"And I to have tempted you"—
. . . that is, tempted her to snap her gold ring and break her promise:
"I to have tempted you! I, who tired
Your soul, no doubt, till it sank! Unwise,
I loved and was lowly, loved and aspired,
Loved, grieving or glad, till I made you mad,
And you meant to have hated and despised—
Whereas, you deceived me nor inquired!"
This is the too-much of magnanimity. Browning tends to exaggerate the beauty of that virtue, as already we have seen in Pompilia; and assuredly this husband has, like her, the defect of his quality. Tender, generous, high-hearted he is, but without the "sinew of the soul," as some old writer called anger. All these wonderful and subtle reasons for the tragic issue, all this apprehensive forecasting of the blow that awaits the woman "at the end of life," and the magnanimity which even then she shall find dreadfully awaiting her . . . all this is noble enough to read of, but imagine its atmosphere in daily life! The truth is that such natures are but wasted if they do not suffer—almost they might be called responsible for others' misdoings. We read the ringing stanzas of The Worst of It, and feel that no one should be doomed to suffer such forgiveness. What chance had her soul? At every turn it found itself forestalled, and shall so find itself, he tells her, to all eternity.
"I knew you once; but in Paradise,
If we meet, I will pass nor turn my face."
No: this with me is not a favourite poem. The wife, beautiful and passionate, was never given a chance, in this world, to be "placed" at all in virtue; and she felt, no doubt, with a woman's intuition, that even in the last of all encounters she should still be baffled. Already that faultless husband is planning to be crushingly right on the Day of Judgment. And he is so crushingly right! He is not a prig, he is not a Pharisee; he is only perfectly magnanimous—perfectly right. . . . And sometimes, she must have thought vaguely, with a pucker on the glorious brow,—sometimes, to love lovably, we must yield a little of our virtue, we must be willing to be perfectly wrong.
But his suffering is genuine. She has twisted all his world out of shape. He believes no more in truth or beauty or life.
"We take our own method, the devil and I,
With pleasant and fair and wise and rare:
And the best we wish to what lives, is—death."
She is better off; she has committed a fault and has done . . . now she can begin again. But most likely she does not repent at all, he goes on to reflect—most likely she is glad she deceived him. She had endured too long:—