“Your smiles, your tears, prayers, curses move alike
My crowned contempt.”
And while he is kneeling there, in bursts the young man, who has returned to say that his aunt declines to meet him. He is startled to see the lady to whom he had vainly offered his heart four years ago, and rushes to the conclusion that he too has been entrapped for some purpose. The fifth section of the poem opens with a scornful denunciation of the trick which he considers stands confessed in the scene which he beholds. “O you two base ones, male and female! Sir!” he exclaims; “half an hour ago I held your master for my best of friends, and four years since you seemed my heart’s one love!” The woman explains to him that she has been sent for simply to counsel his cousin on the question of her proposed marriage. She finds him innocent save in folly, and will so report. The elder man she bids to leave the youth, and leave unsullied the heart she rescues and would lay beside another’s. While she speaks the devil is tempting him to one more crime. He will turn affairs to his own advantage. He writes some lines in the album before him, closes the book, hands it to the indignant woman, and begs her to leave him alone with his friend while he discusses the situation. In the book which she receives he has written a note to her telling her that her young lover is still faithful to her, and threatening her that if she does not receive him on familiar terms the story of her past shame shall be exposed to her husband. Left alone with the young man, he opens out a scheme of infernal ingenuity, whereby at once he will pay his gambling debt and avenge himself for the contempt and scorn with which his unhappy victim has once more received the offer of his affection. He proposes to barter the woman who has unwittingly put herself into his power—to compel her to yield herself up to the man in exchange for the ten thousand pounds he cannot otherwise pay. He explains to him that she has deluded her parson husband—would have yielded to himself had he not determined to substitute his friend. “Make love to her; pick no phrase; prevent all misconception: there’s the fruit to pluck or let alone at pleasure!” He leaves the room, and in superb composure the intended victim enters. Captive of wickedness, she warns him: “Back, in God’s name!” “Sin no more!” she cries: “I am past sin now.” She implores him to break the fetters which have bound him to the evil influence which has destroyed her life. Her noble bearing under the terrible circumstances assures him of her innocence of any complicity in a trick. He tells her the man has told heaps of lies about her, which he had not believed. Blushing and stumbling in his speech, he contrives to let her know the use that was to be made of her. Not knowing if there were truth in what was told him of her marriage, he offers her his hand if she is free to accept it,—any way, to take him as her friend. She gives him her hand. At that moment the adversary returns. “You accept him?” he asks. “Till death us do part!” she answers. “But before death parts, read here the marriage licence which makes us one.” He then displays the awful words addressed to her in the fatal page she holds in her hand. She reads, and when she comes to the last line—
“Consent—you stop my mouth, the only way”—
turning to the young man, she pitifully asks, “How could mortal ‘stop it’?” “So!” he cries. “A tiger-flash, and death’s out and on him!” In the closing scene the wretched, hunted woman dies. She has secured her vindicator’s acquittal on the charge of murder by writing in the album that he has saved her from the villain, righteously slain, who would have outraged her. As she dies the young girl who was to have married the defender of the dead woman appears on the scene, and the tragedy closes. In Notes and Queries for March 25th, 1876, Dr. F. J. Furnivall thus mentions the incidents on which the poem is based: “The story told by Mr. Browning in this poem is, in its main outlines, a real one—that of Lord De Ros, once a friend of the great Duke of Wellington, and about whom there is much in the Greville Memoirs. The original story was, of course, too repulsive to be adhered to in all its details—of, first, the gambling lord producing the portrait of the lady he had seduced and abandoned, and offering his expected dupe, but real beater, an introduction to the lady as a bribe to induce him to wait for payment of the money he had won; secondly, the eager acceptance of the bribe by the younger gambler, and the suicide of the lady from horror at the base proposal of her old seducer. The story made a great sensation in London over thirty years ago. Readers of The Inn Album know how grandly Mr. Browning has lifted the base young gambler, through the renewal of that old love, which the poet has invented, into one of the most pathetic creations of modern time, and has spared the base old roué the degradation of the attempt to sell the love which was once his delight, and which, in the poem, he seeks to regain, with feelings one must hope are real, as the most prized possession of his life. As to the lady, the poet has covered her with no false glory or claim on our sympathy. From the first she was a law unto herself; she gratified her own impulses, and she reaped the fruit of this. Her seducer has made his confession of his punishment, and has attributed, instead of misery, comfort and ease to her. She has to tell him, and the young man who has given her his whole heart, that the supposed comfort and ease have been to her simply hell; and tell, too, why she cannot accept the true love that, under other conditions, would have been her way back to heaven and life. What, then, can be her end? No higher power has she ever sought. Self-contained, she has sinned and suffered. She can do no more. By her own hand she ends her life; and the curtain falls on the most profoundly touching and most powerful poem of modern times.” The young girl of the poem is the invention of the poet; the other characters took part in the actual tragedy. In his Memoirs, first series, Greville mentions Lord De Ros from time to time, and they travelled together in Italy. Under date of “Newmarket, March 29th, 1839,” Greville makes the following entry in the first volume of the second series of his Memoirs, concerning the death of his friend: “Poor De Ros expired last night soon after twelve, after a confinement of two or three months from the time he returned to England. His end was enviably tranquil, and he bore his protracted sufferings with astonishing fortitude and composure. Nothing ruffled his temper or disturbed his serenity. His faculties were unclouded, his memory retentive, his perceptions clear to the last; no murmur of impatience ever escaped him, no querulous word, no ebullition of anger or peevishness; he was uniformly patient, mild, indulgent, deeply sensible of kindness and attention, exacting nothing, considerate of others and apparently regardless of self, overflowing with affection and kindness of manner and language to all around him, and exerting all his moral and intellectual energies with a spirit and resolution that never flagged till within a few hours of his dissolution, when nature gave way, and he sank into a tranquil unconsciousness, in which life gently ebbed away. Whatever may have been the error of his life, he closed the scene with a philosophical dignity not unworthy of a sage, and with a serenity and sweetness of disposition of which Christianity itself could afford no more shining or delightful example. In him I have lost, ‘half lost before,’ the last and greatest of the friends of my youth; and I am left a more solitary and a sadder man.”
Instans Tyrannus == The Threatening Tyrant. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Romances, 1868.) The title of this poem was suggested by Horace’s Ode on the Just Man (Od. iii. 3. 1):—
“Justum et tenacem propositi virum,
Non civium ardor prava jubentium,
Non vultus instantis tyranni,” etc.
(‘The just man, firm to his purpose, is not to be shaken from his fixed resolve by the fury of a mob laying upon him their impious behests, nor by the frown of a threatening tyrant, etc.’) These lines are said to have been repeated by the celebrated De Witte while he was subject to torture. When men or causes are suppressed by tyranny, the tyrant knows well in his heart that force alone, and not justice, enables him to crush opposition to his will; and he is the first to see, even if he do not acknowledge, the Divine Arm thrust forth from the heavens to protect his victims and avenge their wrongs. From some undefined cause a poor, contemptible man was the object of a tyrant’s hate: he struck him, tried to bribe him, tempted his blood and his flesh. Having tried every way to extinguish the man, he contrived thunder above and mine below him to destroy, as a rat in a hole, this friendless wretch, when suddenly the man saw God’s arm across the sky. The man
—“caught at God’s skirts, and prayed!
So, I was afraid!”
[Archdeacon Farrar refers the incidents of this poem to the persecution of the early Christians.—Browning Society Papers, Pt VII., p. 22*.]
In Three Days. (Men and Women, 1855; Dramatic Lyrics, 1868.) A lover anticipates that in three days he shall see his lady. He is aware that three days may change his future, as has often been changed the history of the world in the time. He knows, too, that though three days may cast no shadow in his way, still the years to follow may bring changes and chances of unimagined end. He reiterates that in three days he shall see her, and fear of all that the future may have in store is absorbed in the blissful anticipation.