dwells in some "magic hall" whence ray forth
+shafts of coloured light--crimson, purple, yellow; and along these
+shafts, which symbolise experience, her lover is to travel--coming back
+to her at close of each wayfaring, for the rays end before her feet,
+beneath her eyes and smile, as they began. He goes forth in obedience;
+he comes back. Ever the issue is the same: he comes back smirched. And
+she--forgives him, but not loves him.
+
+     "What means the sad slow silver smile above
+     My clay but pity, pardon?--at the best
+     But acquiescence that I take my rest,
+     Contented to be clay?"
+
+She "smiles him slow forgiveness"--nothing more; he is dismissed, must
+travel forth again. _This_ time he may return, untinged by the ray which
+he is to traverse. She sends him, deliberately; he must break through
+the quintessential whiteness that surrounds her--but he is to come back
+unsmirched. So she pitilessly, for all her "pity," has decreed.
+
+And patient, mute, obedient, always he has gone--until this day. This
+day his patience fails him, and he speaks. Once more he had come
+back--once more been "pardoned." But the pity was so gentle--like a
+moon-beam. He had almost hoped the smile would pass the "pallid moonbeam
+limit," be "transformed at last to sunlight and salvation." If she could
+pass that goal and "gain love's birth," he scarce would know his clay
+from gold's own self; "for gold means love." . . . But no; the "sad slow
+silver smile" had meant, as ever, naught but pity, pardon, acquiescence
+in his lesserness for _him_. _She_ acquiesced not; she keeps her love
+for the "spirit-seven" before God's throne.[291:1]
+
+He then made one supreme appeal for
+
+     "Love, the love sole and whole without alloy."
+
+Vainly! Such an appeal "must be felt, not heard." Her calm regard was
+unchanged--nay, rather it had grown harsh and hard, had seemed to imply
+disdain, repulsion, and he could not face those things; he rose from his
+kissing of her feet--he _did_ go forth again. This time he might return,
+immaculate, from the path of that "lambent flamelet." . . . He knew he
+could not, but--he _might_! She promises that he can: should he not
+trust her?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And now, to-day, once more he is returned. Still she stands, still she
+listens, still she smiles! But he protests at last:
+
+     "Surely I had your sanction when I faced,
+     Fared forth upon that untried yellow ray
+     Whence I retrack my steps?"
+
+The crimson, the purple had been explored; from them he had come back
+deep-stained. How has the yellow used him? He has placed himself again
+for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of
+that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly:
+she _had_ ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and
+body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and
+frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"--just as he had been
+with crimson, purple!
+
+She willed it so: he was to track the yellow ray. He pleads once more
+her own permission--nay, command! And, as before, she shows
+
+     "Scarce recognition, no approval, some
+     Mistrust, more wonder at a man become
+     Monstrous in garb, nay--flesh-disguised as well,
+     Through his adventure."
+
+But she had said that, if he were worthily to retain her love, he must
+share the knowledge shrined in her supernal eyes. And this was the one
+way for _man_ to gain that knowledge. Well, it is as before:
+
+     "I pass into your presence, I receive
+     Your smile of pity, pardon, and I leave."
+
+But no! This time he will not leave, he will not dumbly bend to his
+penance. Hitherto he has trusted her word that the feat can be achieved,
+the ray trod to its edge, yet he return unsmirched. He has tried the
+experiment--and returned, "absurd as frightful." This is his last word.
+
+                            ". . . No, I say:
+     No fresh adventure! No more seeking love
+     At end of toil, and finding, calm above
+     My passion, the old statuesque regard,
+     The sad petrific smile!"
+
+And he turns upon her with a violent invective. She is not so much hard
+and hateful as mistaken and obtuse.
+
+     "You very woman with the pert pretence
+     To match the male achievement!"
+
+_Who_ could not be victorious when all is made easy, when the rough
+effaces itself to smooth, the gruff "grinds down and grows a whisper";
+when man's truth subdues its rapier-edge to suit the bulrush spear that
+womanly falsehood fights with? Oh woman's ears that will not hear the
+truth! oh woman's "thrice-superfine feminity of sense," that ignores, as
+by right divine, the process, and takes the spotless result from out the
+very muck that made it!
+
+But he breaks off. "Ah me!" he cries,
+
+     "The true slave's querulous outbreak!"
+
+And forth again, all slavishly, at her behest he fares. Who knows but
+_this_ time the "crimson quest" may deepen to a sunrise, not decay to
+that cold sad sweet smile--which he obeys?
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Such a being as this, said Browning himself, "is imaginary, not real; a
+nymph and no woman"; but the poem is "an allegory of an impossible ideal
+of love, accepted conventionally." _How_ impossible he has shown not
+only here but everywhere--_how_ conventionally accepted. This is not
+woman's mission! And in the lover's querulous outbreak--the "true
+slave's" outbreak--we may read the innermost meaning of the allegory. If
+women will set up "the pert pretence to match the male achievement,"
+they must consent to take the world as men are forced to take it. There
+must be no unfairness, no claim on the chivalry which has sought to
+shield them: in the homely phrase, they must "take the rough with the
+smooth"--not the stainless result alone, with a revolted shudder for the
+marrings which have made it possible.
+
+But having flung these truths at her, observe that the man rues them. He
+accepts himself as a slave: the slave (as I read this passage) to what
+is _true_ in the idea of woman's purity. The insufferable creature of
+the smile is (as he says) the "mistaken and obtuse unreason of a
+she-intelligence"; but somewhere there was right in her demand. If man
+could but return, unstained! He must go forth, must explore the rays--of
+all the claims of woman on him this is most insistent; but if he could
+explore, and not return "absurd as frightful." . . . He cannot.
+Experience is not whole without "some wonder linked with fear"--the
+colours! The shafts ray from her "midmost home"; she "dwells there,
+hearted." True, but this is not _experience_, and she shall not conceit
+herself into believing it to be. She shall not set up the "pert pretence
+to match the male achievement": she shall learn that men make women
+"easy victors," when their rough effaces itself to smooth for woman's
+sake. One or the other she must choose: knowledge and the right to
+judge, or ignorance and the duty to refrain from judgment. . . . And
+yet--he goes again; he obeys the silver smile! For the "crimson-quest
+may deepen to a sunrise"; he _may_ come back and find her waiting,
+"sunlight and salvation," because she understands at last; and both
+shall look for stains from those long shafts, and see none there. . . .
+Maybe, maybe: he goes--will come again one day; and _that_ at last may
+prove itself the day when "men are pure, and women brave."
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+We pass from the unearthly atmosphere of _Numpholeptos_--well-nigh the
+most abstract of all Browning's poems--to the vivid, astonishing realism
+of _Too Late_.
+
+Edith is dead, and the man who loved her and failed to win her, is
+musing upon the transmutation of all values in his picture of life which
+has been made by the tidings. Not till now had he fully realised his
+absorption in the thought of her: "the woman I loved so well, who
+married the other." He had been wont to "sit and look at his life." That
+life, until he met her, had rippled and run like a river. But he met her
+and loved her and lost her--and it was as if a great stone had been cast
+by a devil into his life's mid-current. The waves strove about it--the
+waves that had "come for their joy, and found this horrible stone
+full-tide."
+
+The stone thwarted God. But the lover has had two ways of thinking about
+it. Though the waves, in all their strength and fullness, could not win
+past, a thread of water might escape and run through the
+"evening-country," safe, untormented, silent, until it reached the sea.
+This would be his tender, acquiescent brooding on all she is to him, and
+the hope that still they may be united at the last, though time shall
+then have stilled his passion.
+
+The second way was better!
+
+     "Or else I would think, 'Perhaps some night
+       When new things happen, a meteor-ball
+     May slip through the sky in a line of light,
+       And earth breathe hard, and landmarks fall,
+     And my waves no longer champ nor chafe,
+       Since a stone will have rolled from its place: let be!'"
+
+For the husband might die, and he, still young and vigorous, might try
+again to win her. . . . That was how he had been wont to "sit and look
+at his life."
+
+     "But, Edith dead! No doubting more!"
+
+All the dreams are over; all the brooding days have been lived in vain.
+
+     "But, dead! All's done with: wait who may,
+       Watch and wear and wonder who will.
+     Oh, my whole life that ends to-day!
+       Oh, my soul's sentence, sounding still,
+     'The woman is dead that was none of his;
+       And the man that was none of hers may go!'
+     There's only the past left: worry that!" . . .
+
+All that he was or could have been, she should have had for a word, a
+"want put into a look." She had not given that look; now she can never
+give it--and perhaps she _does_ want him. He feels that she does--a
+"pulse in his cheek that stabs and stops" assures him that she "needs
+help in her grave, and finds none near"--that from his heart, precisely
+_his_, she now at last wants warmth. And he can only send it--so! . . .
+His acquiescence then had been his error.
+
+     "I ought to have done more: once my speech,
+       And once your answer, and there, the end,
+     And Edith was henceforth out of reach!
+       Why, men do more to deserve a friend,
+     Be rid of a foe, get rich, grow wise,
+       Nor, folding their arms, stare fate in the face.
+     Why, better even have burst like a thief
+       _And borne you away to a rock for us two,
+       In a moment's horror, bright, bloody and brief_" . . .
+
+Well, _he_ had not done this. But--
+
+     "What did the other do? You be judge!
+       Look at us, Edith! Here are we both!
+     Give him his six whole years: I grudge
+       None of the life with you, nay, loathe
+     Myself that I grudged his start in advance
+       Of me who could overtake and pass.
+     But, as if he loved you! No, not he,
+       Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain" . . .
+
+--for he who speaks, though he so loved and loves her, knows that he is
+and was alone in his worship. He knows even that such worship of her
+was among unaccountable things. That _he_, young, prosperous, sane, and
+free, as he was and is, should have poured his life out, as it were, and
+held it forth to _her_, and said, "Half a glance, and I drop the
+glass!" . . . For--and now we come to those amazing stanzas which place
+this passionate love-song by itself in the world--
+
+     "Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
+       More than they said; I was 'ware and watched:
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+     The others? No head that was turned, no heart
+       Broken, my lady, assure yourself!"
+
+Her admirers had quickly recovered: one married a dancer, others stole a
+friend's wife, or stagnated or maundered, or else, unmarried, strove to
+believe that the peace of singleness _was_ peace, and not--what they
+were finding it! But whatever these rejected suitors did, the truth
+about her was simply that
+
+     "On the whole, you were let alone, I think."
+
+And laid so, on the shelf, she had "looked to the other, who
+acquiesced." He was a poet, was he not?
+
+     "He rhymed you his rubbish nobody read,
+       Loved you and doved you--did not I laugh?"
+
+Oh, what a prize! Had she appreciated adequately her pink of
+poets? . . . But, after all, she had chosen him, before _this_ lover:
+they had both been tried.
+
+     "Oh, heart of mine, marked broad with her mark,
+     _Tekel_, found wanting, set aside,
+       Scorned! See, I bleed these tears in the dark
+     Till comfort come, and the last be bled:
+     He? He is tagging your epitaph."
+
+And now sounds that cry of the girl of _In a Year_.
+
+     "If it could only come over again!"
+
+She _must_ have loved him best. If there had been time. . . . She would
+have probed his heart and found what blood is; then would have twitched
+the robe from her lay-figure of a poet, and pricked that leathern heart,
+to find that only verses could spurt from it. . . .
+
+     "And late it was easy; late, you walked
+       Where a friend might meet you; Edith's name
+     Arose to one's lip if one laughed or talked;
+       If I heard good news, you heard the same;
+     When I woke, I knew that your breath escaped;
+       I could bide my time, keep alive, alert."
+
+Now she is dead: "no doubting more." . . . But somehow he will get his
+good of it! He will keep alive--and long, she shall see; but not like
+the others; there shall be no turning aside, and he will begin at once
+as he means to end. Those others may go on with the world--get gold,
+get women, betray their wives and their husbands and their friends.
+
+     "There are two who decline, a woman and I,
+       And enjoy our death in the darkness here."[301:1]
+
+And he recurs to her cherished, her dwelt-on, adored defects. Only _he_
+could have loved her so, in despite of them. The most complex mood of
+lovers, this! Humility and pride are mingled; one knows not which is
+which--the pride of love, humility of self. Only so could the loved one
+have declined to our level; only so could our love acquire value in
+those eyes--and yet "the others" did not love so, the defects _were_
+valid: there should be some recognition: "_I_ loved, _quand meme_!" Why,
+it was almost the defects that brought the thrill:
+
+     "I liked that way you had with your curls,
+       Wound to a ball in a net behind:
+     Your cheek was chaste as a quaker-girl's,
+       And your mouth--there was never, to my mind,
+     Such a funny mouth, for it would not shut;
+       And the dented chin, too--what a chin!
+     There were certain ways when you spoke, some words
+       That you know you never could pronounce:
+     You were thin, however; like a bird's
+       Your hand seemed--some would say, the pounce
+     Of a scaly-footed hawk--all but!
+       The world was right when it called you thin.
+
+     But I turn my back on the world: I take
+       Your hand, and kneel, and lay to my lips.
+     Bid me live, Edith!"
+
+--and she shall be queen indeed, shall have high observance, courtship
+made perfect. He seems to see her stand there--
+
+     "Warm too, and white too: would this wine
+     Had washed all over that body of yours,
+       Ere I drank it, and you down with it, thus!"
+
+. . . The wine of his life, that she would not take--but she shall take
+it now! He will "slake thirst at her presence" by pouring it away, by
+drinking it down with her, as long ago he yearned to do. Edith needs
+help in her grave and finds none near--wants warmth from his heart? He
+sends it--so.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+Assuredly this is the meaning; yet none of the commentators says so. She
+was the man's whole life, and she has died. Then he dies too, that he
+may live.
+
+     "There are two who decline, a woman and I,
+       And enjoy our death in the darkness here."
+
+Yet even in this we have no sense of failure, of "giving-in": it is for
+intenser life that he dies, and she shall be his queen "while his soul
+endures."
+
+This is the last of my "women unwon." In none of all these poems does
+courage fail; love is ever God's secret. It comes and goes: the heart
+has had its moment. It does not come at all: the heart has known the
+loved one's loveliness. It has but hoped to come: the heart hoped with
+it. It has set a price upon itself, a cruel crushing price: the heart
+will pay it, if it can be paid. It has waked too late--it calls from the
+grave: the heart will follow it there. No love is in vain:
+
+     "For God above creates the love to reward the love."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[277:1] He excepts, of course, all through this passage, _Any Wife to
+any Husband_--a poem which has not fallen into my scheme.
+
+[285:1] No line which Browning has written is more characteristic than
+this--nor more famous.
+
+[289:1] In _By the Fireside_.
+
+[290:1] Arthur Symons, _Introduction to the Study of Browning_, p. 198.
+
+[291:1] Browning himself, asked by Dr. Furnivall, on behalf of the
+Browning Society, to explain this allusion, answered in the fashion
+which he often loved to use towards such inquirers: "The 'seven spirits'
+are in the Apocalypse, also in Coleridge and Byron, a common
+image." . . . "I certainly never intended" (he also said) "to personify
+wisdom, or philosophy, or any other abstraction." And he summed up the,
+after all, sufficiently obvious meaning by saying that _Numpholeptos_ is
+"an allegory of an impossible ideal object of love, accepted
+conventionally as such by a man who all the while" (as I have once or
+twice had occasion to say of himself!) "cannot quite blind himself to
+the fact that" (to put it more concisely than he) knowledge and purity
+are best obtained by achievement. Still more concisely:
+"Innocence--sin--virtue"--in the Hegelian chord of experience.
+
+[301:1] Here is a clear echo of Heine, in one of his most renowned
+lyrics:--
+
+     "The dead stand up, 'tis the midnight bell,
+       In crazy dances they're leaping:
+     We two in the grave lie well, lie well,
+       And I in thine arms am sleeping.
+
+     The dead stand up, 'tis the Judgment Day,
+       To Heaven or Hell they're hieing:
+     We two care nothing, we two will stay
+       Together quietly lying."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+THE WOMAN WON
+
+
+Love is not static. We may not sit down and say, "It cannot be more than
+now; it will not be less. Henceforth I take it for granted." Though she
+be won, there still is more to do. I say "she" (and Browning says it),
+because the taking-for-granted ideal is essentially man's--woman has
+never been persuaded to hold it. Possibly it is _because_ men feel so
+keenly the elusiveness of women that they grow weary in the quest of the
+real Herself. But, says Browning, they must not grow weary in it.
+Elusive though she be, her lover must not leave her uncaptured. For if
+love is the greatest adventure, it is also the longest. We cannot come
+to an end of it--and, if we were wise, should not desire so to do.
+
+But is she in truth so elusive? Are not women far simpler than they are
+accounted? "The First Reader in another language," I have elsewhere said
+of them; but doubtless a woman cannot be the judge. Let us see what
+Browning, subtle as few other men, thought of our lucidity.
+
+             "Room after room,
+             I hunt the house through
+             We inhabit together.
+     Heart, fear nothing, for, heart, thou shalt find her--
+     Next time, herself!--not the trouble behind her
+     Left in the curtain, the couch's perfume!
+     As she brushed it, the cornice-wreath blossomed anew;
+     Yon looking-glass gleamed at the wave of her feather."
+
+So elusive, says this man, is the real Herself! But (I maintain) she
+does not know it. She goes her way, unconscious--or, if conscious, blind
+to its deepest implication. Caprice, mood, whim: these indeed she uses,
+_for fun_, as it were, but of "the trouble behind her" she knows
+nothing. Just to rise from a couch, pull a curtain, pass through a room!
+How should she dream that the cornice-wreath blossomed anew? And when
+she tossed her hat off, or carefully put it on before the mirror . . .
+if the glass did gleam, it was a trick of light; _she_ did not produce
+it! For, conscious of this magic, she would lose it; her very
+inapprehensiveness it is which "brings it off." Yet she loves to hear
+her lover tell of such imaginings, and the more he tells, the more there
+seem to be for him.
+
+     "Yet the day wears,
+     And door succeeds door;
+     I try the fresh fortune--
+     Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.
+     Still the same chance! she goes out as I enter.
+     Spend my whole day in the quest, who cares?
+     But 'tis twilight, you see--with such suites to explore,
+     Such closets to search, such alcoves to importune!"
+
+Listening, she begins to understand how deeply he means "herself." It is
+not only the spell that she leaves behind her in the mere, actual rooms:
+it is the mystery residing in her "house of flesh." What does _that_
+house contain--where is _she_? He seems to hold her, yet she "goes out
+as he enters"; he seems to have found her, yet it is like hide-and-seek
+at twilight, and half-a-hundred hiders in a hundred rooms!
+
+She listens, puzzled; perhaps a little frightened to be so much of a
+secret. For she never meant to be--she cannot feel that she _is_; and
+thus, how shall she help him to "find" her? Perhaps she must always
+elude? She does not desire that: he must not let her escape him! And he
+quickly answers:
+
+     "Escape me?
+     Never--
+     Beloved!
+     While I am I, and you are you,
+     So long as the world contains us both,
+     Me the loving and you the loth,
+     While the one eludes, must the other pursue."
+
+But she is not "the loth"; that is all his fancy. She wants him to find
+her. And this, in its turn, scares _him_.
+
+     "My life is a fault at last, I fear:
+     It seems too much like a fate, indeed!
+     Though I do my best, I shall scarce succeed."
+
+It is the trouble of love. He may never reach her. . . . They look at
+one another, and he takes heart again.
+
+     "But what if I fail of my purpose here?
+     It is but to keep the nerves at strain,
+     To dry one's eyes and laugh at a fall,
+     And, baffled, get up and begin again--
+     So the chase takes up one's life, that's all."
+
+But she is now almost repelled. She is not this enigma: she _wants_ him
+to grasp her. Well, then, she can help him, he says:
+
+     "Look but once from your farthest bound
+     At me so deep in the dust and dark,
+     No sooner the old hope goes to ground
+     Than a new one, straight to the self-same mark,
+           I shape me--
+           Ever
+           Removed!"
+
+Is not this the meaning? The two poems seem to me supplementary of each
+other. First, the sense of her elusiveness; then the dim resentment and
+fear which this knowledge of mystery awakes in her. She does not (as I
+have seemed to make her) _speak_ in either of these poems; but the
+thoughts are those which she must have, and so far, surely, her lover
+can divine her? The explanation given both by Mrs. Orr and Berdoe of
+_Love in a Life_ (the first lyric), that the lover is "inhabiting the
+same house with his love," seems to me simply inept. Is it not clear
+that no material house[308:1] is meant? They are both inhabiting the
+_body_; and she, passing through this sphere, touching it at various
+points, leaves the spell of her mere being everywhere--on the curtain,
+the couch, the cornice-wreath, the mirror. But through _her_ house he
+cannot range, as she through actualities. And though ever she eludes
+him, this is not what she sets out to do; she needs his comprehension;
+she does not desire to "escape" him.
+
+The old enigma that is no enigma--the sphinx with the answer to the
+riddle ever trembling on her lips! But if she were understood, she might
+be taken for granted. . . . So the lips may tremble, but the answer is
+kept back:
+
+     "While the one eludes must the other pursue."
+
+"The desire of the man is for the woman; the desire of the woman is for
+the desire of the man."
+
+In those two poems the lovers are almost gay; they can turn and smile at
+one another 'mid the perplexity. The man is eager, resolute, humorous;
+the woman, if not acquiescent, is at least apprehending. The heart
+shall find her some day: "next time herself, not the trouble behind
+her!" She feels that she can aid him to that finding; it depends, in the
+last resort, on _her_.
+
+But in _Two in the Campagna_ a different lover is to deal with. What he
+wants is more than this. He wants to pass the limits of personality, to
+forget the search in the oneness. There is more than "finding" to be
+done: finding is not the secret. He tries to tell her--and he cannot
+tell her, for he does not himself fully know.
+
+     "I wonder do you feel to-day
+       As I have felt since, hand in hand,
+     We sat down on the grass, to stray
+       In spirit better through the land,
+     This morn of Rome and May?"
+
+His thought escapes him ever. Like a spider's silvery thread it mocks
+and eludes; he seeks to catch it, to hang his rhymes upon it. . . . No;
+it escapes, escapes.
+
+     "Help me to hold it! First it left
+       The yellowing fennel. . . ."
+
+What does the fennel mean? Something, but he cannot grasp it--and the
+thread now seems to float upon that weed with the orange cup, where five
+green beetles are groping--but not there either does it rest . . . it is
+all about him: entangling, eluding:
+
+     "Everywhere on the grassy slope,
+       I traced it. Hold it fast!"
+
+The grassy slope may be the secret! That infinity of passion and
+peace--the Roman Campagna:
+
+     "The champaign with its endless fleece
+       Of feathery grasses everywhere!
+     Silence and passion, joy and peace,
+       An everlasting wash of air--
+     Rome's ghost since her decease."
+
+And think of all that that plain even now stands for:
+
+     "Such life here, through such lengths of hours,
+       Such miracles performed in play,
+     Such primal naked forms of flowers,
+       Such letting nature have her way
+     While heaven looks from its towers!"
+
+They love one another: why cannot they be like that plain, why cannot
+_they_ "let nature have her way"? Does she understand?
+
+     "How say you? Let us, O my dove,
+       Let us be unashamed of soul,
+     As earth lies bare to heaven above!
+       How is it under our control
+     To love or not to love?"
+
+But always they stop short of one another. That is the dread mystery:
+
+     "I would that you were all to me,
+       You that are just so much, no more.
+     Nor yours nor mine, nor slave nor free!
+       Where does the fault lie? What the core
+     O' the wound, since wound must be?"
+
+He longs to yield his will, his whole being--to see with her eyes, set
+his heart beating by hers, drink his fill from her soul; make her part
+his--_be_ her. . . .
+
+     "No. I yearn upward, touch you close,
+       Then stand away. I kiss your cheek,
+     Catch your soul's warmth--I pluck the rose
+       And love it more than tongue can speak--
+     Then the good minute goes."
+
+Goes--with such swiftness! Already he is "far out of it." And shall this
+never be different?
+
+                    ". . . Must I go
+     Still like the thistle-ball, no bar,
+       Onward, whenever light winds blow?"
+
+He must indeed, for already he is "off again":
+
+     "Just when I seemed about to learn!"
+
+Even the letting nature have her way is not the secret. The thread is
+lost again:
+
+     "The old trick! Only I discern--
+       Infinite passion, and the pain
+     Of finite hearts that yearn."
+
+_No_ contact is close enough. The passion is infinite, the hearts are
+finite. The deepest love must suffer this doom of isolation: plunged as
+they may be in one another, body and soul, in the very rapture is the
+sentence. The good minute goes. It shall be theirs again--again they
+shall trust it, again the thread be lost: "the old trick!"
+
+For it is the very trick of life, as here we know it. The Campagna
+itself says that--
+
+     "Rome's ghost since her decease."
+
+Mutability, mutability! Though the flowers are the primal, naked forms,
+they are not the same flowers; though love is ever new, it is ever old.
+_New as to-day is new: old as to-day is old_; and all the lovers have
+discerned, like him,
+
+     "Infinite passion, and the pain
+     Of finite hearts that yearn."
+
+For has she helped him to hold the thread? No; she too has been the
+sport of "the old trick." And even of that he cannot be wholly sure:
+
+     "I _wonder_ do you feel to-day
+     As I have felt . . . ?"
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+In the enchanting _Lovers' Quarrel_ we find a less metaphysical pair
+than those whom we have followed in their quest. This man has not taken
+her for granted, but neither has he frightened her with the mystery of
+her own and his elusiveness. No; these two have just had, very humanly
+and gladly, the "time of their lives"! All through the winter they have
+frolicked: there never was a more enchanting love than she, and plainly
+he has charmed her just as much. The same sort of fun appealed to them
+both at the same moment--games out of straws of their own devising;
+drawing one another's faces in the ashes of the hearth:
+
+     "Free on each other's flaws,
+     How we chattered like two church daws!"
+
+And then the _Times_ would come in--and the Emperor has married his
+Mlle. de Montijo!
+
+     "There they sit ermine-stoled,
+     And she powders her hair with gold."
+
+Or a travel-book arrives from the library--and the two heads are close
+together over the pictures.
+
+     "Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
+     Miles and miles of gold and green
+       Where the sunflowers blow
+       In a solid glow,
+     And to break now and then the screen--
+       Black neck and eyeballs keen,
+     Up a wild horse leaps between!"
+
+. . . No picture in the book like that--what a genius he is! The book is
+pushed away; and there lies the table bare:
+
+     "Try, will our table turn?
+     Lay your hands there light, and yearn
+       Till the yearning slips
+       Thro' the finger-tips
+     In a fire which a few discern,
+       And a very few feel burn,
+     And the rest, they may live and learn!
+
+     Then we would up and pace,
+     For a change, about the place,
+       Each with arm o'er neck:
+       'Tis our quarter-deck,
+     We are seamen in woeful case.
+       Help in the ocean-space!
+     Or, if no help, we'll embrace."
+
+The next play must be "dressing-up"; for the sailor-game had ended in
+that nonsense of a kiss because they had not thought of dressing
+properly the parts:
+
+     "See how she looks now, dressed
+     In a sledging-cap and vest!
+       'Tis a huge fur cloak--
+       Like a reindeer's zoke
+     Falls the lappet along the breast:
+       Sleeves for her arms to rest,
+     Or to hang, as my Love likes best."
+
+Now it is _his_ turn; he must learn to "flirt a fan as the Spanish
+ladies can"--but she must pretend too, so he makes her a burnt-cork
+moustache, and she "turns into such a man!" . . .
+
+All this was three months ago, when the snow first mesmerised the earth
+and put it to sleep. Snow-time is love-time--for hearts can then show
+all:
+
+     "How is earth to know
+     Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?"
+
+            *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months ago--and now it is spring, and such a dawn of day! The
+March sun feels like May. He looks out upon it:
+
+         "All is blue again
+         After last night's rain,
+     And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
+         Only, my Love's away!
+     I'd as lief that the blue were grey."
+
+Yes--she is gone; they have quarrelled. Or rather, since it does not
+take two to do that wretched deed, _she_ has quarrelled. It was some
+little thing that he said--neither sneer nor vaunt, nor reproach nor
+taunt:
+
+     "And the friends were friend and foe!"
+
+She went away, and she has not come back, and it is three months ago.
+
+One cannot help suspecting that the little thing he said, which was
+_not_ so many things, must then have been something peculiarly tactless!
+This girl was not, like some of us, devoid of humour--that much is
+clear: laughter lived in her as in its home. What _had_ he said?
+Whatever it was, he "did not mean it." But that is frequently the sting
+of stings. Spontaneity which hurts us hurts far more than malice
+can--for it is more evidently sincere in what it has of the too-much, or
+the too-little. . . . Well, angry exceedingly, or wounded exceedingly,
+she had gone, and still is gone--and he sits marvelling. Three months!
+Is she going to stay away for ever? Is she going to cast him off for a
+word, a "bubble born of breath"? Why, they had been _one_ person!
+
+     "Me, do you leave aghast
+     With the memories We amassed?"
+
+Just for "a moment's spite." . . . She ought to have understood.
+
+     "Love, if you knew the light
+     That your soul casts in my sight,
+         How I look to you
+         For the pure and true,
+     And the beauteous and the right--"
+
+But so had she looked to _him_, and he had shown her "a moment's
+spite." . . . Yet he cannot believe that a hasty word can do all this
+against the other memories. Things like that are indeed for ever
+happening; trivialities thus can mar immensities. The eye can be blurred
+by a fly's foot; a straw can stop all the wondrous mechanism of the ear.
+But that is only the external world; endurance is easy there. It is
+different with love.
+
+     "Wrong in the one thing rare--
+     Oh, it is hard to bear!"
+
+And especially hard now, in this "dawn of day." Little brooks must be
+dancing down the dell,
+
+     "Each with a tale to tell,
+     Could my Love but attend as well."
+
+But as she cannot, he will not. . . . Only, things will get lovelier
+every day, for the spring is back, or at any rate close at hand--the
+spring, when the almond-blossom blows.
+
+         "We shall have the word
+         In a minor third
+     There is none but the cuckoo knows:
+         Heaps of the guelder rose!
+     I must bear with it, I suppose."
+
+For he would choose, if he could choose, that November should come back.
+Then there would be nothing for her to love but love! In such a world as
+spring and summer make, heart can dispense with heart; the sun is there,
+and the "flowers unnipped"; but in winter, freezing in the crypt, the
+heart cries: "Why should I freeze? Another heart, as chill as mine is
+now, would quiver back to life at the touch of this one":
+
+     "Heart, shall we live or die?
+     The rest . . . settle by-and-bye!"
+
+Three months ago they were so happy! They lived blocked up with snow,
+the wind edged in and in, as far as it could get:
+
+     "Not to our ingle, though,
+     Where we loved each the other so!"
+
+If it were but winter now again, instead of the terrible, lovely spring,
+when she will have the blue sky and the hawthorn-spray and the brooks to
+love--and the almond-blossom and the cuckoo, and that guelder-rose
+which he will have to bear with . . .
+
+But, after all, it _is_ November for their hearts! Hers is chill as his;
+she cannot live without him, as he cannot without her. If it were
+winter, "she'd efface the score and forgive him _as before_" (thus we
+perceive that this is not the first quarrel, that he has offended her
+before with that word which was _not_ so many things!)--and what else is
+it but winter for their shivering hearts? So he begins to hope. In
+March, too, there are storms--here is one beginning now, at noon, which
+shows that it will last. . . . Not yet, then, the too lovely spring!
+
+         "It is twelve o'clock:
+         I shall hear her knock
+     In the worst of a storm's uproar:
+         I shall pull her through the door,
+     I shall have her for evermore!"
+
+. . . I think she came back. She would want to see how well he
+understood the spring--he who could make that picture of the Pampas'
+sheen and the wild horse. Why should spring's news unfold itself, and he
+not "say things" about it to her, like those he could say about the mere
+_Times_ news? And it _is_ impossible to bear with the guelder-rose--the
+guelder-rose must be adored. They will adore it together; she will
+efface the score, and forgive him as before. What fun it will be, in the
+worst of the storm, to feel him pull her through the door!
+
+In _The Lost Mistress_ it is really finished: she has dismissed him. We
+are not told why. It cannot be because he has not loved her--he who so
+tenderly, if so whimsically, accepts her decree. He will not let her see
+how much he suffers--he still can say the "little things" she liked.
+
+     "All's over, then: does truth sound bitter
+       As one at first believes?
+     Hark, 'tis the sparrows' good-night twitter
+       About your cottage eaves!
+
+     And the leaf-buds on the vine are woolly,
+       I noticed that, to-day;
+     One day more breaks them open fully
+       --You know the red turns grey."
+
+That is what his life has turned, but he will not maunder about it.
+
+     "To-morrow we meet the same then, dearest?
+       May I take your hand in mine?
+     Mere friends are we--well, friends the merest
+       Keep much that I resign."
+
+He is no more "he" for her: he is a friend like the rest. _He_ resigns.
+But the friends do not know what "he" knew.
+
+     "For each glance of the eye so bright and black
+       Though I keep with heart's endeavour--
+     Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
+       Though it stay in my soul for ever--"
+
+. . . Is this like a friend? But he accepts her bidding--very nearly.
+There are some things, perhaps, that he may fail in, but she need not
+fear--he will try.
+
+     "Yet I will but say what mere friends say,
+       Or only a thought stronger;
+     I will hold your hand but as long as all may,
+       Or so very little longer!"
+
+Again we have the typical Browning lover, who will not reproach nor
+scorn nor whine. But I think that this one had perhaps a little excess
+of whimsical humour. She would herself have needed a good deal of such
+humour to take this farewell just as it was offered. "_Does truth sound
+bitter, as one at first believes?_" Somewhat puzzling to her, it may be,
+that very philosophical reflection! . . . This has been called a noble,
+tender, an heroic, song of loss. For me there lurks a smile in it. I do
+not say that the smile makes the dismissal explicable; rather I a little
+wonder how she could have sent him away. But is it certain that she will
+not call him back, as she called the snowdrops? He means to hold her
+hand a little longer than the others do!
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+_The Worst of It_ is the cry of a man whose young, beautiful wife has
+left him for a lover. He cares for nothing else in the world; his whole
+heart and soul, even now, are set on discovering how he may help her.
+But there is no way, for him. And the "worst of it" is that all has
+happened _through_ him. She had given him herself, she had bound her
+soul by the "vows that damn"--and then had found that she must break
+them. And he proclaims her right to break them: no angel set them down!
+
+But _she_--the pride of the day, the swan with no fleck on her wonder of
+white; she, with "the brow that looked like marble and smelt like
+myrrh," with the eyes and the grace and the glory! Is there to be no
+heaven for her--no crown for that brow? Shall other women be sainted,
+and not she, graced here beyond all saints?
+
+     "Hardly! That must be understood!
+       The earth is your place of penance, then."
+
+But even the earthly punishment will be heavy for her to bear. . . . If
+it had only been he that was false, not she! _He_ could have borne all
+easily; speckled as he is, a spot or two would have made little
+difference. And he is nothing, while she is all.
+
+Too monstrously the magnanimity of this man weights the scale against
+the woman. Instinctively we seek a different "excuse" for her from that
+which he makes--though indeed there scarce is one at which he does not
+catch.
+
+     "And I to have tempted you"--
+
+. . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:
+
+     "I to have tempted you! I, who tired
+       Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
+     I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
+       Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
+     And you meant to have hated and despised--
+       Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"
+
+This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the
+beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and
+assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender,
+generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as
+some old writer called _anger_. All these wonderful and subtle reasons
+for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that
+awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even
+then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble
+enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth
+is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer--almost they
+might be called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing
+stanzas of _The Worst of It_, and feel that no one should be doomed to
+suffer such forgiveness. What chance had _her_ soul? At every turn it
+found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all
+eternity.
+
+     "I knew you once; but in Paradise,
+         If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
+
+No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and
+passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at
+all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that
+even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already
+that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of
+Judgment. And he _is_ so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a
+Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous--perfectly right. . . . And
+sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious
+brow,--sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue,
+we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of
+shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.
+
+     "We take our own method, the devil and I,
+       With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
+     And the best we wish to what lives, is--death."
+
+_She_ is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now
+she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes
+on to reflect--most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured
+too long:--
+
+     "[You] have done no evil and want no aid,
+       Will live the old life out and chance the new.
+     And your sentence is written all the same,
+       And I can do nothing--pray, perhaps:
+     But somehow the word pursues its game--
+       If I pray, if I curse--for better or worse:
+     And my faith is torn to a thousand scraps,
+       And my heart feels ice while my words breathe flame.
+
+     Dear, I look from my hiding-place.
+       Are you still so fair? Have you still the eyes?
+     Be happy! Add but the other grace,
+       Be good! Why want what the angels vaunt?
+     I knew you once: but in Paradise,
+       If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
+
+I think the saddest thing in this poem is its last stanza; for we feel,
+do we not? that _now_ she is having her first opportunity to be both
+happy and good--free from the intolerable magnanimity of this husband.
+And so, by making a male utterance too "noble," Browning has almost
+redressed the balance. The tear had been too frequently assigned to
+woman; exultation too often had sounded from man. We have seen that many
+of the feminine "tears" were supererogatory; and now, in this chapter of
+the Woman Won, we see that she can tap the source of those salt drops in
+man. But not in _James Lee's Wife_ is the top-note of magnanimity more
+strained than in _The Worst of It_. Moral gymnastics should not be
+practised at the expense of others. No one knew that better than
+Browning, but too often he allowed his subtle intellect to confute his
+warm, wise heart--too often he fell to the lure of "situation," and
+forgot the truth. "A man and woman _might_ feel so," he sometimes seems
+to have said; "it does not matter that no man and woman ever have so
+felt."
+
+And thus, now and then, he gave both men and women--the worst of it. But
+oftener he gave them such a best of it that I hardly can imagine a
+reader of Browning who has not love and courage in the heart, and trust
+and looking-forward in the soul; who does not, in the words of the great
+Epilogue:--
+
+     "Greet the unseen with a cheer."
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[308:1] Compare this passage with one in a letter to E. B. B.: "In this
+House of Life, where I go, you go--when I ascend, you run before--when I
+descend, it is after you."
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
+at Paul's Work, Edinburgh
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's Notes:
+
+
+This text uses a unique type of ellipsis to represent where material has
+been left out of poetry quotations and out of the story line of a poem.
+They are indicated here by five asterisks:
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The number of periods in ellipses match the original.
+
+Thought breaks in the text are indicated by the following:
+
+       +       +       +       +       +
+
+The word manoeuvre used an ae ligature in the original.
+
+Words in italics in the original are surrounded by _underscores_.
+
+The following words appear in the original with and without hyphens:
+
+     commonplace/common-place
+     disgrace/dis-grace
+     moonbeam/moon-beam
+     wellnigh/well-nigh
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Browning's Heroines, by Ethel Colburn Mayne
+
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