PART II
THE GREAT LADY
"MY LAST DUCHESS," AND "THE FLIGHT OF THE DUCHESS"
For a mind so subtle, frank, and generous as that of Browning, the perfume which pervades the atmosphere of "high life" was no less obvious than the miasma. His imagination needed not to free itself of all things adventitious to its object ere it could soar; in a word, for Browning, even a "lady" could be a woman—and remain a woman, even though she be turned to a "great" lady, that figure once so gracious, now so hunted from the realm of things that may be loved! Of narrowness like this our poet was incapable. He could indeed transcend the class-distinction, but that was not, with him, the same as trampling it under foot. And especially he loved to set a young girl in those regions where material cares prevail not—where, moving as in an upper air, she joys or suffers "not for bread alone."
"Was a lady such a lady, cheeks so round and lips so red—
On her neck the small face buoyant, like a bell-flower on its bed,
O'er the breast's superb abundance, where a man might base his head?"
He could grant her to be "such a lady," yet grant, too, that her soul existed. True, that in A Toccata of Galuppi's,[166:1] the soul is questioned: