Browning's Heroines Part 8

--and from that paper he read what Phene had got by heart.

But oh, if she need not say it! if she could look up for ever to those eyes, as now Jules lets her!

". . . I believe all sin, All memory of wrong done, suffering borne, Would drop down, low and lower, to the earth Whence all that's low comes, and there touch and stay --Never to overtake the rest of me, All that, unspotted, reaches up to you, Drawn by those eyes!"

But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering--altered!"

She knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are altering--altered--and what can she do? . . . With heartrending pathos, what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "I love you, love" . . . but what does love mean? She knows not, and her "music"

is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change, but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the words--it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and _that_ she cannot find, not understanding. So in the desperate need to see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device--

". . . Or stay! I will repeat Their speech, if that contents you. Only change No more"--

and thus to him, but half aware as yet, sure only that she is not the dream-lady from afar, Phene speaks the words that Lutwyche wrote, and now waits outside to hear.

"I am a painter who cannot paint; In my life, a devil rather than saint; In my brain, as poor a creature too; No end to all I cannot do!

Yet do one thing at least I can-- Love a man or hate a man Supremely: thus my lore began . . ."

The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them--and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical,"

it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost--

"Where he seeks sweetness' soul, he may find--this!"

And truly it is so "involved," that, in the lessons at Natalia's, it had been thought well to tutor Phene in the probable interruptions from her audience of one. There was an allusion to "the peerless bride with her black eyes," and _here_ Jules was almost certain to break in, saying that a.s.suredly the bride was Phene herself, and so, could she not tell him what it all meant?

"And I am to go on without a word."

She goes on--on to the a.n.a.lysis, utterly incomprehensible to her, of Lutwyche's plan for intertwining love and hate; and with every word the malice deepens, becomes directer in its address. If any one should ask this painter who can hate supremely, _how_ his hate can "grin through Love's rose-braided mask," and _how_, hating another and having sought, long and painfully, to reach his victim's heart and pierce to the quick of it, he might chance to have succeeded in that aim--

"Ask this, my Jules, and be answered straight, By thy bride--how the painter Lutwyche can hate!"

Phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. He still is changed.

He is not even thinking of her as she ceases. The name upon his lips is Lutwyche, not her own. He mutters of "Lutwyche" and "all of them," and "Venice"; yes, them he will meet at Venice, and it will be their turn.

But with that word--"meet"--he remembers her; he speaks to her--

". . . You I shall not meet: If I dreamed, saying this would wake me."

Now Phene is again the silent one. We figure to ourselves the dark bent head, the eyes that dare no more look up, the dreadful acquiescence as he gives her money. So many others had done that; she had not thought _he_ would, but she has never understood, and if to give her money is his pleasure--why, she must take it, as she had taken that of the others. But he goes on. He speaks of selling all his casts and books and medals, that the produce may keep her "out of Natalia's clutches"; and if he survives the meeting with the gang in Venice, there is just one hope, for dimly she hears him say--

"We might meet somewhere, since the world is wide . . ."

Just that one vague, far hope, and for her _how_ wide the world is, how very hard to compa.s.s! But she stands silent, in her well-learnt patience; and he is about to speak again, when suddenly from outside a girl's voice is heard, singing.

"Give her but a least excuse to love me!

When--where-- How--can this arm establish her above me, If fortune fixed her as my lady there, There already, to eternally reprove me?"

It is the song the peasants sing of "Kate the Queen"[64:1] and the page who loved her, and pined "for the grace of her so far above his power of doing good to"--

"'She never could be wronged, be poor,' he sighed, 'Need him to help her!' . . ."

Pippa, going back towards Asolo, carols it out as she pa.s.ses; and Jules listens to the end. It was bitter for the page to know that his lady was above all need of him; yet men are wont to love so. But why should they always choose the page's part? _He_ had not, in his dreams of love. . . . And all at once, as he vaguely ponders the song, the deep mysterious import of its sounding in this hour dawns on him.

"Here is a woman with utter need of me-- I find myself queen here, it seems! How strange!"

He turns and looks again at the white, quiet child who stands awaiting her dismissal. Her soul is on her silent lips--

"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . .

This new soul is mine!"

And then, musing aloud, he comes upon the truth of it--

"Scatter all this, my Phene--this mad dream!

What's the whole world except our love, my own!"

To-night (he told her so, did he not?), aye, even before to-night, they will travel for her land, "some isle with the sea's silence on it"; but first he must break up these paltry attempts of his, that he may begin art, as well as life, afresh. . . .

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

And you are ever by me while I gaze, --Are in my arms as now--as now--as now!

Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

That is what Lutwyche, under the window, hears for his revenge.

In this Pa.s.sing of Pippa, silence and song have met and mingled into one another, for Phene is silence, as Pippa is song. Phene will speak more when Jules and she are in their isle together--but never will she speak much: she _is_ silence. Her need of him indeed was utter--she had no soul until he touched her into life: it is the very Pygmalion and Galatea. But Jules' soul, no less, had needed Pippa's song to waken to its truest self: once more the man is the one moved by the direct intervention. Not that Phene, like Ottima, could have saved herself; there _was_ no self to save--she had that awful, piercing selflessness of the used flesh and ignored soul. If Pippa had not pa.s.sed, if Jules had gone, leaving money in her hand . . . I think that Phene would have killed herself--like Ottima, yet how unlike! For Phene (but one step upon the way) would have died for her own self's sake only, because till now she had never known it, but in that strangest, dreadfullest, that least, most, sacred of offerings-up, had "lived for others"--the others of the smile which girls like her are used to bear,

"But never men, men cannot stoop so low."

Were ever scorn and irony more blasting, was ever pity more profound, than in that line which Browning sets in the mouth of silence?

IV. EVENING; NIGHT: THE ENDING OF THE DAY

Our interest now centres again upon Pippa--partly because the Evening and Night episodes are little touched by other feminine influence, but also (and far more significantly) because the dramatic aspect of the work here loses nearly all of its peculiar beauty. The story, till now so slight yet so consummately sufficient, henceforth is involved with "plot"--that natural enemy of spontaneity and unity, and here most eminently successful in blighting both. Indeed, the lovely simplicity of the earlier plan seems actually to aid the foe in the work of destruction, by cutting, as it were, the poem into two or even three divisions: first, the purely lyric portions--those at the beginning and the end--where Pippa is alone in her room; second, the Morning and Noon episodes, where the dramas are absolutely unconnected with the pa.s.sing girl; third, these Evening and Night scenes, where, on the contrary, all is forced into more or less direct relation with the little figure whose most exquisite magic has. .h.i.therto resided in the fusion of her complete personal loneliness with her potent influence upon the lives and characters of those who hear her sing.

Mr. Chesterton claims to have been the first to point out "this gross falsification of the whole beauty of _Pippa Pa.s.ses_"--a glaring instance, as he says, of the definite literary blunders which Browning could make. But though that searching criticism were earliest in declaring this, I think that few of us can have read the poem without being vaguely and discomfortably aware of it. From the moment of the direct introduction of Bluphocks[68:1] (whose very name, with its dull and pointless punning, is an offence), that sense of over-ingenuity, of "tiresomeness," which is the prime stumbling-block to whole-hearted Browning worship, becomes perceptible, and acts increasingly upon our nerves until the Day is over, and Pippa re-enters her "large, mean, airy chamber."

On her return to Asolo from Orcana, she pa.s.ses the ruined turret wherein Luigi and his mother--those Third Happiest Ones whom in her thoughts she had not been able to separate--are wont to talk at evening. Some of the Austrian police are loitering near, and with them is an Englishman, "l.u.s.ty, blue-eyed, florid-complexioned"--one Bluphocks, who is on the watch in a double capacity. He is to point out Luigi to the police, in whose pay he is, and to make acquaintance with Pippa in return for money already given by a private employer--for Bluphocks is the creature of anyone's purse.

As Pippa reaches the turret, a thought of days long, long before it fell to ruin makes her choose from her store of songs that which tells how--

"A king lived long ago, In the morning of the world When earth was nigher heaven than now;"

and coming to be very old, was so serene in his sleepy mood, "so safe from all decrepitude," and so beloved of the G.o.ds--