In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly

untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the

fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general

rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that

such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements

which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the

idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his

fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted,"

thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, I say, but at

the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One

with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already

quoted:

"For each man kills the thing he loves";

and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises

most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is

oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man

of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this

matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic

creation of which I now speak.

Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and

justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for

woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of

the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction

necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is

the most salient quality--a type of which, as I have said, the poet is

bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of

the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses

grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament.

+ + + + +

The character of Mildred in _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ is a striking

example of this. She is a young girl who has been drawn by her innocent

passion into complete surrender to her lover. He, after this surrender,

seeks her in marriage from her brother, who stands in the place of both

parents to the orphan girl. The brother consents, unknowing; but after

his consent, learns from a servant that Mildred has yielded herself to a

man--he learns not _whom_. She, accused, makes no denial, gives no name,

and to her brother's consternation, proposes thus to marry her suitor,

whom Tresham thinks to be in ignorance of her error. Tresham violently

repudiates her; then, meeting beneath her window the cloaked lover,

attacks him, forces him to reveal himself, learns that he and the

accepted suitor are one and the same, and kills him--Mertoun (the lover)

making no defence. Tresham goes to Mildred and tells her what he has

done; she dies of the hearing, and he, having taken poison after the

revelation of Mertoun's identity, dies also.

The defects in this story are so obvious that I need hardly point them

out. Most prominent of all is the difficulty of reconciling Earl

Mertoun's conduct with that of a rational being. He is all that in

Mildred's suitor might be demanded, yet, loving her deeply and so loved

by her, he has feared to ask her brother for her hand, because of his

reverence for this Earl Tresham.

". . . I was young,

And your surpassing reputation kept me

So far aloof . . ."

Thus he explains himself. He feared to ask for her hand, yet did not

fear to seduce her! The thing is so absurd that it vitiates all the

play, which indeed but once or twice approaches aught that we can figure

to ourselves of reality in any period of history. "Mediæval" is a

strange adjective, used by Mrs. Orr to characterise a work of which the

date is placed by Browning himself in the eighteenth century.

Mildred is but fourteen: an age at which, with our modern sense of

girlhood as, happily, in this land we now know it, we find ourselves

unable to apprehend her at all. Instinctively we assign to her at least

five years more, since even these would leave her still a child--though

not at any moment in the play does she actually so affect us, for

Mildred is never a child, never even a young girl. Immature indeed she

is, but it is with the immaturity which will not develop, which has

nothing to do with length of years. To me, the failure here is absolute;

she never comes to life. Every student of Browning knows of the

enthusiasm which Dickens expressed for this piece and this character:

"Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of

sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what

is lovely, true, deeply affecting . . . is to say that there is

no light in the sun, and no heat in the blood. . . . I know

nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever

read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young--I had

no mother.'"

Such ardour well might stir us to agreement, were it not that Dickens

chose for its warmest expression the very centre of our disbelief:

Mildred's _recurrence_ to that cry. . . . The cry itself--I cannot be

alone in thinking--rings false, and the recurrence, therefore, but heaps

error upon error. When I imagine an ardent girl in such a situation,

almost anything she could have been made to say would to me seem more

authentic than this. The first utterance, moreover, occurs before she

knows that Tresham has learnt the truth--it occurs, in soliloquy,

immediately after an interview with her lover.

"I was so young, I loved him so, I had

No mother, God forgot me, and I fell."

_I fell_ . . . No woman, in any extremity, says that; that is what is

said by others of her. And _God forgot me_--is this the thought of one

who "loves him so"? . . . The truth is that we have here the very

commonplace of the theatre: the wish to have it both ways, to show, yet

not to reveal--the "dramatic situation," in short, set out because it

_is_ dramatic, not because it is true. We cannot suppose that Browning

meant Earl Mertoun for a mere seducer, ravishing from a maiden that

which she did not desire to give--yet the words he here puts in

Mildred's mouth bear no other interpretation. Either she is capable of

passion, or she is not. If she _is_, sorrow for the sorrow that her

recklessness may cause to others will indeed put pain and terror in her

soul, but she will not, can not, say that "God forgot her": those words

are alien to the passionate. If she is _not_, if Mertoun is the mere

seducer . . . but the suggestion is absurd. We know that he is like

herself, as herself should have been shown us, young love incarnate,

rushing to its end mistakenly--wrong, high, and pure. These errors are

the errors of quick souls, of souls that, too late realising all, yet

feel themselves unstained, and know that not God forgot them, but they

this world in which we dwell.

In her interview with Tresham after the servant's revelation, I find the

same untruth. He delivers a long rhapsody on brothers' love, saying that

it exceeds all other in its unselfishness. Her sole rejoinder--and here

she does for one second attain to authenticity--is the question: "What

is this for?" He, after some hesitation, tells her what he knows, calls

upon her to confess, she standing silent until, at end of the

arraignment, he demands the lover's name. Listen to her answer:

". . . Thorold, do you devise

Fit expiation for my guilt, if fit

There be! 'Tis nought to say that I'll endure

And bless you--that my spirit yearns to purge

Her stains off in the fierce renewing fire:

But do not plunge me into other guilt!

Oh, guilt enough . . ."

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

punishment.

Again her answer, in the utter falseness to all truth of its abasement,

well-nigh sickens the soul:

"Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me thus!

To die here in this chamber, by that sword,

Would seem like punishment; so should I glide

Like an arch-cheat, into extremest bliss!"

Comment upon that seems to me simply impossible. This is the woman to

whom, but a page or two back, young Mertoun has sung the exquisite song,

known to most readers of Browning's lyrics:

"There's a woman like a dewdrop, she's so purer than the purest,

And her noble heart's the noblest, yes, and her sure faith's the

surest" . . .

Already in that hour with her, Mertoun must have learnt that some of

those high words were turned to slighter uses when they sang of Mildred

Tresham. In that hour he has spoken of the "meeting that appalled us

both" (namely, the meeting with her brother, when he was to ask for her

hand), saying that it is over and happiness begins, "such as the world

contains not." When Mildred answers him with, "This will not be," we

could accept, believingly, were only the sense of doom what her reply

brought with it. But "this will not be," because they do not "deserve

the whole world's best of blisses."

"Sin has surprised us, so will punishment."

And how strange, how sad for a woman is it, to see with what truth and

courage Browning can make Mertoun speak! Each word that _he_ says can be

brave and clear for all its recognition of their error; no word that

_she_ says. . . . Her creator does not understand her; almost, thus, we

do feel Mildred to be real, so quick is our resentment of the

unrealities heaped on her. Imagining beforehand the moment when she

shall receive in presence of them all "the partner of my guilty love"

(is not here the theatre in full blast?), the deception she must

practise--called by her, in the vein so cruelly assigned her, "this

planned piece of deliberate wickedness" . . . imagining all this, she

foresees herself unable to pretend, pouring forth "all our woeful

story," and pictures them aghast, "as round some cursed fount that

should spirt water and spouts blood." . . . "I'll not!" she cries--

". . . 'I'll not affect a grace

That's gone from me--gone once, and gone for ever!'"

"Gone once, and gone for ever." True, when the grace _is_ gone; but

surely not from her, in any real sense, had it gone--and would she not,

in the deep knowledge of herself which comes with revelation to the

world, have felt that passionately? There are accusations of ourselves

which indeed arraign ourselves, yet leave us our best pride. To me, not

the error which made her prey to penitence was Mildred Tresham's

"fall," but those crude cries of shame.

We take refuge in her immaturity, and in the blighting influence of her

brother--that prig of prigs, that "monomaniac of family pride and

conventional morality,"[90:1] Thorold, Earl Tresham; but not thus can we

solace ourselves for Browning's failure. What a girl he might have given

us in Mildred, had he listened only to himself! But, not yet in full

possession of that self, he set up as an ideal the ideal of others,

trying dutifully to see it as they see it, denying dutifully his deepest

instinct; and, thus apostate, piled insincerity on insincerity, until at

last no truth is anywhere, and we read on with growing alienation as

each figure loses all of such reality as it ever had, and even

Gwendolen, the "golden creature"--his own dauntless, individual woman,

seeing and feeling truly through every fibre of her being--is lost amid

the fog, is stifled in the stifling atmosphere, and only at the last,

when Mildred and her brother are both dead, can once more say the word

which lights us back to truth:

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

It was indeed all _they_ could do; but we, more fortunate, can forget

him, imaging to ourselves the Mildred that Browning could have given

us--the Mildred of whom her brother is made to say:

"You cannot know the good and tender heart,

Its girl's trust and its woman's constancy,

How pure yet passionate, how calm yet kind,

How grave yet joyous, how reserved yet free

As light where friends are . . ."

There she is, as Browning might have shown her! "Control's not for this

lady," Tresham adds--the sign-manual of a Browning woman. As I have

said, he can display this lovely type through others, can sing it in his

own person, as in the exquisite dewdrop lyric; but once let her speak

for herself--he obeys the world and its appraisals, and the truth

departs from him; we have the Mildred Tresham of the theatre, of "the

partner of my guilty love," of "Oh, Thorold, you must never tempt me

thus!" of (in a later scene) "I think I might have urged some little

point in my defence to Thorold"; of that last worst unreality of all,

when Thorold has told her of his murder of her lover, and she cries:

". . . I--forgive not,

But bless you, Thorold, from my soul of souls!

There! Do not think too much upon the past!

The cloud that's broke was all the same a cloud

While it stood up between my friend and you;

You hurt him 'neath its shadow: but is that

So past retrieve? I have his heart, you know;

I may dispose of it: I give it you!

It loves you as mine loves!"

True, she is to die, and so is to rejoin her lover; but, thus rejoined,

will "blots upon the 'scutcheon" seem to them the all-sufficient claim

for Thorold's deed--Thorold who dies with these words on his lips:

". . . You hold our 'scutcheon up.

Austin, no blot on it! You see how blood

Must wash one blot away; the first blot came

And the first blood came. To the vain world's eye

All's gules again: no care to the vain world

From whence the red was drawn!"

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

"I said that: yet it did come. Should it come,

Vengeance is God's, not man's. Remember me!"

_Vengeance_: how do they who are met again in the spirit-world regard

that word, that "God"?

FOOTNOTES:

[90:1] Berdoe. _Browning Cyclopædia._

IV

BALAUSTION

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

To me, Balaustion is the queen of Browning's women--nay, I am tempted to

proclaim her queen of every poet's women. For in her meet all

lovelinesses, and to make her dearer still, some are as yet but in germ

(what a mother she will be, for example); so that we have, with all the

other beauties, the sense of the unfolding rose--"enmisted by the scent

it makes," in a phrase of her creator's which, though in the actual

context it does not refer to her, yet exquisitely conveys her influence

on these two works. "Rosy Balaustion": she is that, as well as "superb,

statuesque," in the admiring apostrophes from Aristophanes, during the

long, close argument of the _Apology_. In that piece, the Bald Bard

himself is made to show her to us; and though it follows, not precedes,

the _Adventure_, I shall steal from him at once, presenting in his lyric

phrases our queen before we crown her.

He comes to her home in Athens on the night when Balaustion learns that

her adored Euripides is dead. She and her husband, Euthukles, are

"sitting silent in the house, yet cheerless hardly," musing on the

tidings, when suddenly there come torch-light and knocking at the door,

and cries and laughter: "Open, open, Bacchos[94:1] bids!"--and, heralded

by his chorus and the dancers, flute-boys, all the "banquet-band," there

enters, "stands in person, Aristophanes." Balaustion had never seen him

till that moment, nor he her:

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

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

admiration:

"'You, lady? What, the Rhodian? Form and face,

Victory's self upsoaring to receive

The poet? Right they named you . . . some rich name,

Vowel-buds thorned about with consonants,

Fragrant, felicitous, rose-glow enriched

By the Isle's unguent: some diminished end

In _ion_' . . ."

and trying to recall that name "in _ion_," he guesses two or three at

random, seizing thus the occasion to express her effect on him:

"'Phibalion, for the mouth split red-fig-wise,

Korakinidion, for the coal-black hair,

Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness?'"

But none of these is right; "it was some fruit-flower"; and at last it

comes: _Balaustion_, Wild-Pomegranate-Bloom, and he exclaims in ecstasy,

"Thanks, Rhodes!"--for her fellow-countrymen had found this name for

her, so apt in every way that her real name was forgotten, and as

Balaustion she shall live and die.

"Nettarion, Phabion, for the darlingness"; and for all her intellect and

ardour, it is greatly _this_ that makes Balaustion queen--the lovely

eager sweetness, the tenderness, the "darlingness": Aristophanes guessed

almost right!

+ + + + +

How did she win the name of Wild-Pomegranate-Flower? We learn it from

herself in the _Adventure_. Let us hear: let us feign ourselves members

of the little band of friends, all girls, with their charming, chiming

names: "Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion"--to whom she cries in the

delightful opening:

"About that strangest, saddest, sweetest song

I, when a girl, heard in Kameiros once,

And after, saved my life by? Oh, so glad

To tell you the adventure!"

Part of the adventure is historical. In the second stage of the

Peloponnesian War (that famous contention between the Athenians and the

inhabitants of Peloponnesus which began on May 7, 431 B.C. and lasted

twenty-seven years), the Athenian General, Nikias, had suffered disaster

at Syracuse, and had given himself up, with all his army, to the

Sicilians. But the assurances of safety which he had received were

quickly proved false. He was no sooner in the hands of the enemy than he

was shamefully put to death with his naval ally, Demosthenes; and his

troops were sent to the quarries, where the plague and the hard labour

lessened their numbers and increased their miseries. When this bad news

reached Rhodes, the islanders rose in revolt against the supremacy of

Athens, and resolved to side with Sparta. Balaustion[96:1] was there,

and she passionately protested against this decision, crying to "who

would hear, and those who loved me at Kameiros"[96:2]:

". . . No!

Never throw Athens off for Sparta's sake--

Never disloyal to the life and light

Of the whole world worth calling world at all!

* * * * *

To Athens, all of us that have a soul,

Follow me!"

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

and they turned

"The glad prow westward, soon were out at sea,

Pushing, brave ship with the vermilion cheek,

Proud for our heart's true harbour."

But they were pursued by pirates, and, fleeing from these, drove

unawares into the harbour of that very Syracuse where Nikias and

Demosthenes had perished, and in whose quarries their countrymen were

slaves. The inhabitants refused them admission, for they had heard, as

the ship came into harbour, Balaustion singing "that song of ours which

saved at Salamis." She had sprung upon the altar by the mast, and

carolled it forth to encourage the oarsmen; and now it was vain to tell

the Sicilians that these were Rhodians who had cast in their lot with

the Spartan League, for the Captain of Syracuse answered:

"Ay, but we heard all Athens in one ode . . .

You bring a boatful of Athenians here";

and Athenians they would not have at Syracuse, "with memories of

Salamis" to stir up the slaves in the quarry.

No prayers, no blandishments, availed the Rhodians; they were just about

to turn away and face the pirates in despair, when somebody raised a

question, and

". . . 'Wait!'

Cried they (and wait we did, you may be sure).

'That song was veritable Aischulos,

Familiar to the mouth of man and boy,

Old glory: how about Euripides?

Might you know any of his verses too?'"

Browning here makes use of the historical fact that Euripides was

reverenced far more by foreigners and the non-Athenian Greeks than by

the Athenians--for Balaustion, "the Rhodian," had been brought up in his

worship, though she knew and loved the other great Greek poets also; and

already it was known to our voyagers that the captives in the quarries

had found that those who could "teach Euripides to Syracuse" gained

indulgence far beyond what any of the others could obtain. Thus, when

the question sounded, "Might you know any of his verses too?" the

captain of the vessel cried:

"Out with our Sacred Anchor! Here she stands,

Balaustion! Strangers, greet the lyric girl!

* * * * *

Why, fast as snow in Thrace, the voyage through,

Has she been falling thick in flakes of him,

* * * * *

And so, although she has some other name,

We only call her Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,

Balaustion; since, where'er the red bloom burns

* * * * *

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

He called upon her to save their little band by singing a strophe. But

she could do better than that--she could recite a whole play:

"That strangest, saddest, sweetest song of his,

ALKESTIS!"

Only that very year had it reached "Our Isle o' the Rose"; she had seen

it, at Kameiros, played just as it was played at Athens, and had learnt

by heart "the perfect piece." Now, quick and subtle for all her

enthusiasm, she remembers to tell the Sicilians how, besides "its beauty

and the way it makes you weep," it does much honour to their own loved

deity:

"Herakles, whom you house i' the city here

Nobly, the Temple wide Greece talks about;

I come a suppliant to your Herakles!

Take me and put me on his temple-steps

To tell you his achievement as I may."

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

_Apology_:

"Then, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,

And poetry is power--they all outbroke

In a great joyous laughter with much love:

'Thank Herakles for the good holiday!

Make for the harbour! Row, and let voice ring:

_In we row bringing in Euripides!_'"

So did the Rhodians land at Syracuse. And the whole city, hearing the

cry "In we row," which was taken up by the crowd around the

harbour-quays, came rushing out to meet them, and Balaustion, standing

on the topmost step of the Temple of Herakles, told the play:

"Told it, and, two days more, repeated it,

Until they sent us on our way again

With good words and great wishes."

That was her Adventure. Three things happened in it "for herself": a

rich Syracusan brought her a whole talent as a gift, and she left it on

the tripod as thank-offering to Herakles; a band of the captives--"whom

their lords grew kinder to, Because they called the poet

countryman"--sent her a crown of wild-pomegranate-flower; and the third

thing . . . Petalé, Phullis, Charopé, Chrusion, hear of this also--of

the youth who, all the three days that she spoke the play, was found in

the gazing, listening audience; and who, when they sailed away, was

found in the ship too, "having a hunger to see Athens"; and when they

reached Piræus, once again was found, as Balaustion landed, beside her.

February's moon is just a-bud when she tells her comrades of this youth;

and when that moon rounds full:

"We are to marry. O Euripides!"

* * * * *

Everyone who speaks of _Balaustion's Adventure_ will quote to you that

ringing line, for it sums up the high, ardent girl who, even in the

exultation of her love, must call upon the worshipped Master. It is this

passion for intellectual beauty which sets Balaustion so apart, which

makes her so complete and stimulating. She has a mind as well as a heart

and soul; she is priestess as well as goddess--Euthukles will have a

wife indeed! Every word she speaks is stamped with the Browning marks of

gaiety, courage, trust, and with how many others also: those of

high-heartedness, deep-heartedness, the true patriotism that cherishes

most closely the soul of its country; and then generosity, pride,

ardour--all enhanced by woman's more peculiar gifts of gentleness,

modesty, tenderness, insight, gravity . . . for Balaustion is like many

women in having, for all her gaiety, more sense of happiness than sense

of humour. It often comes to me as debatable if this be not the most

attractive of deficiencies! Certainly Balaustion persuades us of its

power; for in the _Apology_, her refusal of the Aristophanic Comedy is

firm-based upon that imputed lack in women. No man, thus poised, could

have convinced us of his reality; while she convinces us not only of her

reality, but of her rightness. Again, we must applaud our poet's wisdom

in choosing woman for the Bald Bard's accuser; she is as potent in this

part as in that of Euripides' interpreter.

But what a girl Balaustion is, as well as what a woman! Let us see her

with the little band of friends about her, as in the exquisite

revocation (in the _Apology_) of the first adventure's telling:

". . . O that Spring,

That eve I told the earlier[101:1] to my friends!

Where are the four now, with each red-ripe mouth

I wonder, does the streamlet ripple still,

Outsmoothing galingale and watermint?

* * * * *

Under the grape-vines, by the streamlet-side,

Close to Baccheion; till the cool increase,

And other stars steal on the evening star,

And so, we homeward flock i' the dusk, we five!"

Then, in the _Adventure_, comes the translation by Browning of the

_Alkestis_ of Euripides, which Balaustion is feigned to have spoken upon

the temple steps at Syracuse. With this we have here no business, though

so entire is his "lyric girl," so fully and perfectly by him conceived,

that not a word of the play but might have been Balaustion's own. This

surely is a triumph of art--to imagine such a speaker for such a piece,

and to blend them both so utterly that the supreme Greek dramatist and

this girl are indivisible. What a woman was demanded for such a feat,

and what a poet for both! May we not indeed say now that Browning was

our singer? Whom but he would have done this--so crowned, so trusted,

us, and so persuaded men that women can be great?

"Its beauty, and the way it makes you weep": yes--and the way it makes

you thrill with love for Herakles, never before so god-like, because

always before too much the apotheosis of mere physical power. But read

of him in the _Alkestis_ of Euripides, and you shall feel him indeed

divine--"this grand benevolence." . . . We can hear the voice of

Balaustion deepen, quiver, and grow grave with gladdened love, as

Herakles is fashioned for us by these two men's noble minds.

+ + + + +

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

inspiration came to her:

"I think I see how . . .

You, I, or anyone might mould a new

Admetos, new Alkestis";

and saying this, a flood of gratitude for the great gift of poetry comes

full tide across her soul:

". . . Ah, that brave

Bounty of poets, the one royal race

That ever was, or will be, in this world!

They give no gift that bounds itself and ends

I' the giving and the taking: theirs so breeds

I' the heart and soul o' the taker, so transmutes

The man who only was a man before,

That he grows god-like in his turn, can give--

He also; share the poet's privilege,

Bring forth new good, new beauty from the old.

. . . So with me:

For I have drunk this poem, quenched my thirst,

Satisfied heart and soul--yet more remains!

Could we too make a poem? Try at least,

Inside the head, what shape the rose-mists take!"

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

Admetos, in Balaustion's and Browning's _Alkestis_, will not let his

wife be sacrificed for him:

"Never, by that true word Apollon spoke!

All the unwise wish is unwished, oh wife!"

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

"This purpose--that, throughout my earthly life,

Mine should be mingled and made up with thine--

And we two prove one force and play one part

And do one thing. Since death divides the pair,

'Tis well that I depart and thou remain

Who wast to me as spirit is to flesh:

Let the flesh perish, be perceived no more,

So thou, the spirit that informed the flesh,

Bend yet awhile, a very flame above

The rift I drop into the darkness by--

And bid remember, flesh and spirit once

Worked in the world, one body, for man's sake.

Never be that abominable show

Of passive death without a quickening life--

Admetos only, no Alkestis now!"

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

Browning's _Alkestis_.

And the woman, answering, declares that the reality of their joint

existence lies not in her, but in him:

". . . 'What! thou soundest in my soul

To depths below the deepest, reachest good

By evil, that makes evil good again,

And so allottest to me that I live,

And not die--letting die, not thee alone,

But all true life that lived in both of us?

Look at me once ere thou decree the lot!'

* * * * *

Therewith her whole soul entered into his,

He looked the look back, and Alkestis died."

But when she reaches the nether world--"the downward-dwelling

people"--she is rejected as a deceiver: "This is not to die," says the

Queen of Hades, for her death is a mockery, since it doubles the life of

him she has left behind:

"'Two souls in one were formidable odds:

Admetos must not be himself and thou!'

* * * * *

And so, before the embrace relaxed a whit,

The lost eyes opened, still beneath the look;

And lo, Alkestis was alive again."

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

+ + + + +

When next we meet with Balaustion, in _Aristophanes' Apology_, she is

married to her Euthukles, and they are once more speeding across the

waters--this time back to Rhodes, from Athens which has fallen.

Many things have happened in the meantime, and Balaustion, leaving her

adoptive city, with "not sorrow but despair, not memory but the present

and its pang" in her deep heart, feels that if she deliberately invites

the scene, if she embodies in words the tragedy of Athens, she may free

herself from anguish. Euthukles shall write it down for her, and they

will go back to the night they heard Euripides was dead: "One year ago,

Athenai still herself." Together she and Euthukles had mused, together

glorified their poet. Euthukles had met the audience flocking homeward

from the theatre, where Aristophanes had that night won the prize which

Euripides had so seldom won. They had stopped him to hear news of the

other poet's death: "Balaustion's husband, the right man to ask"--but he

had refused them all satisfaction, and scornfully rated them for the

crown but now awarded. "Appraise no poetry," he had cried: "price

cuttlefish!"

Balaustion had seen, since she had come to live in Athens, but one work

of Aristophanes, the _Lysistrata_; and now, in breathless reminiscent

anger, recalls the experience. It had so appalled her, "that bestiality

so beyond all brute-beast imagining," that she would never see again a

play by him who in the crowned achievement of this evening had drawn

himself as Virtue laughingly reproving Vice, and Vice . . . Euripides!

Such a piece it was which had "gained the prize that day we heard the

death."

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

"I thought, 'How thoroughly death alters things!

Where is the wrong now, done our dead and great?'"

Euthukles, divining her thought, told her that the mob had repented when

they learnt the news. He had heard them cry: "Honour him!" and "A statue

in the theatre!" and "Bring his body back,[106:1] bury him in

Piræus--Thucydides shall make his epitaph!"

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

"Our tribute should not be the same, my friend.

Statue? Within our hearts he stood, he stands!"

and, for his mere mortal body:

"Why, let it fade, mix with the elements

There where it, falling, freed Euripides!"

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

This, by

"Singing, we two, its own song back again

Up to that face from which flowed beauty--face

Now abler to see triumph and take love

Than when it glorified Athenai once."

Yes: they two would read together _Herakles_, the play of which

Euripides himself had given her the tablets, in commemoration of the

Adventure at Syracuse. After that, on her first arrival in Athens, she

had gone to see him, "held the sacred hand of him, and laid it to my

lips"; she had told him "how Alkestis helped," and he, on bidding her

farewell, had given her these tablets, with the stylos pendant from them

still, and given her, too, his own psalterion, that she might, to its

assisting music, "croon the ode bewailing age."

All was prepared for the reading, when (as we earlier learnt) there came

the torch-light and the knocking at their door, and Aristophanes, fresh

from his triumph, entered with the banquet-band, to hail the "house,

friendly to Euripides."

He knew, declared Aristophanes, that the Rhodian hated him most of

mortals, but he would not blench. The others blenched--no word could

they utter, nor one laugh laugh. . . . So he drove them out, and stood

alone confronting

"Statuesque Balaustion pedestalled

On much disapprobation and mistake."

He babbled on for a while, defiantly and incoherently, and at length she

turned in dumb rebuke, which he at once understood.

"True, lady, I am tolerably drunk";

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

reigned and increased

"'Till something happened' . . .

Here he strangely paused";

but soon went on to tell the way in which the news had reached them

there. . . . While Aristophanes spoke, Balaustion searched his face; and

now (recalling, on the way to Rhodes, that hour to Euthukles), she

likens the change which she then saw in it to that made by a black cloud

suddenly sailing over a stretch of sparkling sea--such a change as they

are in this very moment beholding.

"Just so, some overshadow, some new care

Stopped all the mirth and mocking on his face,

And left there only such a dark surmise--

No wonder if the revel disappeared,

So did his face shed silence every side!

I recognised a new man fronting me."

At once he perceived her insight, and answered it: "So you see myself?

Your fixed regard can strip me of my 'accidents,' as the sophists say?"

But neither should this disconcert him:

"Thank your eyes' searching; undisguised I stand:

The merest female child may question me.

Spare not, speak bold, Balaustion!"

She, searching thus his face, had learnt already that "what she had

disbelieved most proved most true." Drunk though he was,

"There was a mind here, mind a-wantoning

At ease of undisputed mastery

Over the body's brood, those appetites.

Oh, but he grasped them grandly!"

It was no "ignoble presence": the broad bald brow, the flushed cheek,

great imperious fiery eyes, wide nostrils, full aggressive mouth, all

the pillared head:

"These made a glory, of such insolence--

I thought--such domineering deity . . .

Impudent and majestic . . ."

Instantly on her speaking face the involuntary homage had shown; and it

was to this that Aristophanes, keen of sight as she, had confidently

addressed himself when he told her to speak boldly. And in the very

spirit of her face she did speak:

"Bold speech be--welcome to this honoured hearth,

Good Genius!"

Here sounds the essential note of generous natures. Proved mistaken,

their instant impulse is to rejoice in defeat, if defeat means victory

for the better thing. Thus, as Balaustion speaks, her ardour grows with

every word. He is greater than she had supposed, and so she must even

rhapsodise--she must crowd praise on praise, until she ends with the

exultant cry:

"O light, light, light, I hail light everywhere!

No matter for the murk that was--perchance

That will be--certes, never should have been

Such orb's associate!"

Mark that Aristophanes has not yet _said_ anything to justify her change

of attitude: the seeing of him is enough to draw from her this

recantation--for she trusts her own quick insight, and so, henceforth

trusts him.

Now begins the long, close argument between them which constitutes

_Aristophanes' Apology_. It is (from him) the defence of comedy as he

understands and practises it--broad and coarse when necessary; violent

and satiric against those who in any way condemn it. Euripides had been

one of these, and Balaustion now stands for him. . . . In the long run,

it is the defence of "realism" against "idealism," and, as such,

involves a whole philosophy of life. We cannot follow it here; all we

may do is to indicate the points at which it reveals, as she speaks in

it, the character of Balaustion, and the growing charm which such

revelation has for her opponent.

At every turn of his argument, Aristophanes is sure of her

comprehension. He knows that he need not adapt himself to a feebler

mind: "You understand," he says again and again. At length he comes, in

his narration, to the end of their feast that night, and tells how,

rising from the banquet interrupted by the entrance of Sophocles with

tidings of Euripides dead, he had cried to his friends that they must go

and see

"The Rhodian rosy with Euripides! . . .

And here you stand with those warm golden eyes!

Maybe, such eyes must strike conviction, turn

One's nature bottom-upwards, show the base . . .

Anyhow, I have followed happily

The impulse, pledged my genius with effect,

Since, come to see you, I am shown--myself!"

She instantly bids him, as she has honoured him, that he do honour to

Euripides. But, seized by perversity, he declares that if she will give

him the _Herakles_ tablets (which he has discerned, lying with the other

gifts of Euripides), he will prove to her, by this play alone, the "main

mistake" of her worshipped Master.

She warmly interrupts, reproving him. Their house _is_ the shrine of

that genius, and he has entered it, "fresh from his worst infamy"--yet

she has withheld the words she longs to speak, she has inclined, nay

yearned, to reverence him:

"So you but suffer that I see the blaze

And not the bolt--the splendid fancy-fling,

Not the cold iron malice, the launched lie."

If he does _this_, if he shows her

"A mere man's hand ignobly clenched against

Yon supreme calmness,"

she will interpose:

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

But Aristophanes, at that word of "calmness," exclaims vehemently. Death

is the great unfairness! Once a man dead, the survivors croak, "Respect

him." And so one must--it is the formidable claim, "immunity of

faultiness from fault's punishment." That is why _he_, Aristophanes, has

always attacked the living; he knew how they would hide their heads,

once dead! Euripides had chosen the other way; "men pelted him, but got

no pellet back"; and it was not magnanimity but arrogance that prompted

him to such silence. Those at whom Aristophanes or he should fling mud

were by that alone immortalised--and Euripides, "that calm cold

sagacity," knew better than to do them such service.

As he speaks thus, Balaustion's "heart burns up within her to her

tongue." She exclaims that the baseness of Aristophanes' attack, of his

"mud-volleying" at Euripides, consists in the fact that both men had, at

bottom, the same ideals; they both extended the limitations of art,

both were desirous from their hearts that truth should triumph--yet

Aristophanes, thus desiring, poured out his supremacy of power against

the very creature who loved all that _he_ loved! And she declares that

such shame cuts through all his glory. Comedy is in the dust, laid low

by him:

"Balaustion pities Aristophanes!"

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

"Blood burnt the cheek-bone, each black eye flashed fierce:

'But this exceeds our license!'"

--so he exclaims; but then, seizing his native weapon, stops ironically

to search out an excuse for her. He finds it soon. She and her husband

are but foreigners; they are "uninstructed"; the born and bred Athenian

needs must smile at them, if he do not think a frown more fitting for

such ignorance. But strangers are privileged: Aristophanes will condone.

They want to impose their squeamishness on sturdy health: that is at the

bottom of it all. Their Euripides had cried "Death!"--deeming death the

better life; he, Aristophanes, cries "Life!" If the Euripideans

condescend to happiness at all, they merely "talk, talk, talk about the

empty name," while the thing itself lies neglected beneath their noses;

they

"think out thoroughly how youth should pass--

Just as if youth stops passing, all the same!"

* * * * *

As he proceeds, in the superb defence of his own methods, he sees

Balaustion grow ever more indignant. But he conjures her to wait a

moment ere she "looses his doom" on him--and at last, drawing to an end,

declares that after all the ground of difference between him and her is

slight. In so far as it does exist, however, he claims to have won.

Euripides, for whom she stands, is beaten in this contest, yet he,

Aristophanes, has not even put forth all his power! If she will not

acknowledge final defeat:

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

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

attack."

It is evident how he has been moved, despite his boasting--how eagerly

he awaits her use of the rosy strength. . . . But she begins meekly

enough. She is a woman, she says, and claims no quality "beside the love

of all things lovable"; in _that_, she does claim to stand pre-eminent.

But men may use, justifiably, different methods from those which women

most admire, and so far and because she is a foreigner, as he reminds

her, she may be mistaken in her blame of him. Yet foreigners, strangers,

will in the ultimate issue be the judges of this matter, and shall they

find Aristophanes any more impeccable than she does? (She now begins to

put forth the rosy strength!) What is it that he has done? He did not

invent comedy! Has he improved upon it? No, she declares. One of his

aims is to discredit war. That was an aim of Euripides also; and has

Aristophanes yet written anything like the glorious Song to Peace in the

_Cresphontes_?

"Come, for the heart within me dies away,

So long dost thou delay!"

She gives this forth, in the old "Syracusan" manner, and is well aware

that he can have no answer for her. Again (she proceeds), Euripides

discredited war by showing how it outrages the higher feelings: by what

method has Aristophanes discredited it? By the obscene allurements of

the _Lysistrata_! . . . Thus she takes him through his works, and

finally declares that only in "more audaciously lying" has he improved

upon the earlier writers of comedy. He has genius--she gladly grants it;

but he has debased his genius. The mob indeed has awarded him the

crowns: is such crowning the true guerdon?

"Tell him, my other poet--where thou walk'st

Some rarer world than e'er Ilissos washed!"

But as to the immortality of either, who shall say? And is even _that_

the question? No: the question is--did both men wish to waft the white

sail of good and beauty on its way? Assuredly. . . . And so she cries at

the last: "Your nature too is kingly"; and this is for her the sole

source of ardour--she "trusts truth's inherent kingliness"; and the

poets are of all men most royal. She never would have dared approach

this poet so:

"But that the other king stands suddenly,

In all the grand investiture of death,

Bowing your knee beside my lowly head

--Equals one moment!

--Now arise and go.

Both have done homage to Euripides!"

But he insists that her defence has been oblique--it has been merely an

attack on himself. She must defend her poet more directly, or

Aristophanes will do no homage. At once she answers that she will, that

she has the best, the only, defence at hand. She will read him the

_Herakles_, read it as, at Syracuse, she spoke the _Alkestis_.

"Accordingly I read the perfect piece."

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

"The greatest of all our friends of yore

We have lost for evermore!"

and when Balaustion has chanted forth that strophe, there falls a long

silence, on this night of losing a friend.

Aristophanes breaks it musingly. "'Our best friend'--who has been the

best friend to Athens, Euripides or I?" And he answers that it is

himself, for he has done what he knew he _could_ do, and thus has

charmed "the Violet-Crowned"; while Euripides had challenged failure,

and had failed. Euripides, he cries, remembering an instance, has been

like Thamyris of Thrace, who was blinded by the Muses for daring to

contend with them in song; _he_, Aristophanes, "stands heart-whole, no

Thamyris!" He seizes the psalterion--Balaustion must let him use it for

once--and sings the song, from Sophocles, of Thamyris marching to his

doom.

He gives some verses,[117:1] then breaks off in laughter, having, as he

says, "sung content back to himself," since he is _not_ Thamyris, but

Aristophanes. . . . They shall both be pleased with his next play; it

shall be serious, "no word more of the old fun," for "death defends,"

and moreover, Balaustion has delivered her admonition so soundly! Thus

he departs, in all friendliness:

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

It is "next year," and Balaustion and Euthukles are fleeing across the

water to Rhodes from Athens. This year has seen the death of Sophocles;

and the greatest of all the Aristophanic triumphs in the _Frogs_. It

was all _him_, Balaustion says:

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

--it showed every facet of his genius, and in it Bacchos himself was

"duly dragged through the mire," and Euripides, after all the promises,

was more vilely treated than ever before.

"So, Aristophanes obtained the prize,

And so Athenai felt she had a friend

Far better than her 'best friend,' lost last year."

But then, what happened? The great battle of Ægos Potamos was fought and

lost, and Athens fell into the hands of the Spartans. The conqueror's

first words were, "Down with the Piræus! Peace needs no bulwarks." At

first the stupefied Athenians had been ready to obey--but when the next

decree came forth, "No more democratic government; _we_ shall appoint

your oligarchs!" the dreamers were stung awake by horror; they started

up a-stare, their hands refused their office.

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

Lysander, the Spartan general, angered by the dumb delay, called a

conference, issued decree. Not the Piræus only, but all Athens should be

destroyed; every inch of the "mad marble arrogance" should go, and so at

last should peace dwell there.

* * * * *

Balaustion stands, recalling this to Euthukles, who writes her

words . . . and now, though she does not name it so, she tells the third

"supreme adventure" of her life. When that decree had sounded, and the

Spartans' shout of acquiescence had died away:

"Then did a man of Phokis rise--O heart! . . .

_Who_ was the man of Phokis rose and flung

A flower i' the way of that fierce foot's advance"

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

"You flung that choric flower, my Euthukles!"

--and, gazing down on him from her proud rosy height, while he sits

gazing up at her, she chants again the words she spoke to her

girl-friends at the Baccheion:

"So, because Greeks are Greeks, and hearts are hearts,

And poetry is power, and Euthukles

Had faith therein to, full-face, fling the same--

Sudden, the ice-thaw! The assembled foe,

Heaving and swaying with strange friendliness,

Cried 'Reverence Elektra!'--cried

. . . 'Let stand

Athenai'! . . ."

--and Athens was saved through Euripides,

"Through Euthukles, through--more than ever--me,

Balaustion, me, who, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower,

Felt my fruit triumph, and fade proudly so!"

* * * * *

But next day, Sparta woke from the spell. Harsh Lysander decreed that

though Athens might be saved, the Piræus should not. Comedy should

destroy the Long Walls: the flute-girls should lead off in the dance,

should time the strokes of spade and pickaxe, till the pride of the

Violet-Crowned lay in the dust. "Done that day!" mourns Balaustion:

"The very day Euripides was born."

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

the sights and sounds,

"And press to other earth, new heaven, by sea

That somehow ever prompts to 'scape despair"

--and wonderfully, at the harbour-side they found that old grey mariner,

whose ship she had saved in the first Adventure! The ship was still

weather-wise: it should

"'Convey Balaustion back to Rhodes, for sake

Of her and her Euripides!' laughed he,"

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

sailing.

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

streams,"

"Boiling and freezing, like the love and hate

Which helped or harmed him through his earthly course.

They mix in Arethusa by his grave."

But, just as she had known, this revocation _has_ consoled her. Now she

will be able to forget. Never again will her eyes behold Athenai, nor in

imagination see "the ghastly mirth that mocked her overthrow"; but she

and Euthukles are exiles from the dead, not from the living, Athens:

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

There is no despair, there can be none; for does not the soul anticipate

its heaven here on earth:

"Above all crowding, crystal silentness,

Above all noise, a silver solitude . . .

Hatred and cark and care, what place have they

In yon blue liberality of heaven?

How the sea helps! How rose-smit earth will rise

Breast-high thence, some bright morning, and be Rhodes!"

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

the same:

"All in one chorus--what the master-word

They take up? Hark! 'There are no gods, no gods!

Glory to GOD--who saves Euripides!'"

. . . There she is, Wild-Pomegranate-Flower, Balaustion--and Triumphant

Woman. What other man has given us this?--and even Browning only here.

Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she

must suffer ere he can adore. But Balaustion triumphs, and we hail

her--and we hail her poet too, who dared to make her great not only in

her love, but in her own deep-hearted, ardent self.

"This mortal shall put on individuality." Of all men Browning most

wished women to do that.

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

[101:1] In the _Apology_, she tells "the second supreme adventure": her

interview with Aristophanes, and the recital to him of the _Herakles_ of

Euripides.

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

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

V

POMPILIA

IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"

I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage,

woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."

I should have said that this _has been_ so: for the tendency to-day is

to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in

the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of

that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood

around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the

outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but

I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so

disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist

reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme

uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against

ourselves--we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the

highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their

imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For

women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this!

Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to

themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from

women!"--how would that sound as a war-cry?

Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male

generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails

me--and if me, then probably many another--when I find myself reading of

the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for

my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at

its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as

one might say--the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn

now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering--we turn to

Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of

the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and

last, for the paltriest of motives--money. And money in no large,

imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at

all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: _this_

created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in _The

Ring and the Book_.

"Another day that finds her living yet,

Little Pompilia, with the patient brow

And lamentable smile on those poor lips,

And, under the white hospital-array,

A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise

You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again,

Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.

It seems that when her husband struck her first,

She prayed Madonna just that she might live

So long as to confess and be absolved;

And whether it was that, all her sad life long

Never before successful in a prayer,

This prayer rose with authority too dread--

Or whether because earth was hell to her,

By compensation when the blackness broke,

She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue,

To show her for a moment such things were,"

--the prayer was granted her.

So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband;

and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express

itself--"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the

crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the

seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why

was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?"

demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:

"Who did it shall account to Christ--

Having no pity on the harmless life

And gentle face and girlish form he found,

And thus flings back. Go practise if you please

With men and women. Leave a child alone

For Christ's particular love's sake!"

Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story

of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it--and as Browning, in the issue,

makes us see and feel it too.

In _The Ring and the Book_, Browning tells us this story--this "pure

crude fact" (for fact it actually is)--_ten times over_, through nine

different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice.

Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect

of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither

impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and

new--for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first

of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the

appearance of that fact to:

1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.

2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.

3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.

4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.

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

at the trial.

6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.

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

defence.

8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.

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

after the trial.

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

before execution.

Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the

survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is

omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said,

one overmastering effect stands forth--the utter loveliness and purity

of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as

neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly

[any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and

characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story

with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child."

And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of

weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the

beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of

manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to

show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and

love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not

the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others--this "lady

young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the

call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the

appointed man."

The "pure crude fact," detailed by Browning, was found in the authentic

legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow

parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid

many a day struck calm," on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo of

Florence. He bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and

us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem:

"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore,

Prime nature with an added artistry."

+ + + + +

Pompilia, called Comparini, was in reality "nobody's child." This, which

at first sight may seem of minor importance to the issue, is actually at

the heart of all; for, as I have said, it was the question of her dowry

which set the entire drama in motion. The old Comparini couple,

childless, of mediocre class and fortunes, had through silly

extravagance run into debt, and in 1679 were hard pressed by creditors.

They could not draw on their capital, for it was tied up in favour of

the legal heir, an unknown cousin. But if they had a child, that

disability would be removed. Violante Comparini, seeing this, resolved

upon a plan. She bought beforehand for a small sum the expected baby of

a disreputable woman, giving herself out to her husband, Pietro, and

their friends as almost miraculously pregnant--for she was past fifty.

In due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, Pompilia. This

girl was married at thirteen to Count Guido Franceschini, an

impoverished nobleman, fifty years old, of Arezzo. He married her for

her reported dowry, and she was sold to him for the sake of his rank.

Both parties to the bargain found themselves deceived (Pompilia was, of

course, a mere chattel in the business), for there was no dowry, and

Guido, though he _had_ the rank, had none of the appurtenances thereof

which had dazzled the fancy of Violante. Pietro too was tricked, and the

marriage carried through against his will. The old couple, reduced to

destitution by extracted payment of a part of the dowry, were taken to

the miserable Franceschini castle at Arezzo, and there lived wretchedly,

in every sense, for a while; but soon fled back to Rome, leaving the

girl-wife behind to aggravated woes. About three years afterwards she

also fled, intending to rejoin the Comparini at Rome. She was about to

become a mother. The organiser and companion of her flight was a young

priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who was a canon at Arezzo. Guido followed

them, caught them at Castelnuovo, a village on the outskirts of Rome,

and caused both to be arrested. They were confined in the "New Prisons"

at Rome, and tried for adultery. The result was a compromise--they were

pronounced guilty, but a merely nominal punishment ("the jocular piece

of punishment," as the young priest called it) was inflicted on each.

Pompilia was relegated for a time to a convent; Caponsacchi was

banished for three years to Civita Vecchia. As the time for Pompilia's

confinement drew near, she was permitted to go to her reputed parents'

home, which was a villa just outside the walls of the city. A few months

after her removal there, she became the mother of a son, whom the old

people quickly removed to a place of concealment and safety. A fortnight

later--on the second day of the New Year--Count Guido, with four hired

assassins, came to the villa, and all three occupants were killed:

Pietro and Violante Comparini, and Pompilia his wife. For these murders,

Guido and his hirelings were hanged at Rome on February 22, 1698.

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

this."

When the old Comparini reached Rome, after their flight from Arezzo, the

Pope had just proclaimed jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and

absolution for any sin was to be had for the asking--atonement, however,

necessarily preceding. Violante, remorseful for the sacrifice of their

darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about

the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if

atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir

that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. She therefore

confessed to Pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for

revenge on Guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the

Other Half-Rome, may not have been) his only motive.

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

* * * * *

What, the girl's dowry never was the girl's,

And unpaid yet, is never now to pay?

Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child

That used to be my own with her great eyes--

Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"

He repudiated Pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims

from her husband. Taken into Court, the case (also bound up in the

square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left

undecided.

It was this which loosed all Guido's fury on Pompilia. He had already

learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still

controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses

upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any

fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the

disputed dowry.[130:1] There was only one way thus to rid himself, and

that was to prove her guilty of adultery. He concentrated on it. First,

his brother, the young Canon Girolamo, who lived at the castle, was

incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. She fled to the

Archbishop of Arezzo and implored his succour. He gave none. Then she

went to the Governor: he also "pushed her back." She sought out a poor

friar, and confessed her "despair in God"; he promised to write to her

parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . Guido's

plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of

persecution must be set up. She was hourly accused of "looking

love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the

apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving

up the game."[131:1] She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window;

she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same

stone strength of white despair":

"How does it differ in aught, save degree,

From the terrible patience of God?"

--and more and more he hated her.

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

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

--saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank

personable priest"[131:3]--and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt

". . . Had there been a man like that,

To lift me with his strength out of all strife

Into the calm! . . .

Suppose that man had been instead of this?"

* * * * *

Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid"

that Browning calls him. His family, the oldest in Arezzo and once the

greatest, had wide interest in the Church, and he had always known that

he was to be a priest. But when the time came for "just a vow to read!"

he stopped awestruck. Could he keep such a promise? He knew himself too

weak. But the Bishop smiled. There were two ways of taking that vow, and

a man like Caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals,"

need not choose the harder one.

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

He was good enough for _that_, thought Caponsacchi, and in this spirit

he took the vows. He did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at

his post where beauty and fashion rule"--a fribble and a coxcomb, in

short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . .

After three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of

his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little Canon Conti, a

kinsman of the Franceschini. He was in the mood proper enough for the

place, amused or no . . .

"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself

A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"

--and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the Altar

in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through Matin-Song." The

burden was unpacked, and left--

"Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked

There was the Rafael!"

Fat little Conti noticed his rapt gaze, and exclaimed that he would make

the lady respond to it. He tossed a paper of comfits into her lap; she

turned,

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

and thought the thought that we have learned--for instinctively and

surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that

man":

". . . Silent, grave,

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

Conti told Caponsacchi who she was, and warned him to look away; but

promised to take him to the castle if he could. At Vespers, next day,

Caponsacchi heard from Conti that the husband had seen that gaze. _He_

would not signify, but there was Pompilia:

"Spare her, because he beats her as it is,

She's breaking her heart quite fast enough."

It was the turning-point in Caponsacchi's life. He had no thought of

pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse--he felt that he must

leave Arezzo. All that hitherto had charmed him there was done

with--the social successes, the intrigue, song-making; and his patron

was already displeased. These things were what he was there to do, and

he was going to church instead! "Are you turning Molinist?" the patron

asked. "I answered quick" (says Caponsacchi in his narrative)

"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"

--and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was

over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life

"had shaken under him"; and

"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like,

How utterly dissociated was I

A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife

Of Guido . . .

. . . I had a whole store of strengths

Eating into my heart, which craved employ,

And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help--

And yet there was no way in the wide world

To stretch out mine."

Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read,

and he sat thus--when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his

summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter

on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.

It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter

purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw

through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered

it in such a way that it would save _her_ from all anger, and at the

same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:

". . . What made you--may one ask?--

Marry your hideous husband?"

But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in

the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book,

they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived

a note in a different manner. This warned him _not_ to come, to avoid

the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was

free--he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that

evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband

there, not the wife--for though he had seen through the trick, it did

not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap

them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it

really was, he never guessed at all.

Meanwhile--turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed

her--the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day

after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's

ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed

fidelity to the Count who used _her_, Margherita, as his pastime--ought

she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido

might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:

"I know you cannot read--therefore, let me!

'_My idol_'" . . .

The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as

surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it

from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such

moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at

end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again,

Margherita stooped and whispered _Caponsacchi_. But still, though the

sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked

up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the

servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?

"Therefore while you profess to show him me,

I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"

But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half

through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to

bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's

prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome--even

Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard

it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day

was done:

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

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

her slumber?

". . . Up I sprang alive,

Light in me, light without me, everywhere

Change!"

The exquisite morning was there--the broad yellow sunbeams with their

"myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the

lattice-panes, the birds--

"Always with one voice--where are two such joys?--

The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth,

Stood on the terrace--o'er the roofs such sky!

My heart sang, 'I too am to go away,

I too have something I must care about,

Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!

* * * * *

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

Pope Innocent XII--"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in

the summary of Book I--when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his

highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he

calls "My rose, I gather for the breast of God."

"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much

When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,

How the fine ear felt fall the first low word

'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'

* * * * *

Thou, at first prompting of what I call God,

And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,

Accept the obligation laid on thee,

Mother elect, to save the unborn child.

. . . Go past me,

And get thy praise--and be not far to seek

Presently when I follow if I may!"

"Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific

passage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other

means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal

had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like

everyone else--Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred

her to Caponsacchi--not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly,

flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful

sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment

in which she resolved to appeal to him.

"If then, all outlets thus secured save one,

At last she took to the open, stood and stared

With her wan face to see where God might wait--

And there found Caponsacchi wait as well

For the precious something at perdition's edge,

He only was predestinate to save . . .

* * * * *

Whatever way in this strange world it was,

Pompilia and Caponsacchi met, in fine,

She at her window, he i' the street beneath,

And understood each other at first look."

For suddenly (she tells us) on that morning of Annunciation, she turned

on Margherita, ever at her ear, and said, "Tell Caponsacchi he may

come!" "How plainly" (says Pompilia)--

"How plainly I perceived hell flash and fade

O' the face of her--the doubt that first paled joy,

Then final reassurance I indeed

Was caught now, never to be free again!"

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

"After the Ave Maria, at first dark,

I will be standing on the terrace, say!"

She knew he would come, and prayed to God all day. At "an intense throe

of the dusk" she started up--she "dared to say," in her dying speech,

that she was divinely pushed out on the terrace--and there he waited

her, with the same silent and solemn face, "at watch to save me."

+ + + + +

He had come, as he defiantly had said, and not the husband met him, but,

at the window, with a lamp in her hand, "Our Lady of all the Sorrows."

He knelt, but even as he knelt she vanished, only to reappear on the

terrace, so close above him that she could almost touch his head if she

bent down--"and she did bend, while I stood still as stone, all eye, all

ear."

First she told him that she could neither read nor write, but that the

letters said to be from him had been read to her, and seemed to say that

he loved her. She did not believe that he meant that as Margherita meant

it; but "good true love would help me now so much" that at last she had

resolved to see him. Her whole life was so strange that this but

belonged to the rest: that an utter stranger should be able to help

her--he, and he alone! She told him her story. There was a reason now at

last why she must fly from "this fell house of hate," and she would take

from Caponsacchi's love what she needed: enough to save her life with--

". . . Take me to Rome!

Take me as you would take a dog, I think,

Masterless left for strangers to maltreat:

Take me home like that--leave me in the house

Where the father and mother are" . . .

She tells his answer thus:

"He replied--

The first word I heard ever from his lips,

All himself in it--an eternity

Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth

O' the soul that then broke silence--'I am yours.'"

* * * * *

But when he had left her, irresolution swept over him. First, the Church

seemed to rebuke--the Church who had smiled on his silly intrigues! Now

she changed her tone, it appeared:--

"Now, when I found out first that life and death

Are means to an end, that passion uses both,

Indisputably mistress of the man

Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."

But that soon passed: the word was God's; this was the true

self-sacrifice. . . . But might it not injure her--scandal would hiss

about her name. Would not God choose His own way to save her? And _he_

might pray. . . . Two days passed thus. But he must go to counsel and to

comfort her--was he not a priest? He went. She was there, leaning over

the terrace; she reproached him: why did he delay the help his heart

yearned to give? He answered with his fears for her, but she broke in,

never doubting him though he should doubt himself:

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

"To-morrow at the day's dawn," he replied; and all was arranged--the

place, the time; she came, she did not speak, but glided into the

carriage, while he cried to the driver:

". . . 'By San Spirito,

To Rome, as if the road burned underneath!'"

When she was dying of Guido's twenty-two dagger-thrusts, this was how

Pompilia thought of that long flight:

"I did pray, do pray, in the prayer shall die:

'Oh, to have Caponsacchi for my guide!'

Ever the face upturned to mine, the hand

Holding my hand across the world . . ."

And he, telling the judges of it at the murder-trial, cried that he

never could lie quiet in his grave unless he "mirrored them plain the

perfect soul Pompilia."

"You must know that a man gets drunk with truth

Stagnant inside him. Oh, they've killed her, Sirs!

Can I be calm?"

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

"The glory of life, the beauty of the world,

The splendour of heaven . . . well, Sirs, does no one move?

Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say,

And the beauty, I say, and splendour, still say I" . . .

--for thus he flings defiance at them. Why do they not smile as they

smiled at the earlier adultery-trial, when they gave him "the jocular

piece of punishment," now that he stands before them "in this sudden

smoke from hell"?

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

For if they had but seen _then_ what Guido Franceschini was! If they

would but have been serious! Pompilia would not now be

"Gasping away the latest breath of all,

This minute, while I talk--not while you laugh?"

How can the end of this deed surprise them? Pompilia and he had shown

them what its beginning meant--but all in vain. He, the priest, had left

her to "law's watch and ward," and now she is dying--"there and thus she

lies!" Do they understand _now_ that he was not unworthy of Christ when

he tried to save her? His part is done--all that he had been able to do;

he wants no more with earth, except to "show Pompilia who was true"--

"The snow-white soul that angels fear to take

Untenderly . . . Sirs,

Only seventeen!"

Then he begins his story of

". . . Our flight from dusk to clear,

Through day and night and day again to night

Once more, and to last dreadful dawn of all."

Thinking how they sat in silence, both so fearless and so safe, waking

but now and then to consciousness of the wonder of it, he cries:

"You know this is not love, Sirs--it is faith,

The feeling that there's God."

By morning they had passed Perugia; Assisi was opposite. He met her look

for the first time since they had started. . . . At Foligno he urged her

to take a brief rest, but with eyes like a fawn's,

"Tired to death in the thicket, when she feels

The probing spear o' the huntsman,"

she had cried, "On, on to Rome, on, on"--and they went on. During the

night she had a troubled dream, waving away something with wild arms;

and Caponsacchi prayed (thinking "Why, in my life I never prayed

before!") that the dream might go, and soon she slept peacefully. . . .

When she woke, he answered her first look with the assurance that Rome

was within twelve hours; no more of the terrible journey. But she

answered that she wished it could last for ever: to be "with no dread"--

"Never to see a face nor hear a voice--

Yours is no voice; you speak when you are dumb;

Nor face, I see it in the dark" . . .

--such tranquillity was such heaven to her!

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

"This one heart gave me all the spring!

I could believe himself by his strong will

Had woven around me what I thought the world

We went along in . . .

For, through the journey, was it natural

Such comfort should arise from first to last?"

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

is Caponsacchi:

"Him I now see make the shine everywhere."

Best of all her memories--"oh, the heart in that!"--was the descent at a

little wayside inn. He tells of it thus. When the day was broad, he

begged her to descend at the post-house of a village. He told the woman

of the house that Pompilia was his sister, married and unhappy--would

she comfort her as women can? And then he left them together:

"I spent a good half-hour, paced to and fro

The garden; just to leave her free awhile . . .

I might have sat beside her on the bench

Where the children were: I wish the thing had been,

Indeed: the event could not be worse, you know:

One more half-hour of her saved! She's dead now, Sirs!"

As they again drove forward, she asked him if, supposing she were to die

now, he would account it to be in sin? The woman at the inn had told her

about the trees that turn away from the north wind with the nests they

hold; she thought she might be like those trees. . . . But soon,

half-sleeping again, and restless now with returning fears, she seemed

to wander in her mind; once she addressed him as "Gaetano." . . .

Afterwards he knew that this name (the name of a newly-made saint) was

that which she destined for her child, if she was given a son:

"One who has only been made a saint--how long?

Twenty-five years: so, carefuller, perhaps,

To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,

Tired out by this time--see my own five saints!"[146:1]

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

parents:

". . . so many names for one poor child

--Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela

Pompilia Comparini--laughable!"[146:1] . . .

But now Caponsacchi himself grew restless, nervous: here was

Castelnuovo, as good as Rome:

"Say you are saved, sweet lady!"

She awoke. The sky was fierce with the sunset colours--suddenly she

cried out that she must not die:

"'Take me no farther, I should die: stay here!

I have more life to save than mine!' She swooned.

We seemed safe: what was it foreboded so?"

He carried her,

"Against my heart, beneath my head bowed low,

As we priests carry the paten,"

into the little inn and to a couch, where he laid her, sleeping deeply.

The host urged him to leave her in peace till morn.

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

All night he paced the passage, throbbing with fear from head to foot,

"filled with a sense of such impending woe" . . . and at the first pause

of night went to the courtyard, ordered the horses--the last moment

came, he must awaken her--he turned to go:

". . . And there

Faced me Count Guido."

Oh, if he had killed him then! if he had taken the throat in "one great

good satisfying gripe," and abolished Guido with his lie! . . . But

while he mused on the irony of such a miscreant calling _her_ his wife,

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

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

her.

Caponsacchi insisted that _he_ should lead them to the room where she

was sleeping. He was a priest and privileged; when they came there, if

the officer should detect

"Guilt on her face when it meets mine, then judge

Between us and the mad dog howling there!"

They all went up together. There she lay,

"O' the couch, still breathless, motionless, sleep's self,

Wax-white, seraphic, saturate with the sun

That filled the window with a light like blood."

At Guido's loud order to the officers, she started up, and stood erect,

face to face with the husband: "the opprobrious blur against all peace

and joy and light and life"--for he was standing against the window

a-flame with morning. But in her terror, that seemed to her the flame

from hell, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she

chose hell rather than "embracing any more."

Caponsacchi tried to go to her, but now the room was full of the rabble

pouring in at the noise--he was caught--"they heaped themselves upon

me." . . . Then, when she saw "my angel helplessly held back," then

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

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

"Drew, brandished it, the sunrise burned for joy

O' the blade. 'Die,' cried she, 'devil, in God's name!'

Ah, but they all closed round her, twelve to one

. . . Dead-white and disarmed she lay."

She said, dying, that this, her first and last resistance, had been

invincible, for she had struck at the lie in Guido; and thus not "the

vain sword nor weak speech" had saved her, but Caponsacchi's truth:--

"You see, I will not have the service fail!

I say the angel saved me: I am safe! . . .

What o' the way to the end?--the end crowns all"

--for even though she now was dying, there had been the time at the

convent with the quiet nuns, and then the safety with her parents, and

then:

"My babe was given me! Yes, he saved my babe:

It would not have peeped forth, the bird-like thing,

Through that Arezzo noise and trouble . . .

But the sweet peace cured all, and let me live

And give my bird the life among the leaves

God meant him! Weeks and months of quietude,

I could lie in such peace and learn so much,

Know life a little, I should leave so soon.

Therefore, because this man restored my soul

All has been right . . .

For as the weakness of my time drew nigh,

Nobody did me one disservice more,

Spoke coldly or looked strangely, broke the love

I lay in the arms of, till my boy was born,

Born all in love, with nought to spoil the bliss

A whole long fortnight: in a life like mine

A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much."

For, thinking of her happy childhood before the marriage, already she

has said that only that childhood, and the prayer that brought her

Caponsacchi, and the "great fortnight" remain as real: the four bad

years between

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

In that room in the inn they parted. They were borne off to separate

cells of the same ignoble prison, and, separate, thence to Rome.

"Pompilia's face, then and thus, looked on me

The last time in this life: not one sight more,

Never another sight to be! And yet

I thought I had saved her . . .

It seems I simply sent her to her death.

You tell me she is dying now, or dead."

But then it flashes to his mind that this may be a trick to make him

confess--it would be worthy of them; and the great cry breaks forth:

"No, Sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!

That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,

That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!)

That vision in the blood-red daybreak--that

Leap to life of the pale electric sword

Angels go armed with--that was not the last

O' the lady! Come, I see through it, you find--

Know the manoeuvre! . . .

Let me see for myself if it be so!"

* * * * *

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

"Two days ago, when Guido, with the right,

Hacked her to pieces" . . .

Oh, should they not have seen at first? That very flight proved the

innocence of the pair who thus fled: these judges should have recognised

the accepted man, the exceptional conduct that rightly claims to be

judged by exceptional rules. . . . But it is all over. She is

dying--dead perhaps. He has done with being judged--he is guiltless in

thought, word, and deed; and she . . .

". . . For Pompilia--be advised,

Build churches, go pray! You will find me there,

I know, if you come--and you will come, I know.

Why, there's a judge weeping! Did not I say

You were good and true at bottom? You see the truth--

I am glad I helped you: she helped me just so."

Once more he flashes forth in her defence, in rage against Guido--but

the image of her, "so sweet and true and pure and beautiful," comes back

to him:

"Sirs, I am quiet again. You see we are

So very pitiable, she and I,

Who had conceivably been otherwise"

--and at the thought of _how_ "otherwise," of what life with such a

woman were for a free man, and of his life henceforth, a priest, "on

earth, as good as out of it," with the memory of her, only the

memory . . . for she is dying, dead perhaps . . . the whole man breaks

down, and he goes from the place with one wild, anguished call to

heaven:

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

I have chosen to reveal Pompilia chiefly through Caponsacchi's speech

for two reasons. First, because there is nothing grander in our

literature than that passionate and throbbing monologue; second,

because to show this type of woman _through_ another speaker is the way

in which Browning always shows her best. As I said when writing of

Mildred Tresham, directly such a woman speaks for herself, in Browning's

work, he forces the note, he takes from her (unconsciously) a part of

the beauty which those other speakers have shown forth. So with

Pompilia, though not in the same degree as with Mildred, for here the

truth _is_ with us--Pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the

theatre. Yet even here the same strange errors recur. She has words

indeed that reach the inmost heart--poignant, overpowering in tenderness

and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw

together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "Not so!" Of such is

the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the

marriage-state. This, wholly acceptable while left unexplained, loses

its verisimilitude when comparisons are found in her mouth with which to

delineate it; and the particular one chosen--of marriage as a coin, "a

dirty piece would purchase me the praise of those I loved"--is actually

inept, since the essence of her is that she does not know anything at

all about the "coin," so certainly does not know that it is or may be

"dirty."

Again, here is an ignorant child, whose deep insight has come to her

through love alone. She feels, in the weakness of her nearing death, and

the bliss of spiritual tranquillity, that all the past with Guido is a

terrific dream: "It is the good of dreams--so soon they go!" Beautiful:

but Browning could not leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity.

She must philosophise:

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

Pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says

it in that image of the dream--but she would have left it alone, she

would have made no maxim out of it. And the maxim, when it _is_ made,

says no more than the image had said.

Once again: her plea for Guido. That she should forgive him was

essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. No reason can

confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. To

put in her mouth the plea that Guido had been deceived in his hope of

enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent

justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing

"whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct,

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

--this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which

misled Browning so frequently. There is no loveliness of pardon here;

but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. The aim of

Guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the

victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame

herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that

phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all

sense of good and evil. It is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no

beauty of any kind. But Browning could not "leave things alone"; he had

to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is

analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work

whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own

person.

I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think

the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked

against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this

speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be

confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature.

I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the

new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more

poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her

little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was

that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa:

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

--for she does not dream, not then remembering the "money" which was at

the heart of all her woe, that _he_ would have been spared for that

money's sake. . . . But she had not seen him again, and now will never

see him. And when he grows up and comes to be her age, he will ask what

his mother was like, and people will say, "Like girls of seventeen," and

he will think of some girl he knows who titters and blushes when he

looks at her. . . . That is not the way for a mother!

"Therefore I wish someone will please to say

I looked already old, though I was young;"

--and she begs to be told that she looks "nearer twenty." Her name too

is not a common one--that may help to keep apart

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

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

"No father that he ever knew at all,

Nor never had--no, never had, I say!"

--and a mother who only lived two weeks, and Pietro and Violante gone!

Only his saint to guard him--that was why she chose the new one; _he_

would not be tired of guarding namesakes. . . . After all, she hopes her

boy will come to disbelieve her history, as herself almost does. It is

dwindling fast to that:

"Sheer dreaming and impossibility--

Just in four days too! All the seventeen years,

Not once did a suspicion visit me

How very different a lot is mine

From any other woman's in the world.

The reason must be, 'twas by step and step

It got to grow so terrible and strange.

These strange woes stole on tip-toe, as it were . . .

Sat down where I sat, laid them where I lay,

And I was found familiarised with fear."

First there was the amazement of finding herself disowned by Pietro and

Violante. Then:

"So with my husband--just such a surprise,

Such a mistake, in that relationship!

Everyone says that husbands love their wives,

Guard them and guide them, give them happiness;

'Tis duty, law, pleasure, religion: well--

You see how much of this comes true with me!"

Next, "there is the friend." . . . People will not ask her about him;

they smile and give him nicknames, and call him her lover. "Most

surprise of all!" It is always that word: how he loves her, how she

loves him . . . yet he is a priest, and she is married. It all seems

unreal, like the childish game in which she and her little friend Tisbe

would pretend to be the figures on the tapestry:--

"You know the figures never were ourselves.

. . . Thus all my life."

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

"--Even to my babe! I thought when he was born,

Something began for me that would not end,

Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay

For evermore, eternally, quite mine."

And hers he is, but he is gone, and it is all so confused that even

_he_ "withdraws into a dream as the rest do." She fancies him grown big,

"Strong, stern, a tall young man who tutors me,

Frowns with the others: 'Poor imprudent child!

Why did you venture out of the safe street?

Why go so far from help to that lone house?

Why open at the whisper and the knock?'"

* * * * *

That New Year's Day, when she had been allowed to get up for the first

time, and they had sat round the fire and talked of him, and what he

should do when he was big--

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

And next day, old Pietro had been packed off to church, because he was

so happy and would talk so much, and Violante thought he would tire her.

And then he came back, and was telling them about the Christmas altars

at the churches--none was so fine as San Giovanni--

". . . When, at the door,

A tap: we started up: you know the rest."

Pietro had done no harm; Violante had erred in telling the lie about her

birth--certainly that was wrong, but it was done with love in it, and

even the giving her to Guido had had love in it . . . and at any rate it

is all over now, and Pompilia has just been absolved, and thus there

"seems not so much pain":

"Being right now, I am happy and colour things.

Yes, everybody that leaves life sees all

Softened and bettered; so with other sights:

_To me at least was never evening yet_

_But seemed far beautifuller than its day_,[158:1]

For past is past."

Then she falls to thinking of that real mother, who had sold her before

she was born. Violante had told her of it when she came back from the

nuns, and was waiting for her boy to come. That mother died at her

birth:

"I shall believe she hoped in her poor heart

That I at least might try be good and pure . . .

And oh, my mother, it all came to this?"

Now she too is dying, and leaving her little one behind. But _she_ is

leaving him "outright to God":

"All human plans and projects come to nought:

My life, and what I know of other lives

Prove that: no plan nor project! God shall care!"

She will lay him with God. And her last breath, for gratitude, shall

spend itself in showing, now that they will really listen and not say

"he was your lover" . . . her last breath shall disperse the stain

around the name of Caponsacchi.

". . . There,

Strength comes already with the utterance!"

* * * * *

Now she tells what we know; some of it we have learnt already from her

lips. She goes back over the years in "that fell house of hate"; then,

the seeing of him at the theatre, the persecution with the false

letters, the Annunciation-morning, the summons to him, the meeting, the

escape:

"No pause i' the leading and the light!

* * * * *

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

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

". . . We poor

Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong!

I was already using up my life--

This portion, now, should do him such a good,

This other go to keep off such an ill.

The great life: see, a breath, and it is gone!"

Still, all will be well: "Let us leave God alone." And now she will

"withdraw from earth and man to her own soul," will "compose herself for

God" . . . but even as she speaks, the flood of gratitude to her one

friend again sweeps back, and she exclaims,

"Well, and there is more! Yes, my end of breath

Shall bear away my soul in being true![159:1]

He is still here, not outside with the world,

Here, here, I have him in his rightful place!

* * * * *

I feel for what I verily find--again

The face, again the eyes, again, through all,

The heart and its immeasurable love

Of my one friend, my only, all my own,

Who put his breast between the spears and me.

Ever with Caponsacchi! . . .

O lover of my life, O soldier-saint,

No work begun shall ever pause for death!

Love will be helpful to me more and more

I' the coming course, the new path I must tread--

My weak hand in thy strong hand, strong for that!

* * * * *

Not one faint fleck of failure! Why explain?

What I see, oh, he sees, and how much more!

* * * * *

Do not the dead wear flowers when dressed for God?

Say--I am all in flowers from head to foot!

Say--not one flower of all he said and did,

But dropped a seed, has grown a balsam-tree

Whereof the blossoming perfumes the place

At this supreme of moments!"

She has recognised the truth. This _is_ love--but how different from the

love of the smilings and the whisperings, the "He is your lover!" He is

a priest, and could not marry; but she thinks he would not have married

if he could:

"Marriage on earth seems such a counterfeit,

* * * * *

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

In heaven, where the angels "know themselves into one"; and are never

married, no, nor given in marriage:

". . . They are man and wife at once

When the true time is . . .

So, let him wait God's instant men call years;

Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul,

Do out the duty! Through such souls alone

God, stooping, shows sufficient of his light

For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

* * * * *

Who would analyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is

no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of

God":

"Et, rose, elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses,

L'espace d'un matin."

FOOTNOTES:

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

[130:1] Abandoning for the moment intermediate events, it was _this_

which moved Guido to the triple murder: for once the old couple and

Pompilia dead, with the question of his claim to the dowry still

undecided as it was, his child, the new-born babe, might inherit all.

[131:1] Guido's second speech, wherein he tells the truth, in the hope

that his "impenitence" may defer his execution.

[131:2] Her dying speech.

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

[137:1] Mrs. Orr, commenting on this passage, says: "The sudden

rapturous sense of maternity which, in the poetic rendering of the case,

becomes her impulse to self-protection, was beyond her age and culture;

it was not suggested by the facts"--for Mrs. Orr, who had read the

documents from which Browning made the poem, says: "Unless my memory

much deceives me, her physical condition plays no part in the historical

defence of her flight. . . . The real Pompilia was a simple child, who

lived in bodily terror of her husband, and had made repeated efforts to

escape from him." And, as she later adds, though for many readers this

character is, in its haunting pathos, the most exquisite of Browning's

creations, "for others, it fails in impressiveness because it lacks the

reality which habitually marks them." But (she goes on) "it was only in

an idealised Pompilia that the material for poetical creation, in this

'murder story,' could have been found." These remarks will be seen

partly to agree with some of my own.

[146:1] Her dying speech.

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

these two lines!

[159:1] Caponsacchi uses almost the same words of her: he will "burn his

soul out in showing you the truth."