Robert Browning Part 12

If the grotesque occupies a comparatively small place in _Dramatis Personae_, the example given is of capital importance in this province of Browning's art. The devil of Notre Dame, looking down on Paris, is more effectively placed, but is hardly a more impressive invention of Gothic fantasy than Caliban sprawling in the pit's much mire,

With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin,

while he discourses, with a half-developed consciousness, itself in the mire and scarcely yet pawing to get free, concerning the nature of his Creator. The grotesque here is not merely of the kind that addresses the eye; the poem is an experiment in the grotesque of thought; and yet fantastic as it seems, the whole process of this monstrous Bridgewater treatise is governed by a certain logic. The poem, indeed, is essentially a fragment of Browning's own Christian apologetics; it stands as a burly gate-tower from which boiling pitch can be flung upon the heads of a.s.sailants. The poet's intention is not at all to give us a chapter in the origins of religion; nor is Caliban a representative of primitive man. A frequently recurring idea with Browning is that expressed by Pope Innocent in the pa.s.sage already cited; the external world proves the power of G.o.d; it proves His intelligence: but the proof of love is derived exclusively from the love that lives in the heart of man. Are you dissatisfied with such a proof? Well, then, see what a G.o.d we can construct out of intelligence and power, with love left out! If this world is not a place of trial and training appointed by love, then it is a scene of capricious cruelty or capricious indifference on the part of our Maker; His providence is a wanton sporting with our weakness and our misery. Why were we brought into being? To amuse His solitary and weary intelligence, and to become the victims or the indulged manifestations of His power. Why is one man selected for extreme agony from which a score of his fellows escape? Because G.o.d Setebos resembles Caliban, when through mere caprice he lets twenty crabs march past him unhurt and stones the twenty-first,

Loving not, hating not, just choosing so.

If any of the phenomena of nature lead us to infer or imagine some law superior to the idle artistry and reckless will of Setebos, that law is surely very far away; it is "the Quiet" of Caliban's theology which takes no heed of human life and has for its outposts the cold unmoving stars.

Except the short piece named _May and Death_, which like Rossetti's poem of the wood-spurge, is founded upon one of those freaks of a.s.sociation that make some trival object the special remembrancer of sorrow, the remaining poems of _Dramatis Personae_, as originally published, are all poems of love. _A Likeness_, skilfully contrived in the indirect directness of its acknowledgment of love, its jealous privacy of pa.s.sion, and its irresistible delight in the homage rendered by one who is not a lover, is no exception. Not one of these poems tells of the full a.s.surance and abiding happiness of lovers. But the warmth and sweetness of early pa.s.sion are alive under the most disastrous circ.u.mstances in _Confessions_. The apothecary with his bottles provides a chart of the scene of the boy-and-girl adventures; the professional gravities of the parson put an edge on the memory of the dear indiscretions; "summer's distillation," to borrow a word from Shakespeare, makes faint the odour of the bottle labelled "Ether"; the mummy wheat from the coffin of old desire sprouts up and waves its green pennons. _Youth and Art_ may be placed beside the earlier _Respectability_ as two pages out of the history of the encounters of prudence and pa.s.sion; youth and maiden alike, boy-sculptor and girl-singer, prefer the prudence of worldly success to the infinite prudence of love; and they have their reward--that success in life which is failure. Like the tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe, this is a poem of "very tragical mirth." And no less tragically mirthful is _Dis Aliter Visum_, a variation on the same or a kindred theme, where our young Bohemian sculptor is replaced by the elderly poet, bent, wigged, and lamed, but sure of the fortieth chair in the Academy, and the lone she-sparrow of the house-top by a young beauty, who adds to her other attractions a vague, uninstructed yearning for culture and entirely substantial possessions in the three-per-cents. But the moral is the same--the folly of being overwise, the wisdom of acting upon the best promptings of the heart. In _Too Late_ Browning attempts to render a mood of pa.s.sionate despair;--love and the hopes of love are defeated by a woman's sentence of rejection, her marriage, and, last, her death; it reads, more than any other poem of the writer, like a leaf torn out of "Wuthering Heights." There is a fixity of grief which is more appalling than this whirlblast; the souls that are wedged in ice occupy a lower circle in the region of sorrow than those which are driven before the gale. _The Worst of it_--another poem of the failures of love--reverses the conventional att.i.tude of the wronged husband; he ought, according to all recognised authorities of drama and novel, rage against his faithless wife, and commiserate his virtuous self; here he endeavours, though vainly, to transfer every stain and shame to himself from her; his anguish is all on her behalf, or if on his own chiefly because he cannot restore her purity or save her from her wrong done against herself. It is a poem of moral stress and strain, imagined with great intensity. Browning in general isolates a single moment or mood of pa.s.sion, and studies it, with its s.h.i.+fting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm; often it is a moment of crisis, a moment of culmination. For once in _James Lee's Wife_ (named in the first edition by a stroke of perversity _James Lee_), he represents in a sequence of lyrics a sequence of moods, and with singular success. The season of the year is autumn, and autumn as felt not among golden wheatfields, but on a barren and rocky sea-coast; the processes of the declining year, from the first touch of change to bareness everywhere, accompany and accord with those of the decline of hope in the wife's heart for any return of her love. Her offence is that she has loved too well; that she has laid upon her husband too great a load of devotion; hostility might be met and vanquished; but how can she deal with a heart which love itself only petrifies? It should be a warning to critics who translate dramatic poems into imaginary biography to find that Browning, who had known so perfect a success in the one love of his life, should constantly present in work of imagination the ill fortunes of love and lovers. Looking a little below the surface we see that he could not write directly, he could not speak effusively, of the joy that he had known. But in all these poems he thinks of love as a supreme possession in itself and as a revelation of infinite things which lie beyond it; as a test of character, and even as a pledge of perpetual advance in the life of the spirit.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 84: Letter to Story in Henry James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p.

91 and p. 97.]

[Footnote 85: H. James's "W.W. Story," vol. ii. p. 100.]

[Footnote 86: "Rossetti Papers," p. 302.]

[Footnote 87: In 1863 Browning gave time and pains to revising his friend Story's _Roba di Roma_.]

[Footnote 88: In 1864 Browning again "braved the awful Biarritz" and stayed at Cambo. On this occasion he visted Fontarabia. An interesting letter from Cambo, undated as to time, is printed in Henry James's "W.W.

Story," vol. ii. pp. 153-156. The year--1864--may be ascertained by comparing it with a letter addressed to F.T. Palgrave, given in Palgrave's Life, the date of this letter being Oct. 19, 1864. Browning in the letter to Story speaks of "the last two years in the dear rough Ste.-Marie."]

[Footnote 89: Was the poem _Gold Hair_? If three stanzas were added to the first draft before the poem appeared in _The Atlantic Monthly_ the number of lines would have been 120. Stanzas 21, 22 and 23 were added in the _Dramatis Personae_ version.]

[Footnote 90: _Aristophanes' Apology_ (spoken of Euripides).]

[Footnote 91: Compare with _Epilogue: Third Speaker_ the lines from _A Death in the Desert_:

Then stand before that fact, that Life and Death, Stay there at gaze, till it dispart, dispread, As though a star should open out, all sides, Grow the world on you, as it is my world.

[Footnote 92: Statements by Mrs Orr with respect to Browning's relations to Christianity will be found on p. 319 and p. 373 of her Life of Browning. She regarded "La Saisiaz" as conclusive proof of his "heterodox att.i.tude." Robert Buchanan, in the Epistle dedicatory to "The Outcast," alleges that he questioned Browning as to whether he were a Christian, and that Browning "thundered No!" The statement embodied in my text above is substantially not mine but Browning's own. See on _Ferishtah's Fancies_ in chapter xvi.]

Chapter XII

The Ring and the Book

The publication of _Dramatis Personae_ marks an advance in Browning's growing popularity; a second edition, in which some improvements were effected, was called for in 1864, the year of its first publication.

"All my new cultivators," Browning wrote, "are young men"; many of them belonged to Oxford and Cambridge. But he was resolved to consult his own taste, to take his own way, and let popularity delay or hasten as it would--"pleasing myself," he says, "or aiming at doing so, and thereby, I hope, pleasing G.o.d." His life had ordered itself as seemed best to him--a life in London during the months in which the tide flows and sparkles; then summer and autumn quietude in some retreat upon the French coast. The years pa.s.sed in such a uniformity of work and rest, with enjoyment accompanying each of these, that they may almost be grasped in bundles. In 1865, the holiday was again at Sainte-Marie, and the weather was golden; but he noticed with regret that the old church at p.o.r.nic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried, was disappearing to give s.p.a.ce in front of a new and smart erection of brick and stucco. His Florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he lamented the change. Every detail of the Italian days lived in his memory; the violets and ground ivy on a certain old wall; the fig tree behind the Siena villa, under which his wife would sit and read, and "poor old Landor's oak." "I never hear of any one going to Florence," he wrote in 1870, "but my heart is twitched." He would like to "glide for a long summer-day through the streets and between the old stone-walls--unseen come and unheard go." But he must guard himself against being overwhelmed by recollection: "Oh, me! to find myself some late suns.h.i.+ny Sunday afternoon, with my face turned to Florence--'ten minutes to the gate, ten minutes _home_!' I think I should fairly end it all on the spot."[93]

Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaments, or new barbarous structures, run up beside Poggio, were happening. In May 1866 Browning's father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in June Miss Browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris twenty-four hours before the end. The elder Browning had almost completed his eighty-fifth year. To the last he retained what his son described as "his own strange sweetness of soul." It was the close of a useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep affection. The occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense of loss was great. Miss Browning, whose devotion during many years first to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became her brother's constant companion. They rested for the summer at Le Croisic, a little town in Brittany, in a delightfully s.p.a.cious old house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rus.h.i.+ng waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers. Their enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and to the same place, which Browning has described in his _Two Poets of Croisic_--

Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts Spitefully north,

they returned in the following summer. During this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, _Herve Riel_, was written, though its publication belongs to four years later.[94]

In June 1868 came grief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from outward communication with a portion of what was most precious in his past life. Arabel Barrett, his wife's only surviving sister, who had supported him in his greatest sorrow, died in Browning's arms. "For many years," we are told by Mr Gosse, "he was careful never to pa.s.s her house in Delamere Terrace." Although not p.r.o.ne to superst.i.tion, he had noted in July 1863 a dream of Miss Barrett in which she imagined herself asking her dead sister Elizabeth, "When shall I be with you?" and received the answer, "Dearest, in five years." "Only a coincidence," he adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, "but noticeable." That summer, after wanderings in France, Browning and his sister settled at Audierne, on the extreme westerly point of Brittany, "a delightful, quite unspoiled little fis.h.i.+ng town," with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind. It was in every way an eventful year. In the autumn his new publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., produced the six-volume edition of his Poetical Works, on the t.i.tle-page of which the author describes himself as "Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford."

The distinction, partly due to Jowett's influence, had been conferred a year previously. In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett. Acquaintance quickly ripened into friends.h.i.+p, which was not the less genuine or cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteem for Browning's poems.

"Ought one to admire one's friend's poetry?" was a difficult question of casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one time proposed. Much of Browning's work appeared to him to be "extravagant, perverse, topsy-turvy"; "there is no rest in him," Jowett wrote with special reference to the poems "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day," which he regarded as Browning's n.o.blest work. But for the man his admiration was deep-based and substantial. After Browning's first visit to him in June 1865, Jowett wrote that though getting too old to make, as he supposed, new friends, he had--he believed--made one. "It is impossible to speak without enthusiasm of Mr Browning's open, generous nature and his great ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man. His great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none except the education of his son."[95] Browning's visits to Oxford and Cambridge did not cease when he dropped away from the round of visiting at country houses. He writes with frank enjoyment of the almost interminable banquet given at Balliol in the Lent Term, 1877, on the occasion of the opening of the new Hall. Oxford conferred upon him her D.C.L. in 1882, on which occasion a happy undergraduate jester sent fluttering towards the new Doctor's head an appropriate allusion in the form of a red cotton night-cap. The Cambridge LL.D. was conferred in 1879. In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of London. In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the Lord Rectors.h.i.+p of the University of St Andrews, as successor to John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined.[96] The great event of this year in the history of his authors.h.i.+p was the publication in November and December of the first two volumes of _The Ring and the Book_. The two remaining volumes followed in January and February 1869.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE "THE BOOK" WAS FOUND BY BROWNING.

_From a photograph by_ ALINARI.]

In June 1860 Browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the "square old yellow book," part print, part ma.n.u.script, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the Franceschini murder case was developed.

The price was a lira, "eightpence English just." As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97].

That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite came

the clear voice of the cloistered ones, Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights,

he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his imagination:

I fused my live soul and that inert stuff, Before attempting smithcraft.

According to Mr Rudolf Lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the incident, Browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted: "'When I had read the book,' so Browning told me, 'my plan was at once settled. I went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it.

Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided, and I adhered to that arrangement to the last.'"[98] When in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder and the trial could give little information or none. Smithcraft did not soon begin. He offered the story, "for prose treatment" to Miss Ogle, so we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less a.s.surance of statement, offered it "for poetic use to one of his leading contemporaries." We have seen that in a letter of 1862 from Biarritz, Browning speaks of the Roman murder case as being the subject of a new poem already clearly conceived though unwritten. In the last section of _The Ring and the Book_, he refers to having been in close converse with his old quarto of the Piazza San Lorenzo during four years:

How will it be, my four-years' intimate, When thou and I part company anon?

The publication of _Dramatis Personae_ in 1864 doubtless enabled Browning to give undivided attention to his vast design. In October of that year he advanced to actual definition of his scheme. When staying in the south of France he visited the mountain gorge which is connected with the adventure of the Roland of romance, and there he planned the whole poem precisely as it was carried out. "He says," Mr W.M. Rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868), "he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan--some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at the same time--often stores up a subject long before he writes it. He has written his forthcoming work all consecutively--not some of the later parts before the earlier."[99]

When Carlyle met Browning after the appearance of _The Ring and the Book_, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous than Browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity: "It is a wonderful book," declared Carlyle, "one of the most wonderful poems ever written. I re-read it all through--all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting."[100] A like remark might have been made respecting the book which, in its method and its range of all English books most resembles Browning's poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by Browning's tale of Guido and Pompilia. Richardson's _Clarissa_ consists of eight volumes made out of an Old Bailey story, or what might have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion. But then we should never have known two of the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, Clarissa and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the partic.i.p.ators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader. Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure. It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand. No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius--"This is too long." But neither _Clarissa_ nor _The Ring and the Book_ is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to a.s.sert confidently that this was possible.

It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once. Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons--for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest. In the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves--not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguis.h.i.+ng the several values of human testimony. We become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again. Gossipry on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior foolishness of wisdom. The advocacy which consists of professional self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one--that which commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of rhetoric. The criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his fragment of truth--"What shall a man give for his life?" He has enough truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks, to set up false signal fires upon the rocks. And then are heard three successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to our mind the words, "But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." First the voice of the pure pa.s.sion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except the deliverance of a message--and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it please, ironical. It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his wrath were kindled: "Behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles. I will speak that I may be refreshed." And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi's truth is the whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the light of common day. Next, a voice from one who is human indeed "to the red-ripe of the heart," but who is already withdrawn from all the turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which comes from G.o.d, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,--uttering its fragment of the truth. Last, the voice of old age, and authority and matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompa.s.sed by much doubt and weariness and human infirmity, a solemn, pondering voice, which, with G.o.d somewhere in the clear-obscure, goes sounding on a dim and perilous way, until in a moment this voice of the anxious explorer for truth changes to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the armed doomsman of righteousness.

Truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that, Browning would say, is the concern of G.o.d. And so, at the close, we are directed to take to heart the lesson

That our human speech is naught, Our human testimony false, our fame And human estimation words and wind.

But there are degrees of approximation to truth and of remoteness from it. Truth as apprehended by pure pa.s.sion, truth as apprehended by simplicity of soul ("And a little child shall lead them"), truth as apprehended by spiritual experience--such respectively make up the substance of the monologues of Caponsacchi, of Pompilia, and of the Pope. For the valuation, however, of this loftier testimony we require a sense of the level ground, even if it be the fen-country. A perception of the heights must be given by exhibiting the plain. If we were carried up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that we had not become inhabitants of some Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is where we ordinarily live and move; it has its rights, and is worth understanding for its own sake. Therefore we shall mix our mind with that of "Half-Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome" before we climb any mounts of transfiguration or enter any city set upon a hill. The "man in the street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the _salon_ may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of Caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of Pompilia, the profound searchings of spirit that proceed all through the droop of that sombre February day in the closet of the Pope. And, then, at the most tragic moment and when pathos is most poignant, life goes on, and the world is wide, and laughter is not banished from earth. Therefore Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Procurator of the Poor, shall make his ingenious notes for the defence of Count Guido, and cite his precedents and quote his authorities, and darken counsel with words, all to be by and by ecclesiasticized and regularized and Latinized and Ciceroized, while more than half the good man's mind is occupied with thought of the imminent "lovesome frolic feast" on his boy Cinone's birth-night, which shall bring with it lamb's fry and liver, stung out of its monotony of richness by parsley-sprigs and fennel. Yes, and we shall hear also the other side--how, in a florilegium of Latin, selected to honour aright the Graces and the Muses and the majesty of Law, Johannes-Baptista Bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that Pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce.

The secondary personages in Richardson's "Clarissa" grow somewhat faint in our memories; but the figures of his heroine and of Lovelace remain not only uneffaceable but undimmed by time. Four of the _dramatis personae_ of Browning's poem in like manner possess an enduring life, which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves almost forgotten. Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and l.u.s.t like the Count Cenci of Sh.e.l.ley. He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror.

He is clumsy in his fraud and coa.r.s.e in his violence. Sin may have its strangeness in beauty; but Guido does not gleam with the romance of sin.

If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is borne, the cave and its denizens--the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with Guido himself as the main monster. Yet the Count, short of stature, "hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard" is not a monster but a man; possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a skilful defence. Browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist Webster as wanting in romance. But like some of Webster's saturnine, fantastic a.s.sistants or tools in crime, Guido has failed in everything, is no longer young, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is half-poisoned by its acrid juices. He is G.o.dless in an age of G.o.dless living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays the licentious imagination of an age of license. He plays a poor part in the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging desperately to the world and to life. A disinterested loyalty to the powers of evil might display a certain gallantry of its own, but, though Guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in it--there is always a valid reason, a sordid motive for his rage. And in truth he has grounds of complaint, which a wave of generous pa.s.sion would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of his life, might well make a bad man mad. His wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and n.o.ble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the Archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion. He is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage. He is pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of Arezzo. A gallant of the troop of Satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge; but Guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold. When he makes his final pleading for life in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circ.u.mstance of his death. His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself. When all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon G.o.d, who has made him what he is. It was a fine audacity of Browning in imagining the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, "Christ,--Maria,--G.o.d," one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:--

"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"

Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, pa.s.sive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and champions.h.i.+p of the right. Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire. When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose. Others may yield to the eye of G.o.d a "timid leaf" and an "uncertain bud,"

While--see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze, Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire To incorporate the whole great sun it loves From the inch-height whence it looks and longs. My flower, My rose, I gather for the breast of G.o.d.

As she lies on her pallet, dying "in the good house that helps the poor to die," she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away--