Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. He loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly achieved. Her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By simple force of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his last desperate cry—
"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
In contrast with these two, who shape their course by [the] light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."
"Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?...
Slunk into corners!"
The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,—it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where [the] authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light. Was Caponsacchi blind?
"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun,
Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56]
[55] The Pope, 1550 f.
[56] The Pope, 1563.
It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the Cenci had this other, less famous, "Roman murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government. None of his unofficial heroes—[Paracelsus] or Sordello or Rabbi ben Ezra—has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. But the Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office. He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naïvely submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. The Pope, like his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, Christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to
"Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offence."
And with this solemn and final summing-up—this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing [discords] seem at length to be resolved—the poem, in most hands, would have closed. But Browning was too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" by "lucidity of soul." It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just—