Yet while it seems to say this, the saying brings him no solace. What, "creaking like a ghostly cricket," it intends, he must perceive, since he is neither deaf nor blind:
"But although I take your meaning, 'tis with such a heavy mind! . . .
'Dust and ashes!' So you creak it, and I want the heart to scold.
Dear dead women, with such hair, too—what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms? I feel chilly and grown old."
After all, the pageant of life has value! We need not only the wise men. And even the wise man creeps through every nerve when he listens to that music. "Here's all the good it brings!"
None the less, there is trouble other than that of its passing in this pageant. Itself has the seed of death within it. All that beauty, riches, ease, can do, shall leave some souls unsatisfied—nay, shall kill some souls. . . . This too Browning could perceive and show; and once more, loved to show in the person of a girl. There is something in true womanhood which transcends all morgue: it seems almost his foible to say that, so often does he say it! In Colombe, in the Queen of In a Balcony (so wondrously contrasted with Constance, scarcely less noble, yet half-corroded by this very rust of state and semblance); above all, in the exquisite imagining of that "Duchess," the girl-wife who twice is given us, and in two widely different environments—yet is (to my feeling) one loved incarnation of eager sweetness. He touched her first to life when she was dead, if one may speak so paradoxically; then, unsatisfied with that posthumous awaking, brought her resolutely back to earth—in My Last Duchess and The Flight of the Duchess respectively. Let us examine the two poems, and I think we shall agree, in reading the second, that Browning, like Caponsacchi, could not have the lady dead.
First, then, comes a picture—the mere portrait, "painted on the wall," of a dead Italian girl.
"That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will 't please you sit and look at her? I said
Frà Pandolf by design: for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus."
The Duke, a Duke of Ferrara, owner of "a nine-hundred-years-old name," is showing the portrait, with an intention in the display, to the envoy from a Count whose daughter he designs to make his next Duchess. He is a connoisseur and collector of the first rank, but his pride is deeplier rooted than in artistic knowledge and possessions. Thanks to that nine-hundred-years-old name, he is something more than the passionless art-lover: he is a man who has killed a woman by his egotism. But even now that she is dead, he does not know that it was he who killed her—nor, if he did, could feel remorse. For it is not possible that he could have been wrong. This Duchess—it would have been idle to "make his will clear" to such an one; the imposition, not the exposition, of that will was all that he could show to her (or any other lesser being) without stooping—"and I choose never to stoop." Her error had been precisely the "depth and passion of that earnest glance" which Frà Pandolf had so wonderfully caught. Does the envoy suppose that it was only her husband's presence which called that "spot of joy" into her cheek? It had not been so. The mere painting-man, the mere Frà Pandolf, may have paid her some tribute of the artist—may have said, for instance, that her mantle hid too much of her wrist, or that the "faint half-flush that died along her throat" was beyond the power of paint to reproduce.
". . . Such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy."
As the envoy still seems strangely unenlightened, the Duke is forced to the "stooping" implied in a more explicit statement: