Chapter III: Part I: Browning's Heroines (2)

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

"And best (_look at me while I speak to you_)
Best for the crime."

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

". . . this naked crime of ours
May not now be looked over: look it down."

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

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

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

"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead . . ."

--while she, in a frenzy of passion--

". . . stretched myself upon you, hands
To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook
All my locks loose, and covered you with them--
You, Sebald, the same you!"

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

"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
This way? Will you forgive me--be once more
My great queen?"

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

"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!"

So she bids him; so he crowns her--

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

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

"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven--
All's right with the world!"

(_Pippa passes._)

* * * * *

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

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

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

but she, contemptuously--

". . . Oh, that little ragged girl!
She must have rested on the step: we give them
But this one holiday the whole year round.
Did you ever see our silk-mills--their inside?
_There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!_"

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

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

"Go, get your clothes on--dress those shoulders!
. . . Wipe off that paint! I hate you"--

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

"My God, and she is emptied of it now!
Outright now!--how miraculously gone
All of the grace--had she not strange grace once?
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,
No purpose holds the features up together,
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin
Stay in their places: and the very hair
That seemed to have a sort of life in it,
Drops, a dead web!"

Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer--

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

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

"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle
Broke the delicious indolence--all broken!"

Once more that cry breaks from her--

"To me--not of me!"

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

". . . a fawning, cringing lie,
A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"

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

". . . My God!
Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades--
I should have known there was no blood beneath!"

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

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

* * * * *

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

". . . Me!
Me! no, no, Sebald, not yourself--kill me!
Mine is the whole crime. Do but kill me--then
Yourself--then--presently--first hear me speak!
I always meant to kill myself--wait, you!
_Lean on my breast--not as a breast; don't love me
The more because you lean on me, my own
Heart's Sebald!_ There, there, both deaths presently!"

* * * * *

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

"_My_ brain is drowned now--quite drowned: all _I_ feel"

--and so on; while her sole utterance is--

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

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

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

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

III. NOON: PHENE

A group of art-students is assembled at Orcana, opposite the house of Jules, a young French sculptor, who to-day at noon brings home his bride--that second Happiest One, the pale and shrouded beauty whom Pippa had seen alight at Asolo, and had envied for her immaculate girlhood. Very eagerly the youths are awaiting this arrival; there are seven, including Schramm, the pipe-smoking mystic, and Gottlieb, a new-comer to the group, who hears the reason for their excitement, and tender-hearted and imaginative as he is, provides the human element amid the theorising of Schramm, the flippancy of most of the rest, and the fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are awaiting--Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. But they must all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.

At noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he murders the marble in."[52:1] The bride is--"how magnificently pale!" Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2] fourteen years old at most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How magnificently pale"--and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity--pity!" he exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into decent men as they grow older.

Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and loitered about the house as they arrived.

+ + + + +

The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her aspect--

"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you
Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,
If you'll not die: so, never die!"

He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her white face slowly to him. He lays his own upon it for an instant, then draws back to gaze again, while she still looks into his eyes, until he feels that her soul is drawing his to such communion that--

". . . I could
Change into you, beloved! You by me,
And I by you; this is your hand in mine,
And side by side we sit: all's true. Thank God!"

But her silence is unbroken, and now he needs her voice--

"I have spoken: speak you!"

--yet though he thus claims her utterance, his own bliss drives him onward in eager speech. "O my life to come"--the life with her . . . and yet, how shall he work!

"Will my mere fancies live near you, their truth--
The live truth, passing and re-passing me,
Sitting beside me?"

Still she is silent; he cries again "Now speak!"--but in a new access of joy accepts again that silence, for she must see the hiding-place he had contrived for her letters--in the fold of his Psyche's robe, "next her skin"; and now, which of them all will drop out first?

"Ah--this that swam down like a first moonbeam
Into my world!"

In his gladness he turns to her with that first treasure in his hand. She is not looking. . . . But there is nothing strange in that--all the rest is new to her; naturally she is more interested in the new things, and adoringly he watches her as--

". . . Again those eyes complete
Their melancholy survey, sweet and slow,
Of all my room holds; to return and rest
On me, with pity, yet some wonder too . . ."

But pity and wonder are natural in her--is she not an angel from heaven? Yet he would bring her a little closer to the earth she now inhabits; so--

"What gaze you at? Those? Books I told you of;
Let your first word to me rejoice them too."

Eagerly he displays them, but soon reproves himself: he has shown first a tiny Greek volume, and of course Homer's should be the Greek--

"First breathed me from the lips of my Greek girl!"

So out comes the Odyssey, and a flower finds the place; he begins to read . . . but she responds not, again the dark deep eyes are off "upon their search." Well, if the books were not its goal, the statues must be--and _they_ will surely bring the word he increasingly longs for. That of the "Almaign Kaiser," one day to be cast in bronze, is not worth lingering at in its present stage, but this--_this_? She will recognise this of Hippolyta--

"Naked upon her bright Numidian horse,"

for this is an imagined likeness, before he saw her, of herself. But no, it is unrecognised; so they move to the next, which she cannot mistake, for was it not done by her command? She had said he was to carve, against she came, this Greek, "feasting in Athens, as our fashion was," and she had given him many details, and he had laboured ardently to express her thought. . . . But still no word from her--no least, least word; and, tenderly, at last he reproaches her--

"But you must say a 'well' to that--say 'well'!"

--for alarm is growing in him, though he strives to think it only fantasy; she gazes too like his marble, she is too like marble in her silence--marble is indeed to him his "very life's-stuff," but now he has found "the real flesh Phene . . ." and as he rhapsodises a while, hardly able to sever this breathing vision from the wonders of his glowing stone, he turns to her afresh and beholds her whiter than before, her eyes more wide and dark, and the first fear seizes him again--

"Ah, you will die--I knew that you would die!"--

and after that, there falls a long silence.

Then she speaks. "Now the end's coming"--that is what she says for her first bridal words.

"Now the end's coming: to be sure it must
Have ended some time!"

--and while he listens in the silence dreadfully transferred from her to him, the tale of Lutwyche's revenge is told at last.

We know it before Phene speaks, for Lutwyche, telling Gottlieb, has told us; but Jules must glean it from her puzzled, broken utterance, filled with allusions that mean nothing until semi-comprehension comes through the sighs of tortured soul and heart from her who still is, as it were, in a trance. And this dream-like state causes her, now and then, to say the wrong words--the words _he_ spoke--instead of those which had "cost such pains to learn . . ."

This is the story she tries to tell. Lutwyche had hated Jules for long. There were many reasons, but the chief was that reported judgment of the "crowd of us," as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Greatly, and above all else, had Jules despised their dissoluteness: how could they be other than the poor devils they were, with those debasing habits which they cherished? "He could never," had said Lutwyche to Gottlieb, "be supercilious enough on that matter. . . . _He_ was not to wallow in the mire: _he_ would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with statuary." So Lutwyche had resolved that precisely "on that matter" should his malice concentrate. He happened to hear of a young Greek girl at Malamocco, "white and quiet as an apparition, and fourteen years old at farthest." She was said to be a daughter of the "hag Natalia"--said, that is, by the hag herself to be so, but Natalia was, in plain words, a procuress. "We selected," said Lutwyche, "this girl as the heroine of our jest"; and he and his gang set to work at once. Jules received, first, a mysterious perfumed letter from somebody who had seen his work at the Academy and profoundly admired it: she would make herself known to him ere long. . . . "Paolina, my little friend of the Fenice," who could transcribe divinely, had copied this letter--"the first moonbeam!"--for Lutwyche; and she copied many more for him, the letters which Psyche, at the studio, was to keep in the fold of her robe.

In his very earliest answer, Jules had proposed marriage to the unknown writer. . . . How they had laughed! But Gottlieb, hearing, could not laugh. "I say," cried he, "you wipe off the very dew of his youth." Schramm, however, had had his pipe forcibly taken from his mouth, and then had pronounced that "nothing worth keeping is ever lost in this world"; so, Gottlieb silenced, Lutwyche went on with the story. The letters had gone to Jules, and the answers had come from him, two, three times a day; Lutwyche himself had concocted nearly all the mysterious lady's, which had said she was in thrall to relatives, that secrecy must be observed--in short, that Jules must wed her on trust, and only speak to her when they were indissolubly united.

But that, when accomplished, was not the whole of Lutwyche's revenge, nor of his activity. To get the full savour of his malice, the victim must be undeceived in such a way that there could be no mistaking the hand which had struck; and this could best be achieved by writing a copy of verses which should reveal their author at the end. Nor should these be given Phene to hand Jules, for so Lutwyche would lose the delicious actual instant of the revelation. No; they should be taught her, line by line and word by word (since she could not read), and taught her by the hag Natalia, that not a subtle pang be spared the "strutting stone-squarer." Thus, listening beneath the window, Lutwyche could enjoy each word, each moan, and when Jules should burst out on them in a fury (but he must not be suffered to hurt his bride: she was too valuable a model), they would all declare, with one voice, that this was their revenge for his insults, they would shout their great shout of laughter; and, next day, Jules would depart alone--"oh, alone indubitably!"--for Rome and Florence, and they would be quits with him and his "coxcombry."

* * * * *

That is the plan, but Phene does not know it. All she knows is that Natalia said that harm would come unless she spoke their lesson to the end. Yet, despite this threat, when Jules has fallen silent in his terror at her "whitening cheek and still dilating eyes," she feels at first that that foolish speech need not be spoken. She has forgotten half of it; she does not care now for Natalia or any of them; above all, she wants to stay where Jules' voice has lifted her, by just letting it go on. "But can it?" she asks piteously--for with that transferring of silence a change had come; the music once let fall, even Jules does not seem able to take up its life again--"no, or you would!" . . . So trust, we see, is born in her: if Jules could do what she desires, Phene knows he would. But since he cannot, they'll stay as they are--"above the world."

"Oh, you--what are you?" cries the child, who never till to-day has heard such words or seen such looks as his. But she has heard other words, seen other looks--

"The same smile girls like me are used to bear,
But never men, men cannot stoop so low . . ."

Yet, watching those friends of Jules who came with the lesson she was to learn, the strangest thing of all had been to see how, speaking of him, they had used _that_ smile--

"But still Natalia said they were your friends,
And they assented though they smiled the more,
And all came round me--that thin Englishman
With light lank hair, seemed leader of the rest;
He held a paper"

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

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

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

But even as she gazes, she sees that the eyes "are altering--altered!" She knows not why, she never has understood this sudden, wondrous happening of her marriage, but the eyes to which she trusts are altering--altered--and what can she do? . . . With heartrending pathos, what she does is to clutch at his words to her, the music which had lifted her, and now perhaps will lift him too by its mere sound. "I love you, love" . . . but what does love mean? She knows not, and her "music" is but ignorant echo; if she did know, she could prevent this change, but the change is not prevented, so it cannot have been just the words--it must have been in the tone that his power lay to lift her, and _that_ she cannot find, not understanding. So in the desperate need to see and hear him as he was at first, she turns to her last device--

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

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

"I am a painter who cannot paint;
In my life, a devil rather than saint;
In my brain, as poor a creature too;
No end to all I cannot do!
Yet do one thing at least I can--
Love a man or hate a man
Supremely: thus my lore began . . ."

The timid voice goes on, saying the lines by rote as Phene had learned them--and hard indeed they must have been to learn! For, as Lutwyche had told his friends, it must be "something slow, involved, and mystical," it must hold Jules long in doubt, and lure him on until at innermost--

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

Phene has said her lesson, but it too has failed. He still is changed. He is not even thinking of her as she ceases. The name upon his lips is Lutwyche, not her own. He mutters of "Lutwyche" and "all of them," and "Venice"; yes, them he will meet at Venice, and it will be their turn. But with that word--"meet"--he remembers her; he speaks to her--

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

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

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

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

"Give her but a least excuse to love me!
When--where--
How--can this arm establish her above me,
If fortune fixed her as my lady there,
There already, to eternally reprove me?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Look at the woman here with the new soul . . .
This new soul is mine!"

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

"Scatter all this, my Phene--this mad dream!
What's the whole world except our love, my own!"

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

"Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!

* * * * *

And you are ever by me while I gaze,
--Are in my arms as now--as now--as now!
Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!
Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!"

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

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

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

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

IV. EVENING; NIGHT: THE ENDING OF THE DAY

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

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

+ + + + +

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

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

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

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

"That, having lived thus long, there seemed
No need the king should ever die."

Her clear note penetrates to the spot where Luigi and his mother are talking, as so often before. He is bound this night for Vienna, there to kill the hated Emperor of Austria, who holds his Italy in thrall; for Luigi is a Carbonarist, and has been chosen for this "lesser task" by his leaders. His mother is urging him not to go. First she had tried the direct appeal, but this had failed; then argument, but this failed too; and as she stood at end of her own resources, the one hope that remained was her son's delight in living--that sense of the beauty and glory of the world which was so strong in him that he felt

"God must be glad one loves his world so much."

This joy breaks out at each turn of the mother's discourse. While Luigi is striving to make plain to her the "grounds for killing," he thinks to hear the cuckoo, and forgets all his array of facts; for April and June are coming! The mother seizes at once on this, and joins to it a still more powerful persuasion. In June, not only summer's loveliness, but Chiara, the girl he is to marry, is coming: she who gazes at the stars as he does--and how her blue eyes lift to them

"As if life were one long and sweet surprise!"

In June she comes--and with the reiteration, Luigi falters, for he recollects that in this June they were to see together "the Titian at Treviso." . . . His mother has almost won, when a "low noise" outside, which Luigi has first mistaken for the cuckoo, next for the renowned echo in the turret . . . that low noise is heard again--"the voice of Pippa, singing."

And, listening to the song which tells what kings were in the morning of the world, Luigi cries--

"No need that sort of king should ever die!"

And she begins again--

"Among the rocks his city was:
Before his palace, in the sun,
He sat to see his people pass,
And judge them every one"

--and as she tells the manner of his judging, Luigi again exclaims:

"That king should still judge, sitting in the sun!"

But the song goes on--

"His councillors, to left and right,
Looked anxious up--but no surprise
Disturbed the king's old smiling eyes,
Where the very blue had turned to white";

and those eyes kept their tranquillity even when, as legend tells, a Python one day "scared the breathless city," but coming, "with forked tongue and eyes on flame," to where the king sat, and seeing the sweet venerable goodness of him, did not dare

"Approach that threshold in the sun,
Assault the old king smiling there . . .
Such grace had kings when the world begun!"

"And such grace have they, now that the world ends!"

cries Luigi bitterly, for at Vienna the Python _is_ the king, and brave men lurk in corners "lest they fall his prey." . . . He hesitates no more--

"'Tis God's voice calls: how could I stay? Farewell!"

and rushes from the turret, resolute for Vienna.

By going he escapes the police, for it had been decided that if he stayed at Asolo that night he should be arrested at once. He still may lose his life, for he will try to kill the Emperor; but he will then have been true to his deepest convictions--and thus Pippa's passing, Pippa's song, have for the third time helped a soul to know itself.

+ + + + +

Unwitting as before, she goes on to the house near the Duomo Santa Maria, where the Fourth Happiest One, the Monsignor of her final choice, "that holy and beloved priest," is to stay to-night. And now, for the first time, we are to see her, though only for the barest instant, come into actual contact with some fellow-creatures.

Four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the Santa Maria. We hear them talk with one another before Pippa reaches them: they are playing a "wishing game," originated by one who, watching the swallows fly towards Venice, yearns for their wings. She is not long from the country; her dreams are still of new milk and apples, and

". . . the farm among
The cherry-orchards, and how April snowed
White blossom on her as she ran."

So says one of her comrades scornfully, and tells her how of course the home-folk have been careful to blot out all memories of one who has come to the town to lead the life _she_ leads. She may be sure the old people have rubbed out the mark showing how tall she was on the door, and have

"Twisted her starling's neck, broken his cage,
Made a dung-hill of her garden!"

She acquiesces mournfully, but loses herself again in memories: of her fig-tree that curled out of the cottage wall--

"They called it mine, I have forgotten why"

--and the noise the wasps made, eating the long papers that were strung there to keep off birds in fruit-time. . . . As she murmurs thus to herself, her mouth twitches, and the same girl who had laughed before, laughs now again: "Would I be such a fool!"--and tells _her_ wish. The country-goose wants milk and apples, and another girl could think of nothing better than to wish "the sunset would finish"; but Zanze has a real desire, something worth talking about! It is that somebody she knows, somebody "greyer and older than her grandfather," would give her the same treat he gave last week--

"Feeding me on his knee with fig-peckers,
Lampreys and red Breganze wine;"

while she had stained her fingers red by

"Dipping them in the wine to write bad words with
On the bright table: how he laughed!"

And as she recalls that night, she sees a burnished beetle on the ground before her, sparkling along the dust as it makes its slow way to a tuft of maize, and puts out her foot and kills it. The country girl recalls a superstition connected with these bright beetles--that if one was killed, the sun, "his friend up there," would not shine for two days. They said it in her country "when she was young"; and one of the others scoffs at the phrase, but looking at her, exclaims that indeed she _is_ no longer young: how thin her plump arms have got--does Cecco beat her still? But Cecco doesn't matter, nor the loss of her young freshness, so long as she keeps her "curious hair"--

"I wish they'd find a way to dye our hair
Your colour . . .
. . . The men say they are sick of black."

A girl who now speaks for the first and last time retorts upon this one that very likely "the men" are sick of _her_ hair, and does she pretend that _she_ has tasted lampreys and ortolans . . . but in the midst of this new speaker's railing, the girl with wine-stained fingers exclaims--

"Why there! Is not that Pippa
We are to talk to, under the window--quick-- . . ."

The country girl thinks that if it were Pippa, she would be singing, as they had been told.

"Oh, you sing first," retorts the other--

"Then if she listens and comes close . . . I'll tell you,
Sing that song the young English noble made
Who took you for the purest of the pure,
And meant to leave the world for you--what fun!"

So, not the country girl, but she whose black hair discontents her, sings, and Pippa "listens and comes close," for the song has words as sweet as any of her own . . . and the red-fingered one calls to her to come closer still, they won't eat her--why, she seems to be "the very person the great rich handsome Englishman has fallen so violently in love with." She shall hear all about it; and on the steps of the church Pippa is told by this creature, Zanze, how a foreigner, "with blue eyes and thick rings of raw silk-coloured hair," had gone to the mills at Asolo a month ago and fallen in love with Pippa. Pippa, however, will not keep him in love with her, unless she takes more care of her personal appearance--she must "pare her nails pearlwise," and buy shoes "less like canoes" for her small feet; _then_ she may hope to feast upon lampreys and drink Breganze, as Zanze does. . . . And now Pippa sings one of her songs, and it might have been chosen expressly to please the country girl. It begins--

"Overhead the tree-tops meet,
Flowers and grass spring 'neath our feet;
There was nought above me, and nought below
My childhood had not learned to know"

--a little story of an innocent girl's way of making out for herself only the sweetness of the world, the majesty of the heavens . . . and just when all seemed on the verge of growing clear, and out of the "soft fifty changes" of the moon, "no unfamiliar face" could look, the sweet life was cut short--

"Suddenly God took me . . ."

As Pippa sang those words, she passed on. She had heard enough of the four girls' talk, even were they not now interrupted by a sudden clatter inside Monsignor's house--a sound of calling, of quick heavy feet, of cries and the flinging down of a man, and then a noise as of dragging a bound prisoner out. . . . Monsignor appeared for an instant at the window as she, coming from the Duomo, passed his house. His aspect disappointed her--

"No mere mortal has a right
To carry that exalted air;
Best people are not angels quite . . ."

and with that one look at him, she passed on to Asolo.

+ + + + +

What was the noise that broke out as Pippa finished her song? The loud call which came first was Monsignor's, summoning his guards from an outer chamber to gag and bind his steward. This steward had been supping alone with the Bishop, who had come not only (as Pippa said in the morning, choosing him as the ideal person for her pretending) "to bless the home of his dead brother," but also to take possession of that brother's estate. . . . He knows the steward to be a rascal; but he himself, the "holy and beloved priest," is a good deal of a rascal too; he has connived at his brother's death, and had connived at his mode of life. Now the steward is preparing to blackmail the Bishop, as he had blackmailed the Bishop's brother. Both are aware that the dead man had a child; Monsignor believes that this child was murdered by the steward at the instigation of a younger brother, who wished to succeed to the estates. He urges the man to confess; otherwise he shall be arrested by Monsignor's people who are in the outer room. "Did you throttle or stab my brother's infant--come now?"[77:1]

But the steward has yet another card to play; moreover, so many enemies now surround him that his life is probably forfeited anyhow, so he will tell the truth. And the truth is that the child was not murdered by him or anyone else. The child--the girl--is close at hand; he sees her every day, he saw her this morning. Now, shall he make away with her for Monsignor? Not "the stupid obvious sort of killing . . . of course there is to be no killing; but at Rome the courtesans perish off every three years, and he can entice her thither, has begun operations already"--making use of a certain Bluphocks, an Englishman. Monsignor will not _formally_ assent, of course . . . but will he give the steward time to cross the Alps? The girl is "but a little black-eyed pretty singing Felippa,[77:2] gay silk-winding girl"; some women are to pass off Bluphocks as a somebody, and once Pippa entangled--it will be best accomplished through her singing. . . . Well, Monsignor has listened; Monsignor conceives--is it a bargain?

It was precisely as the steward asked that question that Pippa finished her song of a maiden's lesson and its ending, and Monsignor leaped up and shouted to his guards. . . . The singing by which "little black-eyed pretty Felippa" was to be entangled had rescued instead the soul of her Fourth Happiest One from this deep infamy.

+ + + + +

The great Day is over. Pippa, back in her room, finds horribly uppermost among her memories the talk of those lamentable four girls. It had spoilt the sweetness of her day; it spoils now, for a while, her own sweetness. Her comments on it have none of the wayward charm of her morning fancies, for Pippa is very human--she can envy and decry, swinging loose from the central steadiness of her nature like many another of us, obsessed like her by some vile happening of the hours. Just as we might find our whole remembrance of a festival thus overlaid by malice and ugliness, _she_ finds it; she can only think "how pert that girl was," and how glad she is not to be like her. Yet, all the same, she does not see why she should not have been told who it was that "passed that jest upon her" of the Englishman in love--no foreigner had come to the mills that she recollects. . . . And perhaps, after all, if Luca raises the wage, she may be able to buy shoes next year, and not look any worse than Zanze.

But gradually the atmosphere of her mind seems restored; the fogs of envy and curiosity begin to clear off--she goes over the game of make-believe, how she was in turn each of the Four . . . but no! the miasma is still in the air, and she's "tired of fooling," and New Year's Day is over, and ill or well, _she_ must be content. . . . Even her lily's asleep, but she will wake it up, and show it the friend she has plucked for it--the flower she gathered as she passed the house on the hill. . . . Alas! even the flower seems infected. She compares it, "this pampered thing," this double hearts-ease of the garden, with the wild growth, and once more Zanze comes to mind--isn't she like the pampered blossom? And if there were a king of the flowers, "and a girl-show held in his bowers," which would he like best, the Zanze or the Pippa? . . . No: nothing will conquer her dejection; fancies will not do, awakening sleepy lilies will not do--

"Oh what a drear dark close to my poor day!
How could that red sun drop in that black cloud?"

and despairingly she accepts the one truth that seems to confront her: "Day's turn is over, now arrives the night's;" the larks and thrushes and blackbirds have had their hour; owls and bats and such-like things rule now . . . and listlessly she begins to undress herself. She is so alone; she has nothing but fancies to play with--this morning's, for instance, of being anyone she liked. She had played her game, had kept it up loyally with herself all day--what was the good?

"Now, one thing I should like to really know:
How near I ever might approach all those
I only fancied being, this long day:
Approach, I mean, so as to touch them, so
As to . . . in some way . . . move them--if you please,
Do good or evil to them some slight way.
For instance, if I wind
Silk to-morrow, my silk may bind
And border Ottima's cloak's hem . . ."

Sitting on her bed, undressed, the solitary child thus broods. No nearer than that can she get--her silk might border Ottima's cloak's hem. . . . But she cannot endure this dejection: back to her centre of gaiety, trust, and courage Pippa must somehow swing--and how shall she achieve it? There floats into her memory the hymn which she had murmured in the morning--

"All service ranks the same with God."

But even this can help her only a little--

"True in some sense or other, I suppose . . ."

She lies down; she can pray no more than that; the hymn no doubt is right, "some way or other," and with its message thus almost mocking in her ears, she falls asleep--the lonely little girl who has saved four souls to-day, and does not know, will never know; but will be again, to-morrow perhaps, when that sad talk on the church steps is faded from her memory, the gay, brave, trustful spirit who, by merely being that, had sung her Four Happiest Ones up toward "God in his heaven."

FOOTNOTES:

[24:1] Asolo, in the Trevisan, is a very picturesque mediæval fortified town, the ancient Acelum. It lies at the foot of a hill which is surrounded by the ruins of an old castle; before it stretches the great plain of the rivers Brenta and Piave, where Treviso, Vicenza, and Padua may be clearly recognised. The Alps encircle it, and in the distance rise the Euganean Hills. Venice can be discerned on the extreme eastern horizon, which ends in the blue line of the Adriatic. The village of Asolo is surrounded by a wall with mediæval turrets.--BERDOE, _Browning Cyclopædia_, p. 50.

[26:1] Another line that I should like to omit, for the following words, wholly in character, say all that the ugly ones have boomed at us so incredibly. But here the rhyme-scheme provides a sort of unpardonable excuse.

[49:1] Dr. Berdoe and Mrs. Orr.

[52:1] All the talk between the students is in prose.

[52:2] The long shoaly island in the Lagoon, immediately opposite Venice.

[64:1] This song refers to Catherine of Cornaro, the last Queen of Cyprus, who came to her castle at Asolo when forced to resign her kingdom to the Venetians in 1489. "She lived for her people's welfare, and won their love by her goodness and grace."

[68:1] "The name means _Blue-Fox_, and is a skit on the _Edinburgh Review_, which is bound in blue and fox" (Dr. Furnivall).

[77:1] The dialogue between Monsignor and the steward is in prose.