Browning's Heroines. Ethel Colburn Mayne
She is glad that the "affectation of simplicity" has fallen off—
" … this naked crime of ours
May not now be looked over: look it down."
And were not the joys worth it, great as it is? Would he give up the past?
"Give up that noon I owned my love for you?"
—and as, in her impassioned revocation of the sultry summer's day, she brings back to him the very sense of the sun-drenched garden, the man at last is conquered back to memory. The antiphon of sensual love begins, goes on—the places, aspects, things, sounds, scents, that waited on their ecstasy, the fire and consuming force of hers, the passive, no less lustful, receptivity of his—and culminates in a chant to that "crowning night" in July (and "the day of it too, Sebald!") when all life seemed smothered up except their life, and, "buried in woods," while "heaven's pillars seemed o'erbowed with heat," they lay quiescent, till the storm came—
"Swift ran the searching tempest overhead;
And ever and anon some bright white shaft
Burned thro' the pine-tree roof, here burned and there,
As if God's messenger thro' the close wood screen
Plunged and replunged his weapon at a venture,
Feeling for guilty thee and me; then broke
The thunder like a whole sea overhead … "
—while she, in a frenzy of passion—
" … stretched myself upon you, hands
To hands, my mouth to your hot mouth, and shook
All my locks loose, and covered you with them—
You, Sebald, the same you!"
But the flame of her is scorching the feeble lover; feebly he pleads, resists, begs pardon for the harsh words he has given her, yields, struggles … yields again at last, for hers is all the force of body and of soul: it is his part to be consumed in her—
"I kiss you now, dear Ottima, now and now!
This way? Will you forgive me—be once more
My great queen?"
Glorious in her victory, she demands that the hair which she had loosed in the moment of recalling their wild joys he now shall bind thrice about her brow—
"Crown me your queen, your spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent in sin. Say that!"
So she bids him; so he crowns her—
"My great white queen, my spirit's arbitress,
Magnificent … "
—but ere the exacted phrase is said, there sounds without the voice of a girl singing.
"The year's at the spring,
And day's at the morn;
Morning's at seven;
The hill-side's dew-pearled;
The lark's on the wing;
The snail's on the thorn:
God's in his heaven—
All's right with the world!"
(Pippa passes.)
* * * * *
Like her own lark on the wing, she has dropped this song to earth, unknowing and unheeding where its beauty shall alight; it is the impulse of her glad sweet heart to carol out its joy—no more. She is passing the great house of the First Happy One, so soon rejected in her game of make-believe! If now she could know what part the dream-Pippa might have taken on herself. … But she does not know, and, lingering for a moment by the step, she bends to pick a pansy-blossom.
The pair in the shrub-house have been arrested in full tide of passion by her song. It strikes on Sebald with the force of a warning from above—
"God's in his heaven! Do you hear that? Who spoke?
You, you spoke!"—
but she, contemptuously—
" … Oh, that little ragged girl!
She must have rested on the step: we give them
But this one holiday the whole year round.
Did you ever see our silk-mills—their inside?
There are ten silk-mills now belong to you!"
Enervated by the interruption, she calls sharply to the singer to be quiet—but Pippa does not hear, and Ottima then orders Sebald to call, for his voice will be sure to carry.
No: her hour is past. He is ruled now by that voice from heaven. Terribly he turns upon her—
"Go, get your clothes on—dress those shoulders!
… Wipe off that paint! I hate you"—
and as she flashes back her "Miserable!" his hideous repulse sinks to a yet more hideous contemplation of her—
"My God, and she is emptied of it now!
Outright now!—how miraculously gone
All of the grace—had she not strange grace once?
Why, the blank cheek hangs listless as it likes,
No purpose holds the features up together,
Only the cloven brow and puckered chin
Stay in their places: and the very hair
That seemed to have a sort of life in it,
Drops, a dead web!"
Poignant in its authenticity is her sole, piteous answer—
" … Speak to me—not of me!"
But he relentlessly pursues the dread analysis of baffled passion's aspect—
"That round great full-orbed face, where not an angle
Broke the delicious indolence—all broken!"
Once more that cry breaks from her—
"To me—not of me!"
but soon the natural anger against his insolence possesses her; she whelms him with a torrent of recrimination. Coward and ingrate he is, beggar, her slave—
" … a fawning, cringing lie,
A lie that walks and eats and drinks!"
—while he, as in some horrible trance, continues his cold dissection—
" … My God!
Those morbid olive faultless shoulder-blades—
I should have known there was no blood beneath!"
For though the heaven-song have pierced him, not yet is Sebald reborn, not yet can aught of generosity involve him. Still he speaks "of her, not to her," deaf in the old selfishness and baseness. He can cry, amid his vivid recognition of another's guilt, that "the little peasant's voice has righted all again"—can be sure that he knows "which is better, vice or virtue, purity or lust, nature or trick," and in the high nobility of such repentance as flings the worst of blame upon the other one, will grant himself lost, it is true, but "proud to feel such torments," to "pay the price of his deed" (ready with phrases now, he also!), as, poor weakling, he stabs himself, leaving his final word to her who had been for him all that she as yet knew how to be, in—
"I hate, hate—curse you! God's in his heaven!"
* * * * *
Now, at this crisis, we are fully shown what, in despite of other commentators,[49:1] I am convinced that Browning meant us to perceive from the first—that Ottima's is the nobler spirit of the two. Her lover has stabbed himself, but she, not yet realising it, flings herself upon