Browning's Heroines Part 21

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 G.o.d's instant men call years; Meantime hold hard by truth and his great soul, Do out the duty! Through such souls alone G.o.d, stooping, shows sufficient of his light For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

Who would a.n.a.lyse this child would tear a flower to pieces. Pompilia is no heroine, no character; but indeed a "rose gathered for the breast of G.o.d":

"Et, rose, elle a vecu ce que vivent les roses, L'es.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sage, 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 doc.u.ments 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."

PART II

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT LADY]

THE GREAT LADY

"MY LAST d.u.c.h.eSS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE d.u.c.h.eSS"

For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things advent.i.tious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning, even a "lady" could be a woman--and remain a woman, even though she be turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the cla.s.s-distinction, but that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material cares prevail not--where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers "not for bread alone."

"Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red-- On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed, O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his head?"

He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul existed. True, that in _A Toccata of Galuppi's_,[166:1] the soul _is_ questioned:

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."

But this is not our crude modern refusal of "reality" in any lives but those of toil and privation. It is rather the sad vision of an entire social epoch--the eighteenth century; and the eighteenth century in Venice, who was then at the final stage of her moral death. And despite the denial of soul in these Venetians, there is no contempt, no facile "simplification" of a question whose roots lie deep in human nature, since even the animals and plants we cultivate into cla.s.ses! The sadness is for the mutability of things; and among them, that lighthearted, brilliant way of life, which had so much of charm amid its folly.

"Well, and it was graceful of them--they'd break talk off and afford --She, to bite her mask's black velvet, he, to finger on his sword, While you sat and played toccatas, stately at the clavichord."

The music trickled then through the room, as it trickles now for the listening poet: with its minor cadences, the "lesser thirds so plaintive," the "diminished sixths," the suspensions, the solutions: "Must we die?"--

"Those commiserating sevenths--'Life might last! we can but try!'"

The question of questions, even for "ladies and gentlemen"! And then come the other questions: "Hark, the dominant's persistence till it must be answered to."

"So an octave struck the answer. Oh, they praised you, I dare say!

'Brave Galuppi, that was music! Good alike at grave and gay!

I can always leave off talking when I hear a master play.'

Then they left you for their pleasure; till in due time, one by one, Some with lives that came to nothing, some with deeds as well undone, Death stepped tacitly and took them where they never see the sun."

. . . The "cold music" has seemed to the modern listener to say that _he_, learned and wise, shall not pa.s.s away like these:

". . . You know physics, something of geology, Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; b.u.t.terflies may dread extinction--you'll not die, it cannot be!

As for Venice and her people, merely born to bloom and drop, Here on earth they bore their fruitage, mirth and folly were the crop: What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop?" . . .

Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What, "creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since he is neither deaf nor blind:

"But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! . . .

'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.

Dear dead women, with such hair, too--what's become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."

After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not _only_ the wise men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"

None the less, there is trouble other than that of its pa.s.sing in this pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty, riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied--nay, shall kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in true womanhood which transcends all _morgue_: it seems almost his foible to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of _In a Balcony_ (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less n.o.ble, yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all, in the exquisite imagining of that "d.u.c.h.ess," the girl-wife who twice is given us, and in two widely different environments--yet is (to my feeling) _one_ loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically; then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely back to earth--in _My Last d.u.c.h.ess_ and _The Flight of the d.u.c.h.ess_ respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree, in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have the lady dead.

First, then, comes a picture--the mere portrait, "painted on the wall,"

of a dead Italian girl.

"That's my last d.u.c.h.ess painted on the wall, Looking as if she were alive. I call That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said Fra Pandolf by design: for never read Strangers like you that pictured countenance, The depth and pa.s.sion of its earnest glance, But to myself they turned (since none puts by The curtain I have drawn for you, but I) And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst, How such a glance came there; so, not the first Are you to turn and ask thus."

The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name,"

is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next d.u.c.h.ess. He is a connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the pa.s.sionless art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed her--nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that _he_ could have been wrong. This d.u.c.h.ess--it would have been idle to "make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other lesser being) without stooping--"and I choose never to stoop." Her error had been precisely the "depth and pa.s.sion of that earnest glance" which Fra Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her cheek? It had _not_ been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Fra Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist--may have said, for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the "faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of paint to reproduce.

". . . Such stuff Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough For calling up that spot of joy."

As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement: