PART I

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.