Take, for example, “The Statue and the Bust,” which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the Duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. Considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the Duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of Browning’s solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the Duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. But he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their Browning: “Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life’s set prize, be it what it will!”
There is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line.
“—The sin I impute to each frustrate ghost
Is—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,
Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
In “The Ring and the Book,” the problem is similar to that in the “Inn Album,” except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. The lover, Caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of Browning’s readers seem to doubt as possible. Caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of Catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for Pompilia. In this poem it is Pompilia who is given the divine vision. If I may resay what I have said in another connection,[3] there is no moral struggle in Pompilia’s short life such as that in Caponsacchi’s. Both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. She was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. Therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a struggle begins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. Neither archbishop nor friendly “smiles and shakes of head” could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her attitude toward him was inevitable. No qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. That she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. And how quick and certain her defence of Caponsacchi, threatened by Guido, when he overtakes them at the Inn! As she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of God.
“If I sinned so—never obey voice more.
O, the Just and Terrible, who bids us ‘Bear.’
Not—‘Stand by; bear to see my angels bear!’”
The gossip over her flight with Caponsacchi does not trouble her as it does him. He saved her in her great need; the supposition that their motives for flight had any taint of impurity in them is too puerile to be given a thought, yet with the same sublime certainty of the right, characteristic of her, she acknowledges, at the end, her love for Caponsacchi, and looks for its fulfilment in the future when marriage shall be an interpenetration of souls that know themselves into one. Having attained so great a good she can wish none of the evil she has suffered undone. She goes a step farther. Not only does she accept her own suffering for the sake of the final supreme good to herself, but she feels assured that good will fall at last to those who worked the evil.
In her absolute certainty of her realization of an unexpressed love in a future existence, she is only equaled in Browning’s poetry by the speaker in “Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.”
That Browning’s belief in the mystical quality of personal love never changed is shown by the fact that near the end of his life, in the “Parleying” with Daniel Bartoli, he treats a love romance based upon fact in a way to emphasize this same truth which so constantly appears in his earlier work. The lady in this case, who is of the people, having been offered a bribe by the King which will mean the dishonoring of herself and her husband, and which if she does not accept will mean her complete separation from her husband, instantly decides against the bribe. She prefers love in spirit in a convent to the accepting of the King’s promise that she will be made much of in court if she will sign a paper agreeing that her husband shall at once cede his dukedoms to the King. She explains her attitude to the Duke, who hesitates in his decision, whereupon she leaves and saves his honor for him, but his inability to decide at once upon the higher ground of spiritual love reveals to her the inadequacy of his love as compared with her own and kills her love for him. She later, however, marries a man who was only a boy of ten at the time of this episode, and their life together was a dream of happiness. But she dies and the devoted husband becomes a man of the world again. The Duke, however, has a streak of genuineness in his nature after all. Although carried away by the charms of a bold, black-eyed, tall creature, a development in keeping with the nature of the Duke in the true story, Browning is equal to the occasion, and makes him declare that the real man in him is dead and is still faithful to the old love. All she has is his ghost. Some day his soul will again be called into life by his ideal love.
The poet frequently expresses a doubt of man’s power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife’s death. “Any wife to any husband” reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. The poet’s answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in “Fifine at the Fair,” an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love.
Browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. In relation to the Duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks: