Browning's Heroines

It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and the youngest is the heroine. The setting is French-a castle in Aix-en-Provence; it is the fourteenth century, for tourneys and hawking-parties are the amusements, and a birthday is celebrated by an award of crowns to the victors in the lists, when there are ladies in brave attire, thrones, canopies, false knight and true knight. . . . Here is the story.

Once upon a time there were three beautiful princesses, and they lived in a splendid castle. The youngest had neither father nor mother, so she had come to dwell with her cousins, and they had all been quite happy together until one day in summer, when there was a great tourney and prize-giving to celebrate the birthday of the youngest princess. She was to award the crowns, and her cousins dressed her like a queen for the ceremony. She was very happy; she laughed and "sang her birthday-song quite through," while she looked at herself, garlanded with roses, in the glass before they all three went arm-in-arm down the castle stairs. The throne and canopy were ready; troops of merry friends had assembled. These kissed the cheek of the youngest princess, laughing and calling her queen, and then they helped her to stoop under the canopy, which was pierced by a long streak of golden sunshine. There, in the gleam and gloom, she took her seat on the throne. But for all her joy and pride, there came to her, as she sat there, a great ache of longing for her dead father and mother; and afterwards she remembered this, and thought that perhaps if her cousins had guessed that such sorrow was in her heart, even at her glad moment, they might not have allowed the thing to happen which did happen.

All eyes were on her, except those of her cousins, which were lowered, when the moment came for her to stand up and present the victor's crown.

Shy and proud and glad, she stood up, and as she did so, there stalked forth Count Gauthier-

". . . And he thundered 'Stay!'

And all stayed. 'Bring no crowns, I say!'

'Bring torches! Wind the penance-sheet

About her! Let her shun the chaste,

Or lay herself before their feet!

Shall she whose body I embraced

A night long, queen it in the day?

For Honour's sake no crowns, I say!'"

* * * * *

Some years afterwards she told the story of that birthday to a dear friend, and when she came to Count Gauthier's accusation, she had to stop speaking for an instant, because her voice was choked with tears.

Her friend asked her what she had answered, and she replied-

"I? What I answered? As I live

I never fancied such a thing

As answer possible to give;"

-for just as the body is struck dumb, as it were, when some monstrous engine of torture is directed upon it, so was her soul for one moment.

But only for one moment. For instantly another knight strode out-Count Gismond. She had never seen him face to face before, but now, so beholding him, she knew that she was saved. He walked up to Gauthier and gave him the lie in his throat, then struck him on the mouth with the back of a hand, so that the blood flowed from it-

". . . North, South,

East, West, I looked. The lie was dead

And damned, and truth stood up instead."

Recalling it now, with her friend Adela, she mused a moment; then said how her gladdest memory of that hour was that never for an instant had she felt any doubt of the event.

"God took that on him-I was bid

Watch Gismond for my part: I did.

Did I not watch him while he let

His armourer just brace his greaves,

Rivet his hauberk, on the fret

The while! His foot . . . my memory leaves

No least stamp out, nor how anon

He pulled his ringing gauntlets on."

Before the trumpet's peal had died, the false knight lay, "prone as his lie," upon the ground; and Gismond flew at him, and drove his sword into the breast-

"Cleaving till out the truth he clove.

Which done, he dragged him to my feet

And said 'Here die, but end thy breath

In full confession, lest thou fleet

From my first, to God's second death!

Say, hast thou lied?' And, 'I have lied

To God and her,' he said, and died."

Then Gismond knelt and said to her words which even to this dear friend she could not repeat. She sank on his breast-

"Over my head his arm he flung

Against the world . . ."

-and then and there the two walked forth, amid the shouting multitude, never more to return. "And so they were married, and lived happy ever after."

* * *

Gaiety, courage, trust: in this nameless Browning heroine we find the characteristic marks. On that birthday morning, almost her greatest joy was in the sense of her cousins' love-

"I thought they loved me, did me grace

To please themselves; 'twas all their deed"

-and never a thought of their jealousy had entered her mind. Both were beautiful-

". . . Each a queen

By virtue of her brow and breast;

Not needing to be crowned, I mean,

As I do. E'en when I was dressed,

Had either of them spoke, instead

Of glancing sideways with still head!

But no: they let me laugh and sing

My birthday-song quite through . . ."

and so, all trust and gaiety, she had gone down arm-in-arm with them, and taken her state on the "foolish throne," while everybody applauded her. Then had come the moment when Gauthier stalked forth; and from the older mind, now pondering on that infamy, a flash of bitter scorn darts forth-

"Count Gauthier, when he chose his post,

Chose time and place and company

To suit it . . ."

for with sad experience-"knowledge of the world"-to aid her, she can see that the whole must have been pre-concerted-

"And doubtlessly ere he could draw

All points to one, he must have schemed!"

* * * * *

Her trust in the swiftly emerging champion and lover is comprehensible to us of a later day-that, and the joy she feels in watching him impatiently submit to be armed. Even so might one of us watch and listen to and keep for ever in memory the stamp of the foot, the sound of the "ringing gauntlets"-reproduced as that must be for modern maids in some less heartening music! But, as the tale proceeds, we lose our sense of sisterhood; we realise that this girl belongs to a different age. When Gauthier's breast is torn open, when he is dragged to her feet to die, she knows not any shrinking nor compassion-can apprehend each word in the dialogue between slayer and slain-can, over the bleeding body, receive the avowal of his love who but now has killed his fellow-man like a dog-and, gathered to Gismond's breast, can, unmoved by all repulsion, feel herself smeared by the dripping sword that hangs beside him. . . . All this we women of a later day have "resigned"-and I know not if that word be the right one or the wrong; so many lessons have we conned since Gismond fought for a slandered maiden. We have learned that lies refute themselves, that "things come right in the end," that human life is sacred, that a woman's chastity may be sacred too, but is not her most inestimable possession-and, if it were, should be "able to take care of itself." Further doctrines, though not yet fully accepted, are being passionately taught: such, for example, as that Man-male Man-is the least protective of animals.

"Over my head his arm he flung

Against the world . . ."

I think we can see the princess, as she spoke those words, aglow and tremulous like the throbbing fingers in the Northern skies. Well, the "Northern Lights" recur, in our latitudes, at unexpected moments, at long intervals; but they do recur.

One thing vexes, yet solaces, me in this tale of Count Gismond. The Countess, telling Adela the story, has reached the crucial moment of Gauthier's insult when, choked by tears as we saw, she stops speaking. While still she struggles with her sob, she sees, at the gate, her husband with his two boys, and at once is able to go on. She finishes the tale, prays a perfunctory prayer for Gauthier; then speaks of her sons, in both of whom, adoring wife that she is, she must declare a likeness to the father-

"Our elder boy has got the clear

Great brow; tho' when his brother's black

Full eye shows scorn, it . . ."

With that "it" she breaks off; for Gismond has come up to talk with her and Adela. The first words we hear her speak to that loved husband are-fibbing words! The broken line is finished thus-

". . . Gismond here?

And have you brought my tercel back?

I just was telling Adela

How many birds it struck since May."

We, who have temporarily lost so many things, have at least gained this one-that we should not think it necessary to tell that fib. We should say nothing of what we had been "telling Adela." And some of us, perhaps, would reject the false rhyme as well as the false words.

* * *

The whole of Pippa is emotion. She "passes" alone through the drama, except for one moment-only indirectly shown us-in which she speaks with some girls by the way. She does nothing, is nothing, but exquisite emotion uttering itself in song-quick lyrical outbursts from her joyous child's heart. The happiness-in-herself which this poor silk-winder possesses is something deeper than the gaiety of which I earlier spoke.

Gay she can be, and is, but the spell that all unwittingly she exercises, derives from the profounder depth of which the Eastern poet thought when he said that "We ourselves are Heaven and Hell." . . . Innocent but not ignorant, patient, yet capable of a hearty little grumble at her lot, Pippa is "human to the red-ripe of the heart." She can threaten fictively her holiday, if it should ill-use her by bringing rain to spoil her enjoyment; but even this intimidation is of the very spirit of confiding love, for her threat is that if rain does fall, she will be sorrowful and depressed, instead of joyous and exhilarated, for the rest of the year during which she will be bound to her "wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil." Such a possibility, thinks Pippa's trustful heart, must surely be enough to cajole the weather into beauty and serenity.

It is New Year's Day, and sole holiday in all the twelve-month for silk-winders in the mills of Asolo. An oddly chosen time, one thinks-the short, cold festival! And it is notable that Browning, though he acquiesces in the fictive date, yet conveys to us, so definitely that it must be with intention, the effect of summer weather. We find ourselves all through imagining mellow warmth and sunshine; nay, he puts into Pippa's mouth, as she anticipates the treasured outing, this lovely and assuredly not Janiverian forecast-

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing. . . ."

Is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For "blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "long blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that, whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to Asolo again.

* * *

We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]-the lovely little town of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber, made vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one external happiness in the year.

"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,

A mite of my twelve hours' treasure,

The least of thy gazes or glances,

* * * * *

One of thy choices or one of thy chances,

* * * * *

-My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,

Then shame fall on Asolo, mischief on me!"

I have omitted two lines from this eight-lined stanza, and omitted them because they illustrate all too forcibly Browning's chief fault as a lyric-and, in this case, as a dramatic-poet. Both of them are frankly parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow an indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not cite them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that, whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her invocation to the holiday is out of character-impossible to regard its lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an unlettered girl.

But all carping is forgotten when we reach

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"-

a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the darling menace to the holiday-

". . . But thou must treat me not

As prosperous ones are treated . . .

For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest

Me, who am only Pippa-old year's sorrow,

Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow:

Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow

Sufficient strength of thee for new-year's sorrow.

All other men and women that this earth

Belongs to, who all days alike possess,

Make general plenty cure particular dearth,[26:1]

Get more joy one way, if another less:

Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven

What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven-

Sole light that helps me through the year, thy sun's!"

Having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of those "other men and women," and tells her Day about them, like the child she is. They, she declares, are "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones." Each is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she "passes" at Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night; but this she knows not at the time, nor ever knows.

The first Happy One is "that superb great haughty Ottima," wife of the old magnate, Luca, who owns the silk-mills. The New Year's morning may be wet-

". . . Can rain disturb

Her Sebald's homage? all the while thy rain

Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,

He will but press the closer, breathe more warm

Against her cheek: how should she mind the storm?"

Here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown-that Ottima's "happiness" is not in her husband.

The second Happy One is Phene, the bride that very day of Jules, the young French sculptor. They are to come home at noon, and though noon, like morning, should be wet-

". . . what care bride and groom

Save for their dear selves? 'Tis their marriage day;

* * * * *

Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be

Sunbeams and pleasant weather, spite of thee."

The third Happy One-or Happy Ones, for these two Pippa cannot separate-are Luigi, the young aristocrat-patriot, and his mother. Evening is their time, for it is in the dusk that they "commune inside our turret"-

"The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth,

She in her age, as Luigi in his youth,

For true content . . ."

Aye-though the evening should be obscured with mist, they will not grieve-

". . . The cheerful town, warm, close,

And safe, the sooner that thou art morose

Receives them . . ."

That is all the difference bad weather can make to such a pair.

The Fourth Happy One is Monsignor, "that holy and beloved priest," who is expected this night from Rome,

"To visit Asolo, his brother's home,

And say here masses proper to release

A soul from pain-what storm dares hurt his peace?

Calm would he pray, with his own thoughts to ward

Thy thunder off, nor want the angels' guard."

And now the great Day knows all that the Four Happy Ones possess, besides its own "blue solemn hours serenely flowing"-for not rain at morning can hurt Ottima with her Sebald, nor at noon the bridal pair, nor in the evening Luigi and his mother, nor at night "that holy and beloved" Bishop . . .

"But Pippa-just one such mischance would spoil

Her day that lightens the next twelvemonth's toil

At wearisome silk-winding, coil on coil."

* * *

All at once she realises that in thus lingering over her toilet, she is letting some of her precious time slip by for naught, and betakes herself to washing her face and hands-

"Aha, you foolhardy sunbeam caught

With a single splash from my ewer!

You that would mock the best pursuer,

Was my basin over-deep?

One splash of water ruins you asleep,

And up, up, fleet your brilliant bits.

* * * * *

Now grow together on the ceiling!

That will task your wits."

Here we light on a trait in Browning of which Mr. Chesterton most happily speaks-his use of "homely and practical images . . . allusions, bordering on what many would call the commonplace," in which he "is indeed true to the actual and abiding spirit of love," and by which he "awakens in every man the memories of that immortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond the power of any dictionary to utter." Mr. Chesterton, it is true, speaks of this "astonishing realism" in relation to Browning's love-poetry, and Pippa Passes is not a love-poem; but the insight of the comment is no less admirable when we use it to enhance a passage such as this. Who has not caught the sunbeam asleep in the mere washhand basin as water was poured out for the mere daily toilet-and felt that heartening gratitude for the symbol of captured joy, which made the instant typic and immortal? For these are the things that all may have, as Pippa had. The ambushing of that beam and the ordering it, in her sweet wayward imperiousness, to

". . . grow together on the ceiling.

That will task your wits!"

-is one of the most enchanting moments in this lovely poem. The sunbeam settles by degrees (I wish that she had not been made to term it, with all too Browningesque agility, "the radiant cripple"), and finally lights on her Martagon lily, which is a lily with purple flowers. . . . Here again, for a moment, she ceases to be the lyrical child, and turns into the Browning (to cite Mr. Chesterton again) to whom Nature really meant such things as the basket of jelly-fish in The Englishman in Italy, or the stomach-cyst in Mr. Sludge the Medium-"the monstrosities and living mysteries of the sea." To me, these lines on the purple lily are not only ugly and grotesque-in that kind of ugliness which "was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but a quite unnecessary luxury, to be enjoyed for its own sake"-but are monstrously (more than any other instance I can recall) unsuited to the mind from which they are supposed to come.

"New-blown and ruddy as St. Agnes' nipple,

Plump as the flesh-bunch on some Turk-bird's poll!"

One such example is enough. We have once more been deprived of Pippa, and got nothing really worth the possession in exchange.

But Pippa is quickly retrieved, with her gleeful claim that she is the queen of this glowing blossom, for is it not she who has guarded it from harm? So it may laugh through her window at the tantalised bee (are there travelling bees in Italy on New-Year's Day? But this is Midsummer Day!), may tease him as much as it likes, but must

". . . in midst of thy glee,

Love thy Queen, worship me!"

There will be warrant for the worship-

". . . For am I not, this day,

Whate'er I please? What shall I please to-day?

* * * * *

I may fancy all day-and it shall be so-

That I taste of the pleasures, am called by the names,

Of the Happiest Four in our Asolo!"

So, as she winds up her hair (we may fancy), Pippa plays the not yet relinquished baby-game of Let's-pretend; but is grown-up in this-that she begins and ends with love, which children give and take unconsciously.

"Some one shall love me, as the world calls love:

I am no less than Ottima, take warning!

The gardens and the great stone house above,

And other house for shrubs, all glass in front,

Are mine; where Sebald steals, as he is wont,

To court me, while old Luca yet reposes . . ."

But this earliest pretending breaks down quickly. What, after all, is the sum of those doings in the shrub-house? What would Pippa gain, were she in truth great haughty Ottima? She would but "give abundant cause for prate." Ottima, bold, confident, and not fully aware, can face that out, but Pippa knows, more closely than the woman rich and proud can know,

"How we talk in the little town below."

So the first dream is over.

"Love, love, love-there's better love, I know!"

-and the next pretending shall "defy the scoffer"; it shall be the love of Jules and Phene-

"Why should I not be the bride as soon

As Ottima?"

Moreover, last night she had seen the stranger-girl arrive-"if you call it seeing her," for it had been the merest momentary glimpse-

". . . one flash

Of the pale snow-pure cheek and black bright tresses,

Blacker than all except the black eyelash;

I wonder she contrives those lids no dresses,

So strict was she the veil

Should cover close her pale

Pure cheeks-a bride to look at and scarce touch,

Scarce touch, remember, Jules! For are not such

Used to be tended, flower-like, every feature,

As if one's breath would fray the lily of a creature?

* * * * *

How will she ever grant her Jules a bliss

So startling as her real first infant kiss?

Oh, no-not envy, this!"

For, recalling the virgin dimness of that apparition, the slender gamut of that exquisite reserve, the little work-girl has a moment's pang of pity for herself, who has to trip along the streets "all but naked to the knee."

"Whiteness in us were wonderful indeed,"

she cries, who is pure gold if not pure whiteness, and in an instant shows herself to be at any rate pure innocence. It could not be envy, she argues, which pierced her as she thought of that immaculate girlhood-

". . . for if you gave me

Leave to take or to refuse,

In earnest, do you think I'd choose

That sort of new love to enslave me?

Mine should have lapped me round from the beginning;

As little fear of losing it as winning:

Lovers grow cold, men learn to hate their wives,

And only parents' love can last our lives."

And she turns, thus rejecting the new love, to the "Son and Mother, gentle pair," who commune at evening in the turret: what prevents her being Luigi?

"Let me be Luigi! If I only knew

What was my mother's face-my father, too!"

For Pippa has never seen either, knows not who either was, nor whence each came. And just because, thus ignorant, she cannot truly figure to herself such love, she now rejects in turn this third pretending-

"Nay, if you come to that, best love of all

Is God's;"

-and she will be Monsignor! To-night he will bless the home of his dead brother, and God will bless in turn

"That heart which beats, those eyes which mildly burn

With love for all men! I, to-night at least,

Would be that holy and beloved priest."

Now all the weighing of love with love is over; she has chosen, and already has the proof of having chosen rightly, already seems to share in God's love, for there comes back to memory an ancient New-Year's hymn-

"All service ranks the same with God."

No one can work on this earth except as God wills-

". . . God's puppets, best and worst,

Are we; there is no last or first."

And we must not talk of "small events": none exceeds another in greatness. . . .

The revelation has come to her. Not Ottima nor Phene, not Luigi and his mother, not even the holy and beloved priest, ranks higher in God's eyes than she, the little work-girl-

"I will pass each, and see their happiness,

And envy none-being just as great, no doubt,

Useful to men, and dear to God, as they!"

* * * * *

And so, laughing at herself once more because she cares "so mightily" for her one day, but still insistent that the sun shall shine, she sketches her outing-

"Down the grass path grey with dew,

Under the pine-wood, blind with boughs,

Where the swallow never flew,

Nor yet cicala dared carouse,

No, dared carouse-"

But breaks off, breathless, in the singing for which through the whole region she is famed, leaves the "large mean airy chamber," enters the little street of Asolo-and begins her Day.

In the shrub-house on the hill-side are Ottima, the wife of Luca, and her German lover, Sebald. He is wildly singing and drinking; to him it still seems night. But Ottima sees a "blood-red beam through the shutter's chink," which proves that morning is come.

Let him open the lattice and see! He goes to open it, and no movement can he make but vexes her, as he gropes his way where the "tall, naked geraniums straggle"; pushes the lattice, which is behind a frame, so awkwardly that a shower of dust falls on her; fumbles at the slide-bolt, till she exclaims that "of course it catches!" At last he succeeds in getting the window opened, and her only direct acknowledgment is to ask him if she "shall find him something else to spoil." But this imperious petulance, curiously as it contrasts with the patience which, a little later, she will display, is native to Ottima; she is not the victim of her nerves this morning, though now she passes without transition to a mood of sensuous cajolement-

"Kiss and be friends, my Sebald! Is't full morning?

Oh, don't speak, then!"

-but Sebald does speak, for in this aversion from the light of day he recognises a trait of hers which long has troubled him.

With his first words we perceive that "nerves" are uppermost, that the song and drink of the opening moment were bravado-that Sebald, in short, is close on a breakdown. He turns upon her with a gibe against her ever-shuttered windows. Though it is she who now has ordered the unwelcome light to be admitted, he overlooks this in his enervation, and says how, before ever they met, he had observed that her windows were always blind till noon. The rest of the little world of Asolo would be active in the day's employment; but her house "would ope no eye." "And wisely," he adds bitterly-

"And wisely; you were plotting one thing there,

Nature, another outside. I looked up-

Rough white wood shutters, rusty iron bars,

Silent as death, blind in a flood of light;

Oh, I remember!-and the peasants laughed

And said, 'The old man sleeps with the young wife.'

This house was his, this chair, this window-his."

The last line gives us the earliest hint of what has been done: "This house was his. . . ." But Ottima, whether from scorn of Sebald's mental disarray, or from genuine callousness, answers this first moan of anguish not at all. She gazes from the open lattice: "How clear the morning is-she can see St. Mark's! Padua, blue Padua, is plain enough, but where lies Vicenza? They shall find it, by following her finger that points at Padua. . . ."

Sebald cannot emulate this detachment. Morning seems to him "a night with a sun added"; neither dew nor freshness can he feel; nothing is altered with this dawn-the plant he bruised in getting through the lattice last night droops as it did then, and still there shows his elbow's mark on the dusty sill.

She flashes out one instant. "Oh, shut the lattice, pray!"

No: he will lean forth-

". . . I cannot scent blood here,

Foul as the morn may be."

But his mood shifts quickly as her own-

". . . There, shut the world out!

How do you feel now, Ottima? There, curse

The world and all outside!"

and at last he faces her, literally and figuratively, with a wild appeal to let the truth stand forth between them-

". . . Let us throw off

This mask: how do you bear yourself? Let's out

With all of it."

But no. Her instinct is never to speak of it, while his drives him to "speak again and yet again," for only so, he feels, will words "cease to be more than words." His blood, for instance-

". . . let those two words mean 'His blood';

And nothing more. Notice, I'll say them now:

'His blood.' . . ."

She answers with phrases, the things that madden him-she speaks of "the deed," and at once he breaks out again. The deed, and the event, and their passion's fruit-

". . . the devil take such cant!

Say, once and always, Luca was a wittol,

I am his cut-throat, you are . . ."

With extraordinary patience, though she there, wearily as it were, interrupts him, Ottima again puts the question by, and offers him wine. In doing this, she says something which sends a shiver down the reader's back-

". . . Here's wine!

I brought it when we left the house above,

And glasses too-wine of both sorts . . ."

He takes no notice; he reiterates-

"But am I not his cut-throat? What are you?"

Still with that amazing, that almost beautiful, patience-the quality of her defect of callousness-Ottima leaves this also without comment. She gazes now from the closed window, sees a Capuchin monk go by, and makes some trivial remarks on his immobility at church; then once more offers Sebald the flask-the "black" (or, as we should say, the "red") wine.

Melodramatic and obvious in all he does and says, Sebald refuses the red wine: "No, the white-the white!"-then drinks ironically to Ottima's black eyes. He reminds her how he had sworn that the new year should not rise on them "the ancient shameful way," nor does it.

"Do you remember last damned New Year's Day?"

* * * * *

The characters now are poised for us-in their national, as well as their individual, traits. Ottima, an Italian, has the racial matter-of-factness, callousness, and patience; Sebald, a German, the no less characteristic sentimentality and emotionalism. Her attitude remains unchanged until the critical moment; his shifts and sways with every word and action. No sooner has he drunk the white wine than he can brutally, for an instant, exult in the thought that Luca is not alive to fondle Ottima before his face; but with her instant answer (rejoicing as she does to retrieve the atmosphere which alone is native to her sense)-

". . . Do you

Fondle me, then! Who means to take your life?"

-a new mood seizes on him. They have "one thing to guard against." They must not make much of one another; there must be no more parade of love than there was yesterday; for then it would seem as if he supposed she needed proofs that he loves her-

". . . yes, still love you, love you,

In spite of Luca and what's come to him."

That would be a sure sign that Luca's "white sneering old reproachful face" was ever in their thoughts. Yes; they must even quarrel at times, as if they

". . . still could lose each other, were not tied

By this . . ."

but on her responding cry of "Love!" he shudders back again: Is he so surely for ever hers?

She, in her stubborn patience, answers by a reminiscence of their early days of love-

". . . That May morning we two stole

Under the green ascent of sycamores"

-and, thinking to reason with him, asks if, that morning, they had

". . . come upon a thing like that,

Suddenly-"

but he interrupts with his old demand for the true word: she shall not say "a thing" . . . and at last that marvellous patience gives way, and in a superb flash of ironic rage she answers him-

"Then, Venus' body! had we come upon

My husband Luca Gaddi's murdered corpse

Within there, at his couch-foot, covered close"

-flinging him the "words" he has whimpered for in full measure, that so at last she may attain to asking if, that morning, he would have "pored upon it?" She knows he would not; then why pore upon it now? For him, it is here, as much as in the deserted house; it is everywhere.

". . . For me

(she goes on),

Now he is dead, I hate him worse: I hate . . .

Dare you stay here? I would go back and hold

His two dead hands, and say, 'I hate you worse,

Luca, than--'"

And in her frenzy of reminiscent hatred and loathing for the murdered man, she goes to Sebald and takes his hands, as if to feign that other taking.

With the hysteria that has all along been growing in him, Sebald flings her back-

". . . Take your hands off mine;

'Tis the hot evening-off! oh, morning, is it?"

-and she, restored to her cooler state by this repulse, and with a perhaps unconscious moving to some revenge for it, points out, with a profounder depth of callousness than she has yet displayed, that the body at the house will have to be taken away and buried-

"Come in and help to carry"-

and with ghastly glee she adds-

". . . We may sleep

Anywhere in the whole wide house to-night."

* * * * *

Now the dialogue sways between her deliberate sensuous allurement of the man and his deepening horror at what they have done. She winds and unwinds her hair-was it so that he once liked it? But he cannot look; he would give her neck and her splendid shoulders, "both those breasts of yours," if this thing could be undone. It is not the mere killing-though he would "kill the world so Luca lives again," even to fondle her as before-but the thought that he has eaten the dead man's bread, worn his clothes, "felt his money swell my purse." . . . This is the intolerable; "there's a recompense in guilt"-

"One must be venturous and fortunate:-

What is one young for else?"

and thus their passion is justified; but to have killed the man who rescued him from starvation by letting him teach music to his wife . . . why-

". . . He gave me

Life, nothing less"-

and if he did reproach the perfidy, "and threaten and do more," had he no right after all-what was there to wonder at?

"He sat by us at table quietly:

Why must you lean across till our cheeks touched?"

In that base blaming of her alone we get the measure of Sebald as at this hour he is. He turns upon her with a demand to know how she now "feels for him." Her answer, wherein the whole of her nature (as, again, at this hour it is) reveals itself-callous but courageous, proud and passionate, cruel in its utter sensuality, yet with the force and honesty which attend on all simplicity, good or evil-her answer strikes a truer note than does anything which Sebald yet has said, or is to say. She replies that she loves him better now than ever-

"And best (look at me while I speak to you)

Best for the crime."

She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off-

". . . this naked crime of ours

May not now be looked over: look it down."

And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the past?

"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"

-and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on-the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his-and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent, till the storm came-

"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;

And ever and anon some bright white shaft

Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,

As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen

Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,

Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke

The thunder like a whole sea overhead . . ."

-while she, in a frenzy of passion-

". . . stretched myself upon you, hands

To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook

All my locks loose, and covered you with them-

You, Sebald, the same you!"

But the flame of her is scorching the feeble lover; feebly he pleads, resists, begs pardon for the harsh words he has given her, yields, struggles . . . yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body and of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her-

"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!

This way? Will you forgive me-be once more

My great queen?"

Glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice about her brow-

"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,

Magnificent in sin. Say that!"

So she bids him; so he crowns her-

"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,

Magnificent . . ."

-but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of a girl singing.

"The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn:

God's in his heaven-

All's right with the world!"

(Pippa passes.)

* * * * *

Like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth, unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy-no more. She is passing the great house of the First Happy One, so soon rejected in her game of make-believe! If now she could know what part the dream-Pippa might have taken on herself. . . . But she does not know, and, lingering for a moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.

The pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion by her song. It strikes on Sebald with the force of a warning from above-

"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?

You, you spoke!"-

but she, contemptuously-

". . . Oh, that little ragged girl!

She must have rested on the step: we give them

But this one holiday the whole year round.

Did you ever see our silk-mills-their inside?

There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!"

Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be quiet-but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call, for his voice will be sure to carry.

No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven. Terribly he turns upon her-

"Go, get your clothes on-dress those shoulders!

. . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"-

and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her-

"My God, and she is emptied of it now!

Outright now!-how miraculously gone

All of the grace-had she not strange grace once?

Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,

No purpose holds the features up together,

Only the cloven brow and puckered chin

Stay in their places: and the very hair

That seemed to have a sort of life in it,

Drops, a dead web!"

Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer-

". . . Speak to me-not of me!"

But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect-

"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle

Broke the delicious indolence-all broken!"

Once more that cry breaks from her-

"To me-not of me!"

but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave-

". . . a fawning, cringing lie,

A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"

-while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection-

". . . My God!

Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades-

I should have known there was no blood beneath!"

For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"-can be sure that he knows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in-

"I hate, hate-curse you! God's in his heaven!"

* * * * *

Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive from the first-that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon him, wrests the dagger-

". . . Me!

Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself-kill me!

Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me-then

Yourself-then-presently-first hear me speak!

I always meant to kill myself-wait, you!

Lean on my breast-not as a breast; don't love me

The more because you lean on me, my own

Heart's Sebald! There, there, both deaths presently!"

* * * * *

Here at last is the whole woman. "Lean on my breast-not as a breast"; "Mine is the whole crime"; "I always meant to kill myself-wait, you!" She will relinquish even her sense of womanhood; no word of blame for him; she would die, that he might live forgetting her, but it is too late for that, so "There, there, both deaths presently." . . . And now let us read again the lamentable dying words of Sebald. It is even more than I have said: not only are we meant to understand that Ottima's is the nobler spirit, but (I think) that not alone the passing of Pippa with her song has drawn this wealth of beauty from the broken woman's soul. Always it was there; it needed but the loved one's need to pour itself before him. "There, there, both deaths presently"-and in the dying, each is again revealed. He, all self-

"My brain is drowned now-quite drowned: all I feel"

-and so on; while her sole utterance is-

"Not me-to him, O God, be merciful!"

Pippa's song has, doubtlessly, saved them both, but Sebald as by direct intervention, Ottima as by the revelation of her truest self. Again, and yet again and again, we shall find in Browning this passion for "the courage of the deed"; and we shall find that courage oftenest assigned to women. For him, it was wellnigh the cardinal virtue to be brave-not always, as in Ottima, by the help of a native callousness, but assuredly always, as in her and in the far dearer women, by the help of an instinctive love for truth-

"Truth is the strong thing-let man's life be true!"

Ottima's and Sebald's lives have not been "true"; but she, who can accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound her lover-she can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, passing, could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I believe, without Pippa have saved herself. Direct intervention: not every soul needs that. And-whether it be intentional or not, I feel unable to decide, nor does it lose, but rather gain, in interest, if it be unintentional-one of the most remarkable things in this remarkable artistic experiment, this drama in which the scenes "have in common only the appearance of one figure," is that by each of the Four Passings of Pippa, a man's is the soul rescued.