Browning's Heroines Part 19

"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 h.e.l.l, since _he_ was in it--and she cried to him to stand away, she chose h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d 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, n.o.body 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 ign.o.ble 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 G.o.d! 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 a.n.a.lyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is a.n.a.lytic 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 t.i.tters 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 . . .