Robert Browning Part 15

Chapter XIV

Problem and Narrative Poems

_Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_, which appeared in December 1871, four months after the publication of _Balaustions Adventure_, was written by Browning during a visit to friends in Scotland. His interest in modern politics was considerable, but in general it remained remote from his work as a poet. He professed himself a liberal, but he was a liberal who because he was such, claimed the right of independent judgment. He had rejoiced in the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of Italy. During the American Civil War he was strongly on the side of the North, as letters to Story, written when his private grief lay heavy upon him, abundantly show. He was at one time a friend of the movement in favour of granting the parliamentary suffrage to women, but late in life his opinion on this question altered. He was as decidedly opposed to the proposals for a separate or subordinate Parliament for Ireland as were his friends Carlyle and Tennyson and Matthew Arnold. After the introduction of the Home Rule Bill he could not bring himself, though requested by a friend, to write words which would have expressed or implied esteem for the statesman who had made that most inopportune experiment in opportunism[112] and whose talents he admired. Yet for a certain kind of opportunism--that which conserves rather than destroys--Browning thought that much might fairly be said. To say this with a special reference to the fallen Emperor of France he wrote his _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_.

Browning's instinctive sympathies are not with the "Saviour of Society,"

who maintains for temporary reasons a tottering edifice. He naturally applauds the man who builds on sure foundations, or the man who in order to reach those foundations boldly removes the acc.u.mulated lumber of the past. But there are times when perhaps the choice lies only between conservation of what is imperfect and the attempt to erect an airy fabric which has no basis upon the solid earth; and Browning on the whole preferred a veritable _civitas hominum_, however remote from the ideal, to a sham _civitas Dei_ or a real Cloudcuckootown. "It is true, that what is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit; and those things, which have long gone together, are as it were confederate within themselves; whereas new things piece not so well; but though they help by their utility, yet they trouble by their inconformity." These words, of one whose worldly wisdom was more profoundly studied than ever Browning's was, might stand as a motto for the poem. But the pregnant sentence of Bacon which follows these words should be added--"All this is true if time stood still." Browning's pleading is not a merely ingenious defence of the untenable, either with reference to the general thesis or its application to the French Empire.

He did not, like his wife, think of the Emperor as if he were a paladin of modern romance; but he honestly believed that he had for a time done genuine service--though not the highest--to France and to the world. "My opinion of the solid good rendered years ago," he wrote in September 1863 to Story, "is unchanged. The subsequent deference to the clerical party in France and support of brigandage is poor work; but it surely is doing little harm to the general good." And to Miss Blagden after the publication of his poem: "I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made, and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year." It seemed to Browning a case in which a veritable _apologia_ was admissible in the interests of truth and justice, and by placing this _apologia_ in the mouth of the Emperor himself certain sophistries were also legitimate that might help to give the whole the dramatic character which the purposes of poetry, as the exposition of a complex human character, required.

The misfortune was that in making choice of such a subject Browning condemned himself to write with his left hand, to fight with one arm pinioned, to exhibit the case on behalf of the "Saviour of Society" with his brain rather than with brain and heart acting together. He was to demonstrate that in the scale of spiritual colours there is a respectable place for drab. This may be undertaken with skill and vigour, but hardly with enthusiastic pleasure. _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ is an interesting intellectual exercise, and if this const.i.tutes a poem, a poem it is; but the theme is fitter for a prose discussion. Browning's intellectual ability became a snare by which the poet within him was entrapped. The music that he makes here is the music of Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha:

So your fugue broadens and thickens, Greatens and deepens and lengthens, Till one exclaims--"But where's music, the d.i.c.kens!"

The mysterious Sphinx who expounds his riddle and dissertates on himself in an imaginary Leicester Square says many things that deserve to be considered; but they are addressed to our understanding in the first instance, and only in a secondary and indirect way reach our feelings and our imagination. The interest of the poem is virtually exhausted in a single reading; to a true work of art we return again and again for renewed delight. We return to _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ as to a valuable store-house of arguments or practical considerations in defence of a conservative opportunism; but if we have once appropriated these, we do not need the book. There is a spirit of conservation, like that of Edmund Burke, which has in it a wise enthusiasm, we might almost say a wise mysticism. Browning's Prince is not a conservator possessed by this enthusiasm. Something almost pathetic may be felt in his sense that the work allotted to him is work of mere temporary and transitory utility.

He has no high inspirations such as support the men who change the face of the world. The Divine Ruler who has given him his special faculties, who has enjoined upon him his special tasks, holds no further communication with him. But he will do the work of a mere man in a man's strength, such as it is; he cannot make new things; he can use the thing he finds; he can for a term of years "do the best with the least change possible"; he can turn to good account what is already half-made; and so, he believes, he can, in a sense, co-operate with G.o.d. So long as he was an irresponsible dreamer, a mere voice in the air, it was permitted him to indulge in glorious dreams, to utter s.h.i.+ning words. Now that his feet are on the earth, now that his thoughts convert themselves into deeds, he must accept the limitations of earth. The idealists may put forth this programme and that; his business is not with them but with the present needs of the humble ma.s.s of his people--"men that have wives and women that have babes," whose first demand is bread; by intelligence and sympathy he will effect "equal sustainment everywhere"

throughout society; and when the man of genius who is to alter the world arises, such a man most of all will approve the work of his predecessor, who left him no mere "s.h.i.+ne and shade" on which to operate, but the good hard substance of common human life.

All this is admirably put, and it is interesting to find that Browning, who had rejoiced with Herakles doing great deeds and purging the world of monsters, could also honour a poor provisional Atlas whose task of sustaining a poor imperfect globe upon his shoulders is less brilliant but not perhaps less useful. Nor would it be just to overlook the fact that in three or four pages the poet a.s.serts himself as more than the prudent casuist. The splendid image of society as a temple from which winds the long procession of powers and beauties has in it something of the fine mysticism of Edmund Burke.[113] The record of the Prince's early and irresponsible aspirations for a free Italy--

Ay, still my fragments wander, music-fraught, Sighs of the soul, mine once, mine now, and mine For ever!--

with what immediately follows, would have satisfied the ardent spirit of Mrs Browning.[114] And the characterisation of the genius of the French nation, whose l.u.s.t for war and the glory of war Browning censures as "the dry-rot of the race," rises brilliantly out of its somewhat gray surroundings:--

The people here, Earth presses to her heart, nor owns a pride Above her pride i' the race all flame and air And aspiration to the boundless Great, The incommensurably Beautiful-- Whose very faulterings groundward come of flight Urged by a pinion all too pa.s.sionate For heaven and what it holds of gloom and glow: Bravest of thinkers, bravest of the brave Doers, exalt in Science, rapturous In Art, the--more than all--magnetic race To fascinate their fellows, mould mankind.

It is a pa.s.sage conceived in the same spirit as the great chaunt "O Star of France!" written, at the same date, and with a recognition of both the virtues and the shames of France, by the American poet of Democracy.

To these memorable fragments from _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ one other may be added--that towards the close of the poem which applies the tradition of the succession by murder of the priesthood at the shrine of the c.l.i.tumnian G.o.d to the succession of men of genius in the priesthood of the world--"The new power slays the old, but handsomely."

In _Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau_ there is nothing enigmatical. "It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself," so Browning wrote to Miss Blagden soon after the publication of the volume.

Many persons, however, have supposed that in _Fifine at the Fair_ (1872) a riddle rather than a poem was given to the world by the perversity of the writer. When she comes to speak of this work Browning's biographer Mrs Orr is half-apologetic; it is for her "a piece of perplexing cynicism." The origin of the poem was twofold. The external suggestion came from the fact that during one of his visits to p.o.r.nic, Browning had seen the original of his Fifine, and she lived in his memory as a subject of intellectual curiosity and imaginative interest. The internal suggestion, as Mrs Orr hints, lay in a certain mood of resentment against himself arising from the fact that the encroachments of the world seemed to estrange in some degree a part of his complex being from entire fidelity to his own past. The world, in fact, seemed to be playing with Browning the part of a Fifine. If this were so, it would be characteristic of Browning that he should face round upon the world and come to an explanation with his adversary. But this could not in a printed volume be done in his own person; he was not one to take the public into his confidence. The discussion should be removed as far as possible from his own circ.u.mstances and even his own feelings. It should be a dramatic debate on the subject of fidelity and infidelity, on the bearings of the apparent to the true, on the relation of reality in this our mortal life to illusion. As he studied the subject it a.s.sumed new significances and opened up wider issues. An actual Elvire and an actual Fifine may be the starting points, but by-and-by Elvire shall stand for all that is permanent and substantial in thought and feeling, Fifine for all that is transitory and illusive. The question of conjugal fidelity is as much the subject of _Fifine at the Fair_ as the virtue of tar-water is the subject of Berkeley's _Siris_. The poem is in fact Browning's _Siris_--a chain of thoughts and feelings, reaching with no break in the chain, from a humble basis to the heights of speculation.

But before all else _Fifine at the Fair_ is a poem. Of all the longer poems which followed _The Ring and the Book_ it is the most sustained and the most diversified in imaginative power. To point out pa.s.sages of peculiar beauty, pa.s.sages vivid in feeling, original in thought, would here be out of place; for the brilliance and vigour are unflagging, and what we have to complain of is the lack of some pa.s.sages of repose. The joy in freedom--freedom accepting some hidden law--of these poor losels and truants from convention, who stroll it and stage it, the gypsy figure of Fifine in page-costume, the procession of imagined beauties--Helen, Cleopatra, the Saint of p.o.r.nic Church--the half-emerging, half-undelivered statue by Michelagnolo, the praise of music as nearer to the soul than words, sunset at Saint-Marie, the play of the body in the sea at noontide (with all that it typifies), woman as the rillet leaping to the sea, woman as the dolphin that upbears Orion, the Venetian carnival, which is the carnival of human life, darkness fallen upon the plains, and through the darkness the Druidic stones gleaming--all these are essentially parts of the texture of the poem, yet each has a l.u.s.tre or a s.h.i.+mmer or grave splendour of its own.

It is strange that any reader should have supposed either the Prologue or the Epilogue to be uttered by the imaginary speaker of the poem. Both shadow forth the personal feelings of Browning; the prologue tells of the gladness he still found both in the world of imagination and the world of reality, over which hovers the spirit that had once been so near his own, the spirit that is near him still, yet moving on a different plane, perhaps wondering at or pitying this life of his, which yet he accepts with cheer and will turn to the best account; the epilogue veils behind its grim humour the desolate feeling that came upon him again and again as a householder in this house of life, for behind the happiness which he strenuously maintained, there lay a great desolation. But the last word of the epilogue--"Love is all and Death is nought" is a word of sustainment wrung out of sorrow. These poems have surely in them no "perplexing cynicism," nor has the poem enclosed between them, when it is seen aright. Browning's idea in the poem he declared in reply to a question of Dr Furnivall, "was to show merely how a Don Juan might justify himself, partly by truth, somewhat by sophistry." No more unhappy misnomer than this "Don Juan" could have been devised for the curious, ingenious, learned experimenter in life, no man of pleasure, in the vulgar sense of the word, but a deliberate explorer of thoughts and things, who argues out his case with so much fine casuistry and often with the justest conceptions of human character and conduct. If we could discover a dividing line between his truth and his sophistry, we might discover also that the poem is no exceptional work of Browning, for which an apology is required, but of a piece with his other writings and in harmony with the body of thought and feeling expressed through them. Now it is certain that as Browning advanced in years he more and more distrusted the results of the intellect in its speculative research; he relied more and more upon the knowledge that comes through or is embodied in love. Love by its very nature implies a relation; what is felt is real for us. But the intellect, which aspires to know things as they are, forever lands us in illusions--illusions needful for our education, and therefore far from unprofitable, to be forever replaced by fresh illusions; and the only truth we thus attain is the conviction that truth there a.s.suredly is, that we must forever reach after it, and must forever grasp its shadow. Theologies, philosophies, scientific theories--these change like the s.h.i.+fting and shredding clouds before our eyes, and are forever succeeded by clouds of another shape and hue. But the knowledge involved in love is veritable and is verified at least for us who love. While in his practice he grew more scientific in research for truth, and less artistic in his desire for beauty, such was the doctrine which Browning upheld.

The speaker in _Fifine at the Fair_ is far more a seeker for knowledge than he is a lover. And he has learnt, and learnt aright, that by illusions the intellect is thrown forward towards what may relatively be termed the truth; through shadows it advances upon reality. When he argues that philosophies and theologies are the fizgigs of the brain, its Fifines the false which lead us onward to Elvire the true, he expresses an idea which Browning has repeatedly expressed in _Ferishtah's Fancies_ and which, certainly, was an idea he had made his own. And if a man approaches the other s.e.x primarily with a view to knowledge, with a view to confirm and to extend his own self-consciousness and to acquire experience of the strength and the weakness of womanhood, it is true that he will be instructed more widely, if not more deeply, by Elvire supplemented by Fifine than by Elvire alone. The sophistry of the speaker in Browning's poem consists chiefly in a juggle between knowledge and love, and in a.s.serting as true of love what Browning held to be, in the profoundest sense, true of knowledge. The poet desires, as Butler in his "a.n.a.logy" desired, to take lower ground than his own; but the curious student of man and woman, of love and knowledge--imagination aiding his intellect--is compelled, amid his sophistical jugglings, to work out his problems upon Browning's own lines, and he becomes a witness to Browning's own conclusions. Saul, before the poem closes, is also among the prophets. For him, as for Browning, "G.o.d and the soul stand sure." He sees, as Browning sees, man reaching upward through illusions--religious theories, philosophical systems, scientific hypotheses, artistic methods, scholarly attainments--to the Divine. The p.o.r.nic fair has become the Venice carnival, and this has grown to the vision of man's life, in which the wanton and coquette named a philosophy or a theology has replaced the gipsy in tricot. The speaker misapplies to love and the truths obtained by love Browning's doctrine concerning knowledge. And yet, even so, he is forced to confess, however inconsistent his action may be with his belief, that the permanent--which is the Divine--can be reached through a single, central point of human love, but not through any vain attempt to manufacture an infinite by piecing together a mult.i.tude of detached points:

His problem posed aright Was--"From a given point evolve the infinite!"

Not--"Spend thyself in s.p.a.ce, endeavouring to joint Together, and so make infinite, point and point: Fix into one Elvire a Fair-ful of Fifines!"

If he continues his experiments, they are experiments of the senses or of the intellect, which he knows can bring no profit to the heart: "Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant." He will undoubtedly--let this be frankly acknowledged--grow in a certain kind of knowledge, and as certainly he will dwindle in the higher knowledge that comes through love. The poem is neither enigmatical nor cynical, but in entire accord with Browning's own deepest convictions and highest feelings.[115]

Although in his later writings Browning rendered ever more and more homage to the illuminating power of the affections, his methods unfortunately became, as has been said, more and more scientific, or--shall we say?--pseudo-scientific. Art jealously selects its subjects, those which possess in a high degree spiritual or material beauty, or that more complete beauty which unites the two. Science accepts any subject which promises to yield its appropriate truth.

Browning, probing after psychological truth, became too indifferent to the truth of beauty. Or shall we say that his vision of beauty became enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins and nerves? To say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. His own defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which occur near the close of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_:

Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.

And he would have pleaded that art, which he styles

The love of loving, rage Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things For truth's sake, whole and sole,

may "crush itself" for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. But the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a repulsive story as that of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ served now as well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption--sensuality and superst.i.tion, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration with aid of the scalpel? The incidents of the poem were historical and were recent. Antoine Mellerio, the sometime jeweller of Paris, had flung himself from his belvedere in 1870; the suit, which raised the question of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in 1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning's place of summer sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning's hand. It was an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because it was, he thought, a story with a moral. He did not merely wish to examine as a spiritual chemist the action of Castilian blood upon a French brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism--the scepticism induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he did not merely wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against itself. His purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight.

Granted the conditions, it was, Browning maintains, an act of entire sanity on the part of his sorry hero, Monsieur Leonce Miranda, to fling himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to our Blessed Lady, the bespangled and bejewelled Ravissante, to bear him in safety through the air. But the conditions were deplorable; and those who declined to a.s.sist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are responsible for Leonce Miranda's b.l.o.o.d.y night-cap.

The moral is just, and the story bears it well. Yet Browning's own conviction that man's highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause. An iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect. If our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable, why quarrel with the parables accepted by other minds than our own? The answer is twofold. First Browning was not a sceptic with respect to the truths attained through love, and he held that mankind had already attained through love truths that condemned the religion of self-torture and terrified propitiations, which led Leonce Miranda to reduce his right hand and his left to carbonised stumps and dragged him kneeling along the country roads to manifest his devotion to the image of the Virgin.

Secondly he held that our education through intellectual illusions is a progressive education, and that to seek to live in an obsolete illusion is treason against humanity. Therefore his exhortation is justified by his logic:

Quick conclude Removal, time effects so tardily, Of what is plain obstruction; rubbish cleared, Let partial-ruin stand while ruin may, And serve world's use, since use is manifold.

The tower which once served as a belfry may possibly be still of use to some Father Secchi to "tick Venus off in transit"; only never bring bell again to the partial-ruin,

To damage him aloft, brain us below, When new vibrations bury both in brick.

For which sane word, if not for all the pages of his poem, we may feel gratefully towards the writer. It is the word of Browning the moralist.

The study of the double-minded hero belongs to Browning the psychologist. The admirable portrait of Clara, the successful adventuress, harlot and favoured daughter of the Church, is the chief gift received through this poem from Browning the artist. She is a very admirable specimen of her kind--the _mamestra bra.s.sicae_ species of caterpillar, and having with beautiful aplomb outmanoeuvred and flouted the rapacious cousinry, Clara is seen at the last, under the protection of Holy Church, still quietly devouring her Miranda leaf--such is the irony of nature, and the merit of a perfect digestive apparatus.

The second narrative poem of this period, _The Inn Alb.u.m_ (1875), is in truth a short series of dramatic scenes, placed in a narrative frame-work. It is as concentrated as _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ is diffuse; and the unities of time and place a.s.sist the tragic concentration. A recast of _The Inn Alb.u.m_ might indeed have appeared as a drama on the Elizabethan stage side by side with such a brief masterpiece, piteous and terrible, as "A Yorks.h.i.+re Tragedy"; it moves with a like appalling rapidity towards the climax and the catastrophe.

The incident of the attempted barter of a discarded mistress to clear off the score of a gambling debt is derived from the scandalous chronicle of English nineteenth century society.[116] Browning's tale of crime was styled on its appearance by a distinguished critic of Elizabethan drama the story of a "penny dreadful." He was right; but he should have added that some of the most impressive and elevated pieces of our dramatic literature have had sources of no greater dignity. The story of the "penny dreadful" is here rehandled and becomes a tragedy of which the material part is only a translation into external deed of a tragedy of the soul. The _dramatis personae_, as refas.h.i.+oned from the crude fact and the central pa.s.sions of the poem, were such as would naturally call forth what was characteristic in Browning's genius. A martyr of love, a traitor to love, an avenger of love,--these are the central figures. The girlish innocence of the cousin is needed only as a ray of morning sunlight to relieve the eye that is strained and pained by the darkness and the pallor of the faces of the exponents of pa.s.sion.

And a like effect is produced by the glimpses of landscape, rich in the English qualities of cultured gladness and repose, which Browning so seldom presented, but which are perfectly rendered here:

The wooded watered country, hill and dale And steel-bright thread of stream, a-smoke with mist, A-sparkle with May morning, diamond drift O' the sun-touched dew.

We must feel that life goes on with leisurely happiness outside the little room that isolates its tragic occupants; the smoke from fires of turf and wood is in the air; cottagers are at their morning cookery.

After all the poet of the inn alb.u.m was well inspired in his eloquent address:--"Hail, calm acclivity, salubrious spot!" and only certain incidents, which time will soon efface, have touched the salutation with irony.

In this poem Browning reverts to his earlier method of clearly and simply dividing the evil from the good. We are not embarra.s.sed by the mingling of truth with sophistry; our instinctive sympathies are not held in check, but are on the contrary reinforced by the undisguised sympathies of the writer. We are no more in doubt where wrong and where justice lie than if Count Gismond were confronting Count Gauthier. The avenger, indeed, is no champion of romance; he is only a young English sn.o.b, a little slow of brain, a little unrefined in manner, a "clumsy giant handsome creature," who for a year has tried to acquire under an accomplished tutor the lore of cynical worldliness, and has not succeeded, for he is manly and honest, and has the gentleness of strength; "for ability, all's in the rough yet." Of his education the best part is that he has once loved and been thwarted in his love. And now in a careless-earnest regard for his cousin his need is that of occupation for his big, idle boy's heart; he wants something to do, someone also to serve. Browning wishes to show the pa.s.sion of righteousness, which suddenly flames forth and abolishes an evil thing as springing from no peculiar knightly virtue but from mere honest human nature. The huge boy, somewhat crude, somewhat awkward, with a moral temper still unclarified, has enough of our good, common humanity in him to hold no parley with utter wickedness, when once he fully apprehends its nature; therefore he springs upon it in one swift transport of rage and there and then makes an end of it. His big red hands are as much the instruments of divine justice as is the axe of Ivan Ivanovitch.

The traitor of the poem is "refinement every inch from brow to boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning's villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily affect. There is here and elsewhere in Browning's later poetry somewhat too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world's acquaintance with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it quite good manners. The vulgarity of the man in the street may have a redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of _navete_, in it; the vulgarity of the man in the club, "refinement every inch" is beyond redemption. The exhibition of Browning's traitor as having slipped lower and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking att.i.tudes, are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to discover and interpret aright. The melodramatic is often the truth falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become tragic. There is much in Shakespeare's plays which if treated by an inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. Browning escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite forget its neighbourhood. When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn--as was Guido--

Into that sad obscure sequestered state Where G.o.d unmakes but to remake the soul He else made first in vain,

there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment--though too late--a sudden wave of not ign.o.ble pa.s.sion overwhelmed his baser self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in their starkness and cruelty.

The lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow

Oppressed by sweeps of hair Darker and darker as they coil and swathe The crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black,

her pa.s.sion, her despair, her recovery through chilling to ice the heart within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his last fraud, and her self-sought death--the lady is dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure. Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love. And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and sn.o.b, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at work:

Did you love me once?

Then take love's last and best return! I think Womanliness means only motherhood; All love begins and ends there,--roams enough, But, having run the circle, rests at home.

Her husband, good man, will not suffer acutely for her loss; he will be true to duty, and continue to dose his flock with the comfortable dogma of h.e.l.l-fire, in which not one of them believes.