POMPILIA
IN "THE RING AND THE BOOK"
I said, in writing of Balaustion: "Nearly always, for man's homage, woman must in some sort be victim: she must suffer ere he can adore."
I should have said that this has been so: for the tendency to-day is to demonstrate rather the power than the weakness of woman. True that in the "victim," that weakness was usually shown to be the very source of that power: through her suffering not only she, but they who stood around and saw the anguish, were made perfect. That this theory of the outcome of suffering is an eternal verity I am not desirous to deny; but I do deplore that, in literature, women should be made so disproportionately its exemplars; and I deplore it not for feminist reasons alone. Once we regard suffering in this light of a supreme uplifting influence, we turn, as it were, our weapons against ourselves—we exclaim that men too suffer in this world and display the highest powers of endurance: why, then, do they so frequently, in their imaginative works, present themselves as makers of women's woes? For women make men suffer often; yet how relatively seldom men show this! Thus, paradoxically enough, we may come to declare that it is to themselves that men are harsh, and to us generous. "Chivalry from women!"—how would that sound as a war-cry?
Not all in jest do I so speak, though such recognition of male generosity leaves existent a certain sense of weariness which assails me—and if me, then probably many another—when I find myself reading of the immemorial "victim." It is this which makes Balaustion supreme for my delight. There is a woman with every noble attribute of womanhood at its highest, who suffers at no hands but those of the Great Fates, as one might say—the fates who rule the destiny of nations. . . . We turn now to her direct antithesis in this regard of suffering—we turn to Pompilia, victim first of the mediocre, ignorant, small-souled, then of the very devil of malignant baseness; such a victim, moreover, first and last, for the paltriest of motives—money. And money in no large, imaginative sense, but in the very lowest terms in which it could be at all conceived as a theme for tragedy. A dowry, and a tiny one: this created "that old woe" which "steps on the stage" again for us in The Ring and the Book.
"Another day that finds her living yet,
Little Pompilia, with the patient brow
And lamentable smile on those poor lips,
And, under the white hospital-array,
A flower-like body, to frighten at a bruise
You'd think, yet now, stabbed through and through again,
Alive i' the ruins. 'Tis a miracle.
It seems that when her husband struck her first,
She prayed Madonna just that she might live
So long as to confess and be absolved;
And whether it was that, all her sad life long
Never before successful in a prayer,
This prayer rose with authority too dread—
Or whether because earth was hell to her,
By compensation when the blackness broke,
She got one glimpse of quiet and the cool blue,
To show her for a moment such things were,"
—the prayer was granted her.
So, musing on the murder of the Countess Franceschini by her husband; and her four days' survival of her wounds, does one half of Rome express itself—"The Other Half" in contrast to the earliest commentator on the crime: "Half-Rome." This Other-Half is wholly sympathetic to the seventeen-yeared child who lies in the hospital-ward at St. Anna's. "Why was she made to learn what Guido Franceschini's heart could hold?" demands the imagined spokesman; and, summing up, he exclaims:
"Who did it shall account to Christ—
Having no pity on the harmless life
And gentle face and girlish form he found,
And thus flings back. Go practise if you please
With men and women. Leave a child alone
For Christ's particular love's sake!"
Then, burning with pity and indignation, he proceeds to tell the story of Pompilia as he sees it, feels it—and as Browning, in the issue, makes us see and feel it too.
In The Ring and the Book, Browning tells us this story—this "pure crude fact" (for fact it actually is)—ten times over, through nine different persons, Guido Franceschini, the husband, speaking twice. Stated thus baldly, the plan may sound almost absurd, and the prospect of reading the work appear a tedious one; but once begin it, and neither impression survives for a moment. Each telling is at once the same and new—for in each the speaker's point of view is altered. We get, first of all, Browning's own summary of the "pure crude fact"; then the appearance of that fact to:
1. Half-Rome, antagonistic to Pompilia.
2. The Other Half, sympathetic to her.
3. "Tertium Quid," neutral.
4. Count Guido Franceschini, at his trial.
5. Giuseppe Caponsacchi (the priest with whom Pompilia fled), at the trial.
6. Pompilia, on her death-bed.
7. Count Guido's counsel, preparing his speech for the defence.
8. The Public Prosecutor's speech.
9. The Pope, considering his decision on Guido's appeal to him after the trial.
10. Guido, at the last interview with his spiritual advisers before execution.
Only the speeches of the two lawyers are wholly tedious; the rest of the survey is absorbing. Not a point which can be urged on any side is omitted, as that side presents itself; yet in the event, as I have said, one overmastering effect stands forth—the utter loveliness and purity of Pompilia. "She is the heroine," says Mr. Arthur Symons,[126:1] "as neither Guido nor Caponsacchi can be called the hero. . . . With hardly [any] consciousness of herself, [she] makes and unmakes the lives and characters of those about her"; and in this way he compares her story with Pippa's: "the mere passing of an innocent child."
And so, here, have we not indeed the victim? But though I spoke of weariness, I must take back the words; for here too we have indeed the beauty and the glory of suffering, and here the beauty and the glory of manhood. Guido, like all evil things, is Nothingness: he serves but to show forth what purity and love, in Pompilia, could be; what bravery and love, in Caponsacchi, the "warrior-priest," could do. This girl has not the Browning-mark of gaiety, but she has both the others—this "lady young, tall, beautiful, strange, and sad," who answered without fear the call of the unborn life within her, and trusted without question "the appointed man."
The "pure crude fact," detailed by Browning, was found in the authentic legal documents bound together in an old, square, yellow parchment-covered volume, picked up by him, "one day struck fierce 'mid many a day struck calm," on a stall in the Piazza San Lorenzo of Florence. He bought the pamphlet for eightpence, and it gave to him and us the great, unique achievement of this wonderful poem:
"Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore,
Prime nature with an added artistry."
Pompilia, called Comparini, was in reality "nobody's child." This, which at first sight may seem of minor importance to the issue, is actually at the heart of all; for, as I have said, it was the question of her dowry which set the entire drama in motion. The old Comparini couple, childless, of mediocre class and fortunes, had through silly extravagance run into debt, and in 1679 were hard pressed by creditors. They could not draw on their capital, for it was tied up in favour of the legal heir, an unknown cousin. But if they had a child, that disability would be removed. Violante Comparini, seeing this, resolved upon a plan. She bought beforehand for a small sum the expected baby of a disreputable woman, giving herself out to her husband, Pietro, and their friends as almost miraculously pregnant—for she was past fifty. In due time she became the apparent mother of a girl, Pompilia. This girl was married at thirteen to Count Guido Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman, fifty years old, of Arezzo. He married her for her reported dowry, and she was sold to him for the sake of his rank. Both parties to the bargain found themselves deceived (Pompilia was, of course, a mere chattel in the business), for there was no dowry, and Guido, though he had the rank, had none of the appurtenances thereof which had dazzled the fancy of Violante. Pietro too was tricked, and the marriage carried through against his will. The old couple, reduced to destitution by extracted payment of a part of the dowry, were taken to the miserable Franceschini castle at Arezzo, and there lived wretchedly, in every sense, for a while; but soon fled back to Rome, leaving the girl-wife behind to aggravated woes. About three years afterwards she also fled, intending to rejoin the Comparini at Rome. She was about to become a mother. The organiser and companion of her flight was a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, who was a canon at Arezzo. Guido followed them, caught them at Castelnuovo, a village on the outskirts of Rome, and caused both to be arrested. They were confined in the "New Prisons" at Rome, and tried for adultery. The result was a compromise—they were pronounced guilty, but a merely nominal punishment ("the jocular piece of punishment," as the young priest called it) was inflicted on each. Pompilia was relegated for a time to a convent; Caponsacchi was banished for three years to Civita Vecchia. As the time for Pompilia's confinement drew near, she was permitted to go to her reputed parents' home, which was a villa just outside the walls of the city. A few months after her removal there, she became the mother of a son, whom the old people quickly removed to a place of concealment and safety. A fortnight later—on the second day of the New Year—Count Guido, with four hired assassins, came to the villa, and all three occupants were killed: Pietro and Violante Comparini, and Pompilia his wife. For these murders, Guido and his hirelings were hanged at Rome on February 22, 1698.
But now we must return upon our steps, if we would know "the truth of this."
When the old Comparini reached Rome, after their flight from Arezzo, the Pope had just proclaimed jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution for any sin was to be had for the asking—atonement, however, necessarily preceding. Violante, remorseful for the sacrifice of their darling, and regarding the woe as retribution for her original lie about the birth, resolved to confess; but since absolution was granted only if atonement preceded it, she must be ready to restore to the rightful heir that which her pretended motherhood had taken from him. She therefore confessed to Pietro first, and he instantly seized the occasion for revenge on Guido, though that was not (or at any rate, according to the Other Half-Rome, may not have been) his only motive.
"What? All that used to be, may be again?
* * * * *
What, the girl's dowry never was the girl's,
And unpaid yet, is never now to pay?
Then the girl's self, my pale Pompilia child
That used to be my own with her great eyes—
Will she come back, with nothing changed at all?"
He repudiated Pompilia publicly, and with her, of course, all claims from her husband. Taken into Court, the case (also bound up in the square yellow book) was, after appeals and counter-appeals, left undecided.
It was this which loosed all Guido's fury on Pompilia. He had already learned to hate her for her shrinking from him; now, while he still controlled her person, and wreaked the vilest cruelties and basenesses upon it, he at the same time resolved to rid himself of her in any fashion whatsoever which should leave him still a legal claimant to the disputed dowry.[130:1] There was only one way thus to rid himself, and that was to prove her guilty of adultery. He concentrated on it. First, his brother, the young Canon Girolamo, who lived at the castle, was incited to pursue her with vile solicitations. She fled to the Archbishop of Arezzo and implored his succour. He gave none. Then she went to the Governor: he also "pushed her back." She sought out a poor friar, and confessed her "despair in God"; he promised to write to her parents for her, but afterwards flinched, and did nothing. . . . Guido's plan was nevertheless hanging fire; a supplementary system of persecution must be set up. She was hourly accused of "looking love-lures at theatre and church, in walk, at window"; but this, in the apathy which was descending on her, she baffled by "a new game of giving up the game."[131:1] She abandoned theatre, church, walk, and window; she "confounded him with her gentleness and worth," he "saw the same stone strength of white despair":
"How does it differ in aught, save degree,
From the terrible patience of God?"
—and more and more he hated her.
But at last, at the theatre one night, Pompilia—
"Brought there I knew not why, but now know well"[131:2]
—saw, for the first time, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, "the young frank personable priest"[131:3]—and seeing him as rapt he gazed at her, felt
". . . Had there been a man like that,
To lift me with his strength out of all strife
Into the calm! . . .
Suppose that man had been instead of this?"
* * * * *
Caponsacchi had hitherto been very much "the courtly spiritual Cupid" that Browning calls him. His family, the oldest in Arezzo and once the greatest, had wide interest in the Church, and he had always known that he was to be a priest. But when the time came for "just a vow to read!" he stopped awestruck. Could he keep such a promise? He knew himself too weak. But the Bishop smiled. There were two ways of taking that vow, and a man like Caponsacchi, with "that superior gift of making madrigals," need not choose the harder one.
"Renounce the world? Nay, keep and give it us!"
He was good enough for that, thought Caponsacchi, and in this spirit he took the vows. He did his formal duties, and was equally diligent "at his post where beauty and fashion rule"—a fribble and a coxcomb, in short, as he described himself to the judges at the murder-trial. . . . After three or four years of this, he found himself, "in prosecution of his calling," at the theatre one night with fat little Canon Conti, a kinsman of the Franceschini. He was in the mood proper enough for the place, amused or no . . .
"When I saw enter, stand, and seat herself
A lady young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad"
—and it was (he remembered) like seeing a burden carried to the Altar in his church one day, while he "got yawningly through Matin-Song." The burden was unpacked, and left—
"Lofty and lone: and lo, when next I looked
There was the Rafael!"
Fat little Conti noticed his rapt gaze, and exclaimed that he would make the lady respond to it. He tossed a paper of comfits into her lap; she turned,
"Looked our way, smiled the beautiful sad strange smile;"
and thought the thought that we have learned—for instinctively and surely she felt that whoever had thrown the comfits, it was not "that man":
". . . Silent, grave,
Solemn almost, he saw me, as I saw him."
Conti told Caponsacchi who she was, and warned him to look away; but promised to take him to the castle if he could. At Vespers, next day, Caponsacchi heard from Conti that the husband had seen that gaze. He would not signify, but there was Pompilia:
"Spare her, because he beats her as it is,
She's breaking her heart quite fast enough."
It was the turning-point in Caponsacchi's life. He had no thought of pursuing her; wholly the contrary was his impulse—he felt that he must leave Arezzo. All that hitherto had charmed him there was done with—the social successes, the intrigue, song-making; and his patron was already displeased. These things were what he was there to do, and he was going to church instead! "Are you turning Molinist?" the patron asked. "I answered quick" (says Caponsacchi in his narrative)
"Sir, what if I turned Christian?"
—and at once announced his resolve to go to Rome as soon as Lent was over. One evening, before he went, he was sitting thinking how his life "had shaken under him"; and
"Thinking moreover . . . oh, thinking, if you like,
How utterly dissociated was I
A priest and celibate, from the sad strange wife
Of Guido . . .
. . . I had a whole store of strengths
Eating into my heart, which craved employ,
And she, perhaps, need of a finger's help—
And yet there was no way in the wide world
To stretch out mine."
Her smile kept glowing out of the devotional book he was trying to read, and he sat thus—when suddenly there came a tap at the door, and on his summons, there glided in "a masked muffled mystery," who laid a letter on the open book, and stood back demurely waiting.
It was Margherita, the "kind of maid" of Count Guido, and the letter purported to be from Pompilia, offering her love. Caponsacchi saw through the trick at once: the letter was written by Guido. He answered it in such a way that it would save her from all anger, and at the same time infuriate the "jealous miscreant" who had written it:
". . . What made you—may one ask?—
Marry your hideous husband?"
But henceforth such letters came thick and fast. Caponsacchi was met in the street, signed to in church; slips were found in his prayer-book, they dropped from the window if he passed. . . . At length there arrived a note in a different manner. This warned him not to come, to avoid the window for his life. At once he answered that the street was free—he should go to the window if he chose, and he would go that evening at the Ave. His conviction was that he should find the husband there, not the wife—for though he had seen through the trick, it did not occur to him that it was more than a device of jealousy to trap them, already suspected after that mutual gaze at the theatre. What it really was, he never guessed at all.
Meanwhile—turning now to Pompilia's dying speech to the nuns who nursed her—the companion persecution had been going on at the castle. Day after day, Margherita had dinned the name of Caponsacchi into the wife's ears. How he loved her, what a paragon he was, how little she owed fidelity to the Count who used her, Margherita, as his pastime—ought she not at least to see the priest and warn him, if nothing more? Guido might kill him! Here was a letter from him; and she began to impart it:
"I know you cannot read—therefore, let me!
'My idol'" . . .
The letter was not from Caponsacchi, and Pompilia, divining this as surely as she had divined that he did not throw the comfits, took it from the woman's hands and tore it into shreds. . . . Day after day such moments added themselves to all the rest of the misery, and at last, at end of her strength, she swooned away. As she was coming to again, Margherita stooped and whispered Caponsacchi. But still, though the sound of his name was to the broken girl as if, drowning, she had looked up through the waves and seen a star . . . still she repudiated the servant's report of him: had she not that once beheld him?
"Therefore while you profess to show him me,
I ever see his own face. Get you gone!"
But the swoon had portended something; and on "one vivid daybreak," half through April, Pompilia learned what that something was. . . . Going to bed the previous night, the last sound in her ears had been Margherita's prattle. "Easter was over; everyone was on the wing for Rome—even Caponsacchi, out of heart and hope, was going there." Pompilia had heard it, as she might have heard rain drop, thinking only that another day was done:
"How good to sleep and so get nearer death!"
But with the daybreak, what was the clear summons that seemed to pierce her slumber?
". . . Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change!"
The exquisite morning was there—the broad yellow sunbeams with their "myriad merry motes," the glittering leaves of the wet weeds against the lattice-panes, the birds—
"Always with one voice—where are two such joys?—
The blessed building-sparrow! I stepped forth,
Stood on the terrace—o'er the roofs such sky!
My heart sang, 'I too am to go away,
I too have something I must care about,
Carry away with me to Rome, to Rome!
* * * * *
Not to live now would be the wickedness.'"[137:1]
Pope Innocent XII—"the great good old Pope," as Browning calls him in the summary of Book I—when in his turn he speaks to us, gives his highest praise, "where all he praises," to this trait in her whom he calls "My rose, I gather for the breast of God."
"Oh child, that didst despise thy life so much
When it seemed only thine to keep or lose,
How the fine ear felt fall the first low word
'Value life, and preserve life for My sake!'
* * * * *
Thou, at first prompting of what I call God,
And fools call Nature, didst hear, comprehend,
Accept the obligation laid on thee,
Mother elect, to save the unborn child.
. . . Go past me,
And get thy praise—and be not far to seek
Presently when I follow if I may!"
"Now" (says the sympathetic Other Half-Rome), "begins the tenebrific passage of the tale." As we have seen, Pompilia had tried all other means of escape, even before the great call came to her. Her last appeal had been made to two of Guido's kinsmen, on the wing for Rome like everyone else—Conti being one. Both had refused, but Conti had referred her to Caponsacchi—not evilly like Margherita, but jestingly, flippantly. Nevertheless, that name had come to take a half-fateful sense to her ears . . . and the Other Half-Rome thus images the moment in which she resolved to appeal to him.
"If then, all outlets thus secured save one,
At last she took to the open, stood and stared
With her wan face to see where God might wait—
And there found Caponsacchi wait as well
For the precious something at perdition's edge,
He only was predestinate to save . . .
* * * * *
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 manœuvre! . . .
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!*nbsp;. . .
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 vécu ce que vivent les roses,
L'espace d'un matin."