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and the woman and the girl enter. The latter has lately been disturbed by a vague fear that she and her betrothed have mistaken 'easy ignorance' of each other for knowledge. She has sent for the married woman to decide the case, and, after seeing him, pronounce judgment on the lover. For four years the girl has seen nothing of her old friend, whom conjugal happiness has, she fancies, engrossed. Who then so able to decide on a question regarding marriage? The girl, like her cousin, possesses a large share of insensibility, or she would discern the woman's terrible world-weariness. In easy assumption of the life of bliss led by the parson's wife, she rattles on, till even her stupidity is shivered by her interlocutor. Before more can be inquired, the older woman has despatched her to fetch the lover. IV. The sorrowful lady is alone, when, all unwittingly, he, the fiftyyears-old libertine, enters, who was the cause of her shame. There they stand, hate fronting hate in words of ice and fire. The man, detesting the incarnation of that image which has seemed to dog each subsequent false step of his life, taunts her with her marriage, for which he guessed a base, shallowhearted motive. Her reply contains another of Browning's flashes of insight into human nature. When, four years ago, she started back in horror from the miscreant's commonplace proposal of making her amends by marriage,' eclipsed self-respect redawned in her consciousness of her own capacity for contempt. Browning regards that capacity for great

scorn as the sure pledge of a future, redeemable and infinite. She who could feel so was not utterly lost nor degraded. This being so, she could live on, choosing a life penitential in the extreme. She married a purblind, drudging parish-priest, old and poor, yet desiring a woman's help in doling out his sterile ministrations in a sterile parish. Among brutalised people, she has endured an existence of drear apathy. No 'human lucid laugh' has penetrated it, and today's hearing of one had almost forbidden her return to bondage, till her betrayer's reappearance checked such impulse. For reply, the man tells her she never loved him if she loathes him now. She controverts this, in words that, over its grave, recall the dead enthusiasm. Then the man's cynicism half breaks up. Throwing himself before her, he cries to her to redeem his life by uniting hers with it to the end. He strives to excuse his doubt of love, he assails her soul with subtle temptation, finest flattery, himself for the moment seeming to struggle with his own evil. The passage is tragical in the contrast between what is genuine in the man's appeal and the woman's hurling back of all of it. She only hears in it a bidding to break faith with the husband whom she has rightly kept uninformed of her story of woe. She is deriding the man, changing his revived ardour into malignancy, when the youth enters. V. The young man and she recognise each other. To his whirl of consciousness, her presence together with the older man's attitude look like plotted villainy.

His rash invective she silences by explaining the situation sufficiently to solemnly warn him against the 'friend' who has ruined her life and would ruin his. (And now the older man, with the luck against him, and egged on by the woman's scorn and disbelief, and the young man, his now undeceived dupe's threats, prepares to play a last card. He conceives the double purpose of ridding himself of his money debt and revenging his rebuff from the woman, by writing in the Album what he calls the price of his keeping silence on the past to her husband. This he sends her into the adjoining room to read. The price of his silence is that she shall accept a frankly dishonouring offer if such be made her by the younger man.) VI. Alone with the youth, the 'Adversary' traduces the woman, predicting, in proof of her infamy, that she will accept the proposal which he recommends the young man to make her. The fee for the lesson in womankind that he represents himself as giving, if found correct, may fairly be, he urges, the remission of the ten thousand pounds. VII. The evil one retires to await success, and the lady re-enters. (While in the other room, she has taken a poison always kept by her against some such need.) She comprehends what has passed during her absence, and, in words that have death's calmness upon them, disperses the calumnies of her foe. The young man's reply to her, unknowing though he yet is of the threat in the Album, is a generous, selfless offer to her of his life's service. This is one of the grandest

dramatic passages in Browning's works. In its few minutes, the youth turns man, all his callowness done. away with. Every rag of a boy's conventionality is scattered to the winds in the equal delicacy and directness of the speech. He has offered her his hand for ever. She takes it, knowing, as he does not, what 'for ever' means. When the enemy returns, even he is taken aback at the apparent success of his scheme. He little imagines the pact come to by natures so unlike his. With loathsome compliment, he congratulates the couple, but is interrupted by the dying woman, who reads to her champion the writing in the Album. For fitting comment, the younger man springs at the villain, and strangles him. VIII. The woman dies, but not till she has falteringly written what will vindicate her deliverer's conduct. There is silence in the room. Outside, a laughing voice is heard. It is that of the girl, to whom dreadful news has to be broken by the grave survivor, saved as he is from doing her the supreme indignity of marriage without love.

Pacchiarotto and how he worked in Distemper: with other Poems, 1876 (Vol. XIV.), is Browning's first work in the serio - grotesque key which, on and off, distinguishes his penultimate period. The poet's personal robustness runs riot in the present volume. Four of the poems, At the "Mermaid," House, Shop, and the Epilogue repudiate poetic self delineation, yet in these very pieces Browning is self-delineative as to his poetic methods

and principles. Such a paradox comes naturally from the apostle of paradoxes.

Prologue (A Wall in the Selections, Second Series, 1880) is a little reverie, induced by watching the pulsation and flutter of wall foliage. That common sight, which mysteriously stimulates most imaginations, is full of supersensual suggestiveness to Browning.

Of Pacchiarotto, and how he worked in Distemper is a true story, frolicsomely told, of the Sienese painter of the early sixteenth century whose personality it is hard to disentangle from that of his contemporary fellow-townsman, Pacchia. The poem, with its sportive rhymes, is a merry quirk, abounding in the liberty of power. Browning has frequently insisted that a man's wisdom is no more than he needs to shape his own course aright, and he enjoys this opportunity of showing how ill-advised meddling and dreams of social perfectibility brought to grotesque grief a reformer who would have done better to stick to his paint-pot. A similar idea was gravely expressed in The Boy and the Angel. The reformed reformer, the Abbot, and the corpse urge no selfish letting-be, but a strenuous doing of one's individual best towards earth's amelioration, chastened by a full acceptance of the unconquerable unevenness of what Browning1 calls this 'Rehearsal,' life. Browning tacks on to Pacchiarotto proper a roistering mockery of his reviewers, 'in the drabs, blues, and yellows.' 1 Cp. Epictetus, Encheiridion, XVII.

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