Life of Robert Browning [48]
The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing.
Once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably,
as when he cries --
"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 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! Also herself said
I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?
Let me see for myself if it be so!"
Than the poignant pathos and beauty of "Pompilia", there is nothing
more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last
we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakespeare's Arthur.
It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child.
How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of
Guido's defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi's closing words,
culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, "O great, just, good God!
miserable me!" -- how marvellously comes upon the reader
the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife --
"I am just seventeen years and five months old,
And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
'Tis writ so in the church's register,
Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
At length, so many names for one poor child,
-- Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini -- laughable!"
Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight
which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than
women's own invision of themselves -- Robert Browning and George Meredith,
but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts
of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed "Pompilia".
The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard,
in "The Ordeal of Richard Feveral", is, it is true, within the highest reach
of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance
and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.
And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness.
Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender
is the poetry of "Pompilia" --
"Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,
-- Better than born, baptised and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
HE WAS TOO YOUNG TO SMILE AND SAVE HIMSELF ----"
or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses
not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor,
dilapidated Virgin, "at our street-corner in a lonely niche,"
with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off:
or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia relates
why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished "no old name
for sorrow's sake," so chose the latest addition to the saints,
elected only twenty-five years before --
"So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time, -- see my own five saints!"
or these --
"Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
-- Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine ----"
once more --
"One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying. . . .
Now it is over, and no danger more . . .
To me at least was never evening yet
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past ----"
Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of
the first "thrill of dawn's suffusion through her dark,"
the "light of the unborn face sent long before:" or those unique lines
of the starved soul's Spring