* * * * *

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 vecu 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."



PART II



THE GREAT LADY

"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"

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 adventitious 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 class-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 classes! 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 pass away like these:

". . . You know physics, something of geology, Mathematics are your pastime; souls shall rise in their degree; Butterflies 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 passing 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 noble, yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all, in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," 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 Duchess and The Flight of the Duchess 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 Duchess 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 passion 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 Duchess. 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 passionless 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 Duchess—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 passion 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:

". . . She had A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad, Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er She looked on, and her looks went everywhere."

Even now it does not seem that the listener is in full possession and accord; more stooping, then, is necessary, for the hint must be clearly conveyed:

"Sir, 'twas all one! My favour at her breast, The dropping of the daylight in the west, The bough of cherries some officious fool Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule She rode with round the terrace—all and each Would draw from her alike the approving speech, Or blush, at least. . . ."

+ + + + +

We, like the envoy, sit in mute amazement and repulsion, listening to the Duke, looking at the Duchess. We can see the quivering, glad, tender creature as though we also were at gaze on Fra Pandolf's picture. . . . I call this piece a wonder, now! Scarce one of the monologues is so packed with significance; yet it is by far the most lucid, the most "simple"—even the rhymes are managed with such consummate art that they are, as Mr. Arthur Symons has said, "scarcely appreciable." Two lives are summed up in fifty-six lines. First, the ghastly Duke's; then, hers—but hers, indeed, is finally gathered into one. . . . Everything that came to her was transmuted into her own dearness—even his favour at her breast. We can figure to ourselves the giving of that "favour"—the high proprietary air, the loftily anticipated gratitude: Sir Willoughby Patterne by intelligent anticipation. But then, though the approving speech and blush were duly paid, would come the fool with his bough of cherries—and speech and blush were given again! Absurder still, the spot of joy would light for the sunset, the white mule . . .

"Who'd stoop to blame This sort of trifling?"

Even if he had been able to make clear to "such an one" the crime of ranking his gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name "with anybody's gift"—even if he had plainly said that this or that in her "disgusted" him, and she had allowed herself to be thus lessoned (but she might not have allowed it; she might have set her wits to his, forsooth, and made excuse) . . . even so (this must be impressed upon the envoy), it would have meant some stooping, and the Duke "chooses never to stoop."

Still the envoy listens, with a thought of his own, perhaps, for the next Duchess! . . . More and more raptly he gazes; his eyes are glued upon that "pictured countenance"; and still the peevish voice is sounding in his ear—

". . . Oh, Sir, she smiled, no doubt, Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together."

There falls a curious, throbbing silence. The envoy still sits gazing. There she stands, looking as if she were alive. . . . And almost he starts to hear the voice echo his thought, but with so different a meaning—

". . . There she stands As if alive"

—the picture is a wonder!

Still the visitor sits dumb. Was it from human lips that those words had just now sounded: "Then all smiles stopped together"?

She stands there—smiling . . . But the Duke grows weary of this pause before Fra Pandolf's piece. It is a wonder; but he has other wonders. Moreover, the due hint has been given, and no doubt, though necessarily in silence, taken: the next Duchess will be instructed beforehand in the proper way to "thank men." He intimates his will to move away:

"Will't please you rise? We'll meet The company below, then."

The envoy rises, but not shakes off that horror of repulsion. Somewhere, as he stands up and steps aside, a voice seems prating of "the Count his master's known munificence," of "just pretence to dowry," of the "fair daughter's self" being nevertheless the object. . . . But in a hot resistless impulse, he turns off; one must remove one's self from such proximity. Same air shall not be breathed, nor same ground trod. . . . Still the voice pursues him, sharply a little now for his lack of the due deference:

". . . Nay, we'll go Together down, sir,"

—and slowly (since a rupture must not be brought about by him) the envoy acquiesces. They begin to descend the staircase. But the visitor has no eyes for "wonders" now—he has seen the wonder, has heard the horror. . . . His host is all unwitting. Strange, that the guest can pass these glories, but everybody is not a connoisseur. One of them, however, must be pointed out:

". . . Notice Neptune, though, Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity, Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me."

. . . Something else getting "stopped"! The envoy looks.

+ + + + +

But lo, she is alive again! This time she is in distant Northern lands, or was, for now (and, strangely, we thank Heaven for it) we know not where she is. Wherever it is, she is happy. She has been saved, as by flame; has been snatched from her Duke, and borne away to joy and love—by an old gipsy-woman! No lover came for her: it was Love that came, and because she knew Love at first sight and sound, she saved herself.

The old huntsman of her husband's Court tells the story to a traveller whom he calls his friend.

"What a thing friendship is, world without end!"

It happened thirty years ago; the huntsman and the Duke and the Duchess all were young—if the Duke was ever young! He had not been brought up at the Northern castle, for his father, the rough hardy warrior, had been summoned to the Kaiser's court as soon as his heir was born, and died there,

"At next year's end, in a velvet suit . . . Petticoated like a herald, In a chamber next to an ante-room Where he breathed the breath of page and groom, What he called stink, and they perfume."

The "sick tall yellow Duchess" soon took the boy to Paris, where she belonged, being (says our huntsman) "the daughter of God knows who." So the hall was left empty, the fire was extinguished, and the people were railing and gibing. But in vain they railed and gibed until long years were past, "and back came our Duke and his mother again."

"And he came back the pertest little ape That ever affronted human shape; Full of his travel, struck at himself. You'd say, he despised our bluff old ways? —Not he!"

—for in Paris it happened that a cult of the Middle Ages was in vogue, and the Duke had been told there that the rough North land was the one good thing left in these evil days:

"So, all that the old Dukes had been, without knowing it, This Duke would fain know he was, without being it."

It was a renaissance in full blast! All the "thoroughly worn-out" usages were revived:

"The souls of them fumed-forth, the hearts of them torn-out."

The "chase" was inevitably one thing that must be reconstructed from its origins; and the Duke selected for his own mount a lathy horse, all legs and length, all speed, no strength:

"They should have set him on red Berold, Mad with pride, like fire to manage! . . . With the red eye slow consuming in fire, And the thin stiff ear like an abbey spire!"

Thus he lost for ever any chance of esteem from our huntsman. He preferred "a slim four-year-old to the big-boned stock of mighty Berold"; he drank "weak French wine for strong Cotnar" . . . anything in the way of futility might be expected after these two manifestations.

"Well, such as he was, he must marry, we heard: And out of a convent, at the word, Came the lady in time of spring. —Oh, old thoughts, they cling, they cling!"

Spring though it was, the retainers must cut a figure, so they were clad in thick hunting-clothes, fit for the chase of wild bulls or buffalo:

"And so we saw the lady arrive; My friend, I have seen a white crane bigger! She was the smallest lady alive, Made in a piece of Nature's madness, Too small, almost, for the life and gladness That over-filled her."

She rode along, the retinue forming as it were a lane to the castle, where the Duke awaited her.

"Up she looked, down she looked, round at the mead, Straight at the castle, that's best indeed To look at from outside the walls"

—and her eager sweetness lavished itself already on the "serfs and thralls," as of course they were styled. She gave our huntsman a look of gratitude because he patted her horse as he led it; she asked Max, who rode on her other hand, the name of every bird that flew past: "Was that an eagle? and was the green-and-grey bird on the field a plover?"

Thus happily hearing, happily looking (how like the Italian duchess—but she is the same!), the little lady rode forward:

"When suddenly appeared the Duke."

She sprang down, her small foot pointed on the huntsman's hand. But the Duke, stiffly and as though rebuking her impetuosity, "stepped rather aside than forward, and welcomed her with his grandest smile." The sick tall yellow Duchess, his mother, stood like a north wind in the background; the rusty portcullis went up with a shriek, and, like a sky sullied by a chill wind,

"The lady's face stopped its play, As if her first hair had grown grey; For such things must begin some one day."

But the brave spirit survived. In a day or two she was well again, as if she could not believe that God did not mean her to be content and glad in His sight. "So, smiling as at first went she." She was filled to the brim with energy; there never was such a wife as she would have made for a shepherd, a miner, a huntsman—and this huntsman, who has had a beloved wife, knows what he is saying.

"She was active, stirring, all fire— Could not rest, could not tire— To a stone she might have given life! . . . And here was plenty to be done, And she that could do it, great or small, She was to do nothing at all."

For the castle was crammed with retainers, and the Duke's plan permitted a wife, at most, to meet his eye with the other trophies in the hall and out of it:

"To sit thus, stand thus, see and be seen At the proper place, in the proper minute, And die away the life between."

The little Duchess, with her warm heart and her smile like the Italian girl's that "went everywhere," broke every rule at first. It was amusing enough (the old huntsman remembers)—but for the grief that followed after. For she did not submit easily. Having broken the rules, she would find fault with them! She would advise and criticise, and "being a fool," instruct the wise, and deal out praise or blame like a child. But "the wise" only smiled. It was as if a little mechanical toy should be contrived to make the motion of striking, and brilliantly make it. Thus, as a mechanical toy, was the only way to treat this minute critic, for like the Duke at Ferrara, this Duke (and his mother) did not choose to stoop. He would merely wear his "cursed smirk" as he nodded applause, but he had some trouble in keeping off the "old mother-cat's claws."

"So the little lady grew silent and thin, Paling and ever paling."

Then all smiles stopped together . . . And the Duke, perceiving, said to himself that it was done to spite him, but that he would find the way to deal with it.

Like the envoy, our huntsman's friend is beginning to find the tale a little more than he can stand—but, unlike the envoy, he can express himself. The old man soothes him down: "Don't swear, friend!" and goes on to solace him by telling how the "old one" has been in hell for many a year,

"And the Duke's self . . . you shall hear."

+ + + + +

"Well, early in autumn, at first winter-warning, When the stag had to break with his foot, of a morning, A drinking-hole out of the fresh, tender ice,"

it chanced that the Duke, asking himself what pleasures were in season (he would never have known, unless "the calendar bade him be hearty"), found that a hunting party was indicated:

"Always provided, old books showed the way of it!"

Poetry, painting, tapestries, woodcraft, all were consulted: how it was properest to encourage your dog, how best to pray to St. Hubert, patron saint of hunters. The serfs and thralls were duly dressed up,

"And oh, the Duke's tailor, he had a hot time on't!"

But when all "the first dizziness of flap-hats and buff-coats and jack-boots" had subsided, the Duke turned his attention to the Duchess's part in the business, and, after much cogitation, somebody triumphantly announced that he had discovered her function. An old book stated it:

"When horns wind a mort and the deer is at siege, Let the dame of the castle prick forth on her jennet, And with water to wash the hands of her liege In a clean ewer with a fair toweling, Let her preside at the disemboweling."

All was accordingly got ready: the towel, the most antique ewer, even the jennet, piebald, black-barred, cream-coated, pink-eyed—and only then, on the day before the party, was the Duke's pleasure signified to his lady.

And the little Duchess—paler and paler every day—said she would not go! Her eyes, that used to leap wide in flashes, now just lifted their long lashes, as if too weary even for him to light them; and she duly acknowledged his forethought for her,

"But spoke of her health, if her health were worth aught, Of the weight by day and the watch by night, And much wrong now that used to be right;"

and, in short, utterly declined the "disemboweling."

But everything was arranged! The Duke was nettled. Still she persisted: it was hardly the time . . .

The huntsman knew what took place that day in the Duchess's room, because Jacynth, who was her tire-woman, was waiting within call outside on the balcony, and since Jacynth was like a June rose, why, the casement that Jacynth could peep through, an adorer of roses could peep through also.

Well, the Duke "stood for a while in a sultry smother," and then "with a smile that partook of the awful," turned the Duchess over to his mother to learn her duty, and hear the truth. She learned it all, she heard it all; but somehow or other it ended at last; the old woman, "licking her whiskers," passed out, and the Duke, who had waited to hear the lecture, passed out after her, making (he hoped) a face like Nero or Saladin—at any rate, he showed a very stiff back.

However, next day the company mustered. The weather was execrable—fog that you might cut with an axe; and the Duke rode out "in a perfect sulkiness." But suddenly, as he looked round, the sun ploughed up the woolly mass, and drove it in all directions, and looking through the courtyard arch, he saw a troop of Gipsies on their march, coming with the annual gifts to the castle. For every year, in this North land, the Gipsies come to give "presents" to the Dukes—presents for which an equivalent is always understood to be forthcoming.

And marvellous the "presents" are! These Gipsies can do anything with the earth, the ore, the sand. Snaffles, whose side-bars no brute can baffle, locks that would puzzle a locksmith, horseshoes that turn on a swivel, bells for the sheep . . . all these are good, but what they can do with sand!

"Glasses they'll blow you, crystal-clear, Where just a faint cloud of rose shall appear, As if in pure water you dropped and let die A bruised black-blooded mulberry."

And then that other sort, "their crowning pride, with long white threads distinct inside."

These are the things they bring, when you see them trooping to the castle from the valley. So they trooped this morning; and when they reached the fosse, all stopped but one:

"The oldest Gipsy then above ground."

This witch had been coming to the castle for years; the huntsman knew her well. Every autumn she would swear must prove her last visit—yet here she was again, with "her worn-out eyes, or rather eye-holes, of no use now but to gather brine."

She sidled up to the Duke and touched his bridle, so that the horse reared; then produced her presents, and awaited the annual acknowledgment. But the Duke, still sulky, would scarcely speak to her; in vain she fingered her fur-pouch. At last she said in her "level whine," that as well as to bring the presents, she had come to pay her duty to "the new Duchess, the youthful beauty." As she said that, an idea came to the Duke, and the smirk returned to his sulky face. Supposing he set this old woman to teach her, as the other had failed? What could show forth better the flower-like and delicate life his fortunate Duchess led, than the loathsome squalor of this sordid crone? He turned and beckoned the huntsman out of the throng, and, as he was approaching, bent and spoke mysteriously into the Gipsy's ear. The huntsman divined that he was telling of the frowardness and ingratitude of the "new Duchess." And the Gipsy listened submissively. Her mouth tightened, her brow brightened—it was as if she were promising to give the lady a thorough frightening. The Duke just showed her a purse—and then bade the huntsman take her to the "lady left alone in her bower," that she might wile away an hour for her:

"Whose mind and body craved exertion, And yet shrank from all better diversion."

And then the Duke rode off.

+ + + + +

Now begins "the tenebrific passage of the tale." Or rather, now begins what we can make into such a passage if we will, but need not. We can read a thousand transcendental meanings into what now happens, or we can simply accept and understand it—leaving the rest to the "Browningites," of whom Browning declared that he was not.

The huntsman, turning round sharply to bid the old woman follow him—a little distrustful of her since that interview with the Duke—saw something that not only restored his trust, but afterwards made him sure that she had planned beforehand the wonders that now happened. She looked a head taller, to begin with, and she kept pace with him easily, no stooping nor hobbling—above all, no cringing! She was wholly changed, in short, and the change, "whatever the change meant," had extended to her very clothes. The shabby wolf-skin cloak she wore seemed edged with gold coins. Under its shrouding disguise, she was wearing (we may conjecture), for this foreseen occasion, her dress of tribal Queen. But most wonderful of all was the change in her "eye-holes." When first he saw her that morning, they had been, as it were, empty of all but brine; now, two unmistakable eye-points, live and aware, looked out from their places—as a snail's horns come out after rain. . . . He accepted all this, "quick and surprising" as it was, without spoken comment; and took the Gipsy to Jacynth, standing duty at the lady's chamber-door.

"And Jacynth rejoiced, she said, to admit any one, For since last night, by the same token, Not a single word had the lady spoken."

The two women went in, and our friend, on the balcony, "watched the weather."

Jacynth never could tell him afterwards how she came to fall soundly asleep all of a sudden. But she did so fall asleep, and so remained the whole time through. He, on the balcony, was following the hunt across the open country—for in those days he had a falcon eye—when, all in a moment, his ear was arrested by

"Was it singing, or was it saying, Or a strange musical instrument playing?"

It came from the lady's room; and, pricked by curiosity, he pushed the lattice, pulled the curtain, and—first—saw Jacynth "in a rosy sleep along the floor with her head against the door." And in the middle of the room, on the seat of state,

"Was a queen—the Gipsy woman late!"

She was bending down over the lady, who, coiled up like a child, sat between her knees, clasping her hands over them, and with her chin set on those hands, was gazing up into the face of the old woman. That old woman now showed large and radiant eyes, which were bent full on the lady's, and seemed with every instant to grow wider and more shining. She was slowly fanning with her hands, in an odd measured motion—and the huntsman, puzzled and alarmed, was just about to spring to the rescue, when he was stopped by perceiving the expression on the lady's face.

"For it was life her eyes were drinking . . . Life's pure fire, received without shrinking, Into the heart and breast whose heaving Told you no single drop they were leaving."

The life had passed into her very hair, which was thrown back, loose over each shoulder,

"And the very tresses shared in the pleasure, Moving to the mystic measure, Bounding as the bosom bounded."

He stopped short, perplexed, "as she listened and she listened." But all at once he felt himself struck by the self-same contagion:

"And I kept time to the wondrous chime, Making out words and prose and rhyme, Till it seemed that the music furled Its wings like a task fulfilled, and dropped From under the words it first had propped."

He could hear and understand, "word took word as hand takes hand"—and the Gipsy said:

"And so at last we find my tribe, And so I set thee in the midst . . . I trace them the vein and the other vein That meet on thy brow and part again, Making our rapid mystic mark; And I bid my people prove and probe Each eye's profound and glorious globe Till they detect the kindred spark In those depths so dear and dark . . . And on that round young cheek of thine I make them recognise the tinge . . . For so I prove thee, to one and all, Fit, when my people ope their breast, To see the sign, and hear the call, And take the vow, and stand the test Which adds one more child to the rest— When the breast is bare and the arms are wide, And the world is left outside."

There would be probation (said the Gipsy), and many trials for the lady if she joined the tribe; but, like the jewel-finder's "fierce assay" of the stone he finds, like the "vindicating ray" that leaps from it:

"So, trial after trial past, Wilt thou fall at the very last Breathless, half in trance With the thrill of the great deliverance, Into our arms for evermore; And thou shalt know, those arms once curled About thee, what we knew before, How love is the only good in the world. Henceforth be loved as heart can love, Or brain devise, or hand approve! Stand up, look below, It is our life at thy feet we throw To step with into light and joy; Not a power of life but we employ To satisfy thy nature's want."

The Gipsy said much more; she showed what perfect mutual love and understanding can do, for "if any two creatures grow into one, they will do more than the world has done"—and the tribe will at least approach that end with this beloved woman. She says not how—whether by one man's loving her to utter devotion of himself, or by her giving "her wondrous self away," and taking the stronger nature's sway. . . .

"I foresee and I could foretell Thy future portion, sure and well; But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, Let them say what thou shalt do!"

But whatever she does, the eyes of her tribe will be upon her, with their blame, their praise:

"Our shame to feel, our pride to show, Glad, angry—but indifferent, no!"

And so at last the girl who now sits gazing up at her will come to old age—will retire apart with the hoarded memories of her heart, and reconstruct the past until the whole "grandly fronts for once her soul" . . . and then, the gleam of yet another morning shall break; it will be like the ending of a dream, when

"Death, with the might of his sunbeam, Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes."

With that great utterance her voice changed like a bird's. The music began again, the words grew indistinguishable . . . with a snap the charm broke, and the huntsman, "starting as if from a nap," realised afresh that the lady was being bewitched, sprang from the balcony to the ground, and hurried round to the portal. . . . In another minute he would have entered:

"When the door opened, and more than mortal Stood, with a face where to my mind centred All beauties I ever saw or shall see, The Duchess: I stopped as if struck by palsy. She was so different, happy and beautiful, I felt at once that all was best" . . .

And he felt, too, that he must do whatever she commanded. But there was, in fact, no commanding. Looking on the beauty that had invested her, "the brow's height and the breast's expanding," he knew that he was hers to live and die, and so he needed not words to find what she wanted—like a wild creature, he knew by instinct what this freed wild creature's bidding was. . . . He went before her to the stable; she followed; the old woman, silent and alone, came last—sunk back into her former self,

"Like a blade sent home to its scabbard."

He saddled the very palfrey that had brought the little Duchess to the castle—the palfrey he had patted as he had led it, thus winning a smile from her. And he couldn't help thinking that she remembered it too, and knew that he would do anything in the world for her. But when he began to saddle his own nag ("of Berold's begetting")—not meaning to be obtrusive—she stopped him by a finger's lifting, and a small shake of the head. . . . Well, he lifted her on the palfrey and set the Gipsy behind her—and then, in a broken voice, he murmured that he was ready whenever God should please that she needed him. . . . And she looked down

"With a look, a look that placed a crown on me,"

and felt in her bosom and dropped into his hand . . . not a purse! If it had been a purse of silver ("or gold that's worse") he would have gone home, kissed Jacynth, and soberly drowned himself—but it was not a purse; it was a little plait of hair, such as friends make for each other in a convent:

"This, see, which at my breast I wear, Ever did (rather to Jacynth's grudgment) And ever shall, till the Day of Judgment. And then—and then—to cut short—this is idle, These are feelings it is not good to foster. I pushed the gate wide, she shook the bridle, And the palfrey bounded—and so we lost her."

+ + + + +

There is the story of the Flight of the Duchess; and it seems to me to need no "explanation" at all. The Gipsy can be anyone or anything we like that saves us; the Duke and his mother anyone or anything that crushes love.

"Love is the only good in the world."

And the love (though it may be) need not be the love of man for woman, and woman for man; but simply love. The quick warm impulse which made this girl look round so eagerly as she approached her future home, and thank the man who led her horse for patting it, and want to hear the name of every bird—the impulse from the heart "too soon made glad, too easily impressed"; the sweet, rich nature of her who "liked whate'er she looked on, and her looks went everywhere" . . . what was all this but love? The tiny lady was one great pulse of it; without love she must die; to give it, take it, was the meaning of her being. And love was neither given nor accepted from her. Worse, it was scorned; it was not "fitting." All she had to do was to be "on show"; nothing, nothing, nothing else—

"And die away the life between."

And then came the time when, like Pompilia, she had "something she must care about"; and the office asked of her was to "assist at the disemboweling" of a noble, harried stag! Not even when she pleaded the hour that awaited her was pity shown, was love shown, for herself or for the coming child. And then the long, spiteful lecture. . . . That night, even to Jacynth, not a word could she utter. Here was a world without love, a world that did not want her—and she was here, and she must stay, until, until . . . Which would the coming child be—herself again, or him again? Scarce she knew which would be the sadder happening.

And then Love walked in upon her. She was "of their tribe"—they wanted her; they wanted all she was. Just what she was; she would not have to change; they wanted her. They liked her eyes, and the colour on her cheek—they liked her. Her eyes might look at them, and "speak true," for they wanted just that truth from just those eyes.

It is any escape, any finding of our "tribe"! It is the self-realisation of a nature that can love. And this is but one way of telling the great tale. Browning told it thus, because for years a song had jingled in his ears of "Following the Queen of the Gipsies, O!"—and to all of us, the Gipsies stand for freedom, for knowledge of the great earth-secrets, for nourishment of heart and soul. But we need not follow only them to compass "the thrill of the great deliverance." We need but know, as the little Duchess knew, what it is that we want, and trust it. She placed the old woman at once upon her own "seat of state": from the moment she beheld her, love leaped forth and crowned the messenger of love.

"And so at last we find my tribe, And so I set thee in the midst . . . Henceforth be loved as heart can love. . . . It is our life at thy feet we throw To step with into light and joy."

The Duchess heard, and knew, and was saved. It needed courage—needed swift decision—needed even some small abandonment of "duty." But she saw what she must do, and did it. Duty has two voices often; the Duchess heard the true voice. If she was bewitched, it was by the spell that was ordained to save her, could she hear it. . . . And that she heard aright, that, leaving the castle, she left the hell where love lives not, we know from the old huntsman:

"For the wound in the Duke's pride rankled fiery; So they made no search and small inquiry";

and Gipsies thenceforth were hustled across the frontier.

Even the Duchess could not make love valid there. Reality was out of them. . . . True, the huntsman, after thirty years, is still her sworn adorer. He had stayed at the castle:

"I must see this fellow his sad life through— He is our Duke, after all, And I, as he says, but a serf and thrall";

—but, as soon as the Duke is dead, our friend intends to "go journeying" to the land of the Gipsies, and there find his lady or hear the last news of her:

"And when that's told me, what's remaining?"

For Jacynth is dead and all their children, and the world is too hard for his explaining, and so he hopes to find a snug corner under some hedge, and turn himself round and bid the world good-night, and sleep soundly until he is waked to another world, where pearls will no longer be cast before swine that can't value them. "Amen."

But at any rate this talk with his friend has made him see his little lady again, and everything that they did since "seems such child's play," with her away! So her love did one thing even there—just as one likes to think that the unhappier Duchess, the Italian one, left precisely such a memory in the heart of that officious fool who broke the bough of cherries for her in the orchard.

And is it not good to think that almost immediately after The Flight of the Duchess was published, Browning was to meet the passionate-hearted woman whom he snatched almost from the actual death-bed that had been prepared for her with as much of pomp and circumstance as was the Duchess's life-in-death! With this in mind, it gives one a queer thrill to read those lines of silenced prophecy:

"I foresee and I could foretell Thy future portion, sure and well: But those passionate eyes speak true, speak true, Let them say what thou shalt do!"

FOOTNOTES:

[166:1] The "Toccata" which awakens these reflections in the poet is by a Venetian composer, Baldassare Galuppi, who was born in 1706, and died in 1785. He lived and worked in London from 1741 to 1744. "He abounded" (says Vernon Lee, in her Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy) "in melody, tender, pathetic, and brilliant, which in its extreme simplicity and slightness occasionally rose to the highest beauty."



PART III



I

LOVERS MEETING

Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life—the thing which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general outlook—more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his passion for humanity as humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let us take them for granted—let us examine man as a separate phenomenon, so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest, next to mankind, was art in all its branches—a correlative aspect, that is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in expression of our subtlest inward life. Man was, for him, the proper study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit—differing there from Byron, almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature." Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook; and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.

In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for flabbiness—there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker ways. After Pauline—rejected utterance of his green-sickness—the wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up, "as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed do all for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted, but no claim shall be formulated on either side. This is the true faith, the true freedom, for both. Meredith has said the same, more axiomatically than Browning ever said it:

"He learnt how much we gain who make no claims"

—but Browning's whole existence announced that axiom, and triumphantly proved it true. Almost the historic happy marriage of the world! Such was his marriage, and such it must have been, for never was man declared beforehand more infallible for the greatest of decisions. He understood: understood love, marriage, and (hardest of all perhaps!) conduct—what it may do, and not do, for happiness. That is to say, he understood how far conduct helps toward comprehension and how far hinders it—when it is that we should judge by words and deeds, and when by "what we know," apart from words and deeds. The whole secret, for Browning, lay in loving greatly.

Thus, for example, it is notable that, except The Laboratory and Fifine at the Fair, none of his poems of men and women turns upon jealousy. For him, that was no part of love; there could be no place in love for it. And even Elvire's demurs (in Fifine), even the departure from her husband, are not the words, the deed, of jealousy, but of insight into Juan's better self. He will never be all that he can be (she sees) until he knows that it is her he loves, and her alone and always; if this is the way he must learn it, she will go, that he may be deep and true as well as brilliant.

For Browning, how love comes is not important. It may be by the high-road or the bypath; so long as it is truly recognised, bravely answered, all is well. Living, it will be our highest bliss; dying, our dearest memory.

"What is he buzzing in my ears? 'Now that I come to die, Do I view the world as a vale of tears?' Ah, reverend sir, not I!"

And why not? Because in the days gone by, a girl and this now dying man "used to meet." What he viewed in the world then, he now sees again—the "suburb lane" of their rendezvous; and he begins to make a map, as it were, with the bottles on the bedside table.

"At a terrace, somewhere near the stopper, There watched for me, one June, A girl: I know, Sir, it's improper, My poor mind's out of tune."

Nevertheless the clergyman must look, while he traces out the details. . . . She left the attic, "there, by the rim of the bottle labelled 'Ether,'"

"And stole from stair to stair,

And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas! We loved, Sir—used to meet: How sad and mad and bad it was— But then, how it was sweet!"

They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other "confession"—if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life: that is all.

In Confessions, the story is done; the man is dying. In Love among the Ruins, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone, is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of "a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace," a wall with a hundred gates—its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:

"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass Never was"

—as here,

"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe Long ago; Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame Struck them tame; And that glory and that shame alike, the gold Bought and sold."

Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows

"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair Waits me there In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul For the goal, When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb Till I come."

That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its temples and colonnades,

"All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts—and then All the men! When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand, Either hand On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace Of my face, Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech Each on each."

A million fighters were sent forth every year from that city; and they built their gods a brazen pillar high as the sky, yet still had a thousand chariots in reserve—all gold, of course. . . .

"Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns! Earth's returns For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin. Shut them in With their triumphs and their glories and the rest! Love is best!"

But though love be best, it is not all. It is here to transfigure all; we must accept with it the merer things it glorifies. For life calls us, even from our love. The day is long and we must work in it; but we can meet when the day is done. In the light of this low half-moon can put off in our boat, and row across and push the prow into the slushy sand at the other side of the bay:

"Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach; Three fields to cross till a farm appears; A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch And blue spurt of a lighted match, And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears, Than the two hearts beating each to each!"

Yes—we can meet at night. . . . But we must part at morning.

"Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, And the sun looked over the mountain's rim; And straight was a path of gold for him, And the need of a world of men for me."[205:1]

These are plainly not wedded lovers, though some commentators so describe them; and indeed Browning sings but seldom of wedded love. When he does so sing, he reaches heights of beauty beyond any in the other lyrics, but the poems of marriage are not in our survey. In nearly all his other love-poetry, it is the "trouble of love," in one form or another, which occupies him—the lovers who meet to part; those who love "in vain" (as the phrase goes, but never his phrase); those who choose separation rather than defiance of the "world, and what it fears"; those who do defy that world, and reckon up their gains.

"Dear, had the world in its caprice Deigned to proclaim 'I know you both, Have recognised your plighted troth, Am sponsor for you: live in peace!'— How many precious months and years Of youth had passed, that speed so fast, Before we found it out at last, The world, and what it fears?

How much of priceless life were spent With men that every virtue decks, And women models of their sex, Society's true ornament— Ere we dared wander, nights like this, Thro' wind and rain, and watch the Seine, And feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss?"

That old quarrel between the ideals of Bohemia and of "respectability"! They could have done these things, even as a married pair, but the trouble is that then they would not have "dared" to do them. "People would have talked." . . . Well, people may talk now, but they have gained something. They have gained freedom to live their lives as they choose—rightly or wrongly, but at any rate it is not "the world" that sways them. They have learnt how much that good word is worth! What is happening, this very hour, in that environment—here, for instance, in the Institute, which they are just passing? "Guizot receives Montalembert!" The two men are utterly opposed in everything that truly signifies to each; yet now are exchanging empty courtesies. See the courtyard all alight for the reception! Let them escape from it all, and leave respectability to its false standards. They are not included—they are outcasts: "put forward your best foot!"

I accept this delightful poem with some reserve, for I think the lovers had not so wholly emancipated themselves from "the world" as they were pleased to think. The world still counted for them—as it counts for all who remember so vehemently to denounce it. Moreover, married, they could, were their courage complete, have beaten the world by forgetting it. No more docile wild-beast than that much badgered creature when once it recognises the true Contemner! To

"Feel the Boulevard break again To warmth and light and bliss"

—on wild wet nights of wandering . . . this might even, through the example of the Real Unfearing, become a craze! Yes—we must refuse to be dazzled by rhetoric. These lovers also had their falling-short—they could not forget the world.

Hitherto we have considered the normal meetings of lovers. Now we turn to the dream-meetings—the great encounters which all of us feel might be, yet are not. There can be few to whom there has not come that imagination of the spiritually compelled presence, which Browning has so marvellously uttered in Mesmerism. Here, in these breathless stanzas,[208:1] so almost literally mesmeric that, as we read them (or rather draw them in at our own breathless lips!), we believe in the actual coming of our loved one, and scarce dare look round lest we should find the terrifying glory true . . . here the man sits alone in his room at dead of night, and wills the woman to be with him. He brings his thought to bear on her, "till he feels his hair turn grey":

"Till I seemed to have and hold In the vacancy 'Twixt the walls and me From the hair-plait's chestnut-gold To the foot in its muslin fold—

Have and hold, then and there, Her, from head to foot, Breathing and mute, Passive and yet aware, In the grasp of my steady stare—

Hold and have, there and then, All her body and soul That completes my whole, All that women add to men, In the clutch of my steady ken"—

. . . if so he can sit, never loosing his will, and with a gesture of his hands that "breaks into very flame," he feels that he must draw her from "the house called hers, not mine," which soon will seem to suffocate her if she cannot escape from it:

"Out of doors into the night! On to the maze Of the wild wood-ways, Not turning to left nor right From the pathway, blind with sight—

Swifter and still more swift, As the crowding peace Doth to joy increase In the wild blind eyes uplift Thro' the darkness and the drift!"

And he will sit so, feeling his soul dilate, and no muscle shall be relaxed as he sees his belief come true, and more and more she takes shape for him, so that she shall be, when she does come, altered even from what she was at his first seeming to "have and hold her"—for the lips glow, the cheek burns, the hair, from its plait, breaks loose, and spreads with "a rich outburst, chestnut gold-interspersed," and the arms open wide "like the doors of a casket-shrine," as she comes, comes, comes . . .

"'Now—now'—the door is heard! Hark, the stairs! and near— Nearer—and here— 'Now!' and at call the third She enters without a word!"

* * * * *

Could a woman ever forget the man who should do that with her! Would she not almost be ready, in such an hour, to die as Porphyria died?

But in Porphyria's Lover, not so great a spirit speaks. This man, too, sitting in his room alone, thinks of the woman he loves, and she comes to him; but here it is her own will that drives through wind and rain—there is no compelling glory from the man uncertain still of passion's answering passion.

"The rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart fit to break. When glided in Porphyria." . . .

She glided in and did not speak. She looked round his cottage, then kneeled and made the dying fire blaze up. When all the place was warm, she rose and put off her dripping cloak and shawl, the hat, the soiled gloves; she let her rain-touched hair fall loose,

"And, last, she sat down by my side And called me. When no voice replied,

She put my arm about her waist, And made her smooth white shoulder bare, And all her yellow hair displaced, And, stooping, made my cheek lie there, And spread o'er all her yellow hair—

Murmuring how she loved me—she Too weak, for all her heart's endeavour, To set its struggling passion free From pride, and vainer ties dissever, And give herself to me for ever."

But to-night, at some gay feast in a world all sundered from this man's, there had seized her

"A sudden thought of one so pale For love of her, and all in vain: So, she was come through wind and rain."

She found him indeed as she had pitifully dreamed of him: "with heart fit to break" sitting desolate in the chill cottage; and even when she was come, he still sat there inert, stupefied as it were by his grief—unresponsive to the joy of her presence, unbelieving in it possibly, since already so often he had dreamed that this might be, and it had not been. But, unfaltering now that she has at last decided, she calls to him, and as even then he makes no answer, sits down beside him and draws his head to her breast.

"Be sure I looked up at her eyes Happy and proud; at last I knew Porphyria worshipped me; surprise Made my heart swell, and still it grew While I debated what to do.

That moment she was mine, mine, fair, Perfectly pure and good: I found A thing to do, and all her hair In one long yellow string I wound Three times her little throat around,

And strangled her." . . .

But he knows that she felt no pain, for in a minute he opened her lids to see, and the blue eyes laughed back at him "without a stain." He loosed the tress about her neck, and the colour flashed into her cheek beneath his burning kiss. Now he propped her head—this time his shoulder bore

"The smiling rosy little head, So glad it has its utmost will, That all it scorned at once is fled, And I, its love, am gained instead!

Porphyria's love: she guessed not how Her darling one wish would be heard. And thus we sit together now, And all night long we have not stirred, And yet God has not said a word!"

* * * * *

This poem was first published as the second of two headed "Madhouse Cells"; and though the classifying title was afterwards rejected, that it should ever have been used is something of a clue to the meaning. But only "something," for even so, we wonder if the dream were all a dream, if Porphyria ever came, and, if she did, was this the issue? What truly happened on that night of wind and rain?—that night which is real, whatever else is not . . . I ask, we all ask; but does it greatly matter? Enough that we can grasp the deeper meaning—the sanity in the madness. As Porphyria, with her lover's head on her breast, sat in the little cottage on that stormy night, the world at last rejected, the love at last accepted, she was at her highest pulse of being: she was herself. When in all the rest of life would such another moment come? . . . How many lovers have mutually murmured that: "If we could die now!"—nothing impaired, nothing gone or to go from them: the sanity in the madness, the courage in the cowardice. . . . So this lover felt, brooding in the "madhouse cell" on what had been, or might have been:

"And thus we sit together now, And yet God has not said a word!"

Six poems of exultant love—and a man speaks in each! With Browning, the woman much more rarely is articulate; and when she does speak, even he puts in her mouth the less triumphant utterances. From the nameless girl in Count Gismond and from Balaustion—these only—do we get the equivalent of the man's exultation in such lyrics as I have just now shown. . . . Always the tear assigned to woman! It may be "true"; I think it is not at least so true, but true in some degree it must be, since all legend will thus have it. What then shall a woman say? That the time has come to alter this? That woman cries "for nothing," like the children? That she does not understand so well as man the ends of love? Or that she understands them better? . . . Perhaps all of these things; perhaps some others also. Let us study now, at all events, the "tear"; let us see in what, as Browning saw her, the Trouble of Love consists for woman.

FOOTNOTES:

[205:1] Very curious is the uncertainty which this stanza leaves in the minds of some. In Berdoe's Browning Cyclopaedia the difficulty is frankly stated, with an exquisitely ludicrous result. He interprets the last line of Parting at Morning as meaning that the woman "desires more society than the seaside home affords"! But it is the man who speaks, not the woman. The confusion plainly arises from a misinterpretation of "him" in "straight was a path of gold for him." Berdoe reads this as "lucrative work for the man"! Of course "him" refers to the sun who has "looked over the mountain's rim" . . . Here is an instance of making obscurity where none really exists.

[208:1] Mr. Symons points out that in this extraordinary poem "fifteen stanzas succeed one another without a single full stop or a real break in sense or sound."



II

TROUBLE OF LOVE: THE WOMAN'S

I.—THE LADY IN "THE GLOVE"

Writing of the unnamed heroine of Count Gismond, I said that she had one of the characteristic Browning marks—that of trust in the sincerity of others. Here, in The Glove, we find a figure who resembles her in two respects: she is nameless, and she is a "great" lady—a lady of the Court. But now we perceive, full-blown, the flower of Court-training: dis-trust. In this heroine (for all we are told, as young as the earlier one) distrust has taken such deep root as to produce the very prize-bloom of legend—that famous incident of the glove thrown into the lion's den that her knight may go to fetch it. . . . Does this interpretation of the episode amaze? It is that which our poet gives of it. Distrust, and only that, impelled this lady to the action which, till Browning treated it, had been regarded as a prize-bloom indeed, but the flower not of distrust, but its antithesis—vanity! All the world knows the story; all the world, till this apologist arrived, condemned alone the lady. Like Francis I, each had cried:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity, Not love, set that task to humanity!"

But Browning, who could detect the Court-grown, found excuse for her in that lamentable gardening. The weed had been sown, as it was sown (so much more tragically) for the earlier heroine; and little though we are told of the latter lady's length of years, we may guess her, from this alone, to be older. She had been longer at Court; its lesson had penetrated her being. Day after day she had watched, day after day had listened; then arrived De Lorge with fervent words of love, and now she watched him, hearkened him . . . and more and more misdoubted, hesitated, half-inclined and half-afraid; until at last, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," she gathered all her hesitation, yielding, courage, into one quick impulse—and flung her glove to the lions! With the result which we know—of an instant and a fearless answer to the test; but, as well, an instant confirmation of the worst she had dreaded.

+ + + + +

It was at the Court of King Francis I of France that it happened—the most brilliant Court, perhaps, in history, where the flower of French knighthood bloomed around the gayest, falsest of kings. Romance was in the air, and so was corruption; poets, artists, worked in every corner, and so did intrigue and baseness and lust. Round the King was gathered the Petite Bande, the clique within a clique—"that troop of pretty women who hunted with him, dined with him, talked with him"—led by his powerful mistress, the Duchesse d'Etampes, friend of the Dauphin's neglected wife, the Florentine Catherine de Medicis—foe of that wife's so silently detested rival, "Madame Dame Diane de Poitiers, Grande Seneschale de Normandie."

The two great mistresses had each her darling poet: the Duchesse d'Etampes had chosen Clement Marot, who could turn so gracefully the Psalms of David into verse; La Grande Seneschale, always supreme in taste, patronised Pierre Ronsard—and this was why Pierre sometimes found that when he "talked fine to King Francis," the King would yawn in his face, or whistle and move off to some better amusement.

That was what Francis did one day after the Peace of Cambray had been signed by France and Spain. He had grown weary of leisure:

"Here we've got peace, and aghast I'm Caught thinking war the true pastime. Is there a reason in metre? Give us your speech, master Peter!"

Peter obediently began, but he had hardly spoken half a dozen words before the King whistled aloud: "Let's go and look at our lions!"

They went to the courtyard, and as they went, the throng of courtiers mustered—lords and ladies came as thick as coloured clouds at sunset. Foremost among them (relates Ronsard in Browning's poem) were De Lorge and the lady he was "adoring."

"Oh, what a face! One by fits eyed Her, and the horrible pitside"

—for they were now all sitting above the arena round which the lions' dens were placed. The black Arab keeper was told to stir up the great beast, Bluebeard. A firework was accordingly dropped into the den, whose door had been opened . . . they all waited breathless, with beating hearts . . .

"Then earth in a sudden contortion Gave out to our gaze her abortion. Such a brute! . . . One's whole blood grew curdling and creepy To see the black mane, vast and heapy, The tail in the air stiff and straining, The wide eyes nor waxing nor waning."

And the poet, watching him, thought how perhaps in that eruption of noise and light, the lion had dreamed that his shackles were shivered, and he was free again.

"Ay, that was the open sky o'erhead! And you saw by the flash on his forehead, By the hope in those eyes wide and steady, He was leagues in the desert already."

The King laughed: "Was there a man among them all who would brave Bluebeard?" Not as a challenge did he say this—he knew well that it were almost certain death:

"Once hold you, those jaws want no fresh hold!"

But Francis had scarcely finished speaking when (as all the world knows) a glove fluttered down into the arena and fell close to the lion. It was the glove of De Lorge's lady. They were sitting together, and he had been, as Ronsard could see, "weighing out fine speeches like gold from a balance." . . . He now delayed not an instant, but leaped over the barrier and walked straight up to the glove. The lion never moved; he was still staring (as all of us, with aching hearts, have seen such an one stare from his cage) at the far, unseen, remembered land. . . . De Lorge picked up the glove, calmly; calmly he walked back to the place where he had leaped the barrier before, leaped it again, and (once more, as all the world knows) dashed the glove in the lady's face. Every eye was on them. The King cried out in applause that he would have done the same:

". . . 'Twas mere vanity, Not love, set that task to humanity!"

—and, having the royal word for it, all the lords and ladies turned with loathing from De Lorge's "queen dethroned."

All but Peter Ronsard. He noticed that she retained undisturbed her self-possession amid the Court's mockery.

"As if from no pleasing experiment She rose, yet of pain not much heedful, So long as the process was needful.

* * * * *

She went out 'mid hooting and laughter; Clement Marot stayed; I followed after."

Catching her up, he asked what it had all meant. "I'm a poet," he added; "I must know human nature."

"She told me, 'Too long had I heard Of the deed proved alone by the word: For my love—what De Lorge would not dare! With my scorn—what De Lorge could compare! And the endless descriptions of death He would brave when my lip formed a breath, I must reckon as braved'" . . .

—and for these great gifts, must give in return her love, as love was understood at the Court of King Francis. But to-day, looking at the lion, she had mused on all the dangers affronted to get that beast to that den: his capture by some poor slave whom no lady's love was to reward, no King or Court to applaud, but only the joy of the sport, and the delight of his children's wonder at the glorious creature. . . . And at this very Court, the other day, did not they tell of a page who for mere boyish bravado had dropped his cap over the barrier and leaped across, pretending that he must get it back? Why should she not test De Lorge here and now? For now she was still free; now she could find out what "death for her sake" really meant; otherwise, he might yet break down her doubts, she might yield, still unassured, and only then discover that it did not mean anything at all! So—she had thrown the glove.

"'The blow a glove gives is but weak: Does the mark yet discolour my cheek? But when the heart suffers a blow, Will the pain pass so soon, do you know?'"

* * * * *

De Lorge, indeed, had braved "death for her sake"; but he had then been capable of the public insult. The pain of that, had she loved him, must quite have broken her heart. And not only had he been capable of this, but he had not understood her, he too had thought it "mere vanity." Love then was nowhere—neither in his heart nor in hers. . . . Ronsard, following her with his eyes as she went finally away, saw a youth keeping as close as he dared to the doorway by which she would pass. He was a mere plebeian; naturally his life was not so precious as that of the brilliant De Lorge (thus Ronsard ironically remarks); but there was no doubt what he would have done, "had our brute been Nemean." He would exultantly have accepted the test, have thought it right that he should earn what he so ardently desired.

"And when, shortly after, she carried Her shame from the Court, and they married, To that marriage some happiness, maugre The voice of the Court, I dared augur."

De Lorge led for some time the most brilliant of envied careers, and finally married a beauty who had been the King's mistress for a week. Thenceforth he fetched her gloves very diligently, at the hours when the King desired her presence and his absence—and never did he set off on that errand (looking daggers at her) but Francis took occasion to tell the Court the story of the other glove. And she would smile and say that he brought hers with no murmur.

+ + + + +

Was the first lady right or wrong? She was right to hesitate in accepting De Lorge's "devotion"—not because De Lorge was worthless, but because she did not love him. The King spoke truly when he said that not love set that task to humanity. Neither did mere vanity set it, as we now perceive; but only love could excuse the test which love could never have imposed. De Lorge was worthless—no matter; the lady held no right over him, whatever he was, for she did not love him. And not alone her "test" was the proof of this: her hesitation had already proved it.

But, it may be said, the age was different: women still believed that love could come to them through "wooing." Nowadays, to be sure, so subtle a woman as this would know that her own heart lay passive, and that women's hearts do not lie passive when they love. . . . But I think there were few things about love that women did not know in the days of King Francis! We have only to read the discourses of Marguerite de Valois, sister of the King—we have only to consider the story of Diane de Poitiers, seventeen years older than her Dauphin, to realise that most fully. Women's hearts were the same; and a woman's heart, when it loves truly, will make no test for very pride-in-love's dear sake. It scorns tests—too much scorns them, it may be, and yet I know not. Again it is the Meredithian axiom which arrests me: "He learnt how much we gain who make no claims." Our lovers then may be, should be, prepared to plunge among the lions for our gloves—but we should not be able to send them! And if so, a De Lorge here and there should win a "hand" he merits not, we may reflect that the new, no more than the old, De Lorge will have won the heart which doubts—and, doubting, flings (or keeps) the glove.