sensualism is too coarse for her position. A certain success is
attained, but the imagination is frequently jarred. The very outburst of
unsensual love at the end, when her love passes from the flesh into the
spirit, when self-sacrifice dawns upon her and she begins to suffer the
first agonies of redemption, is plainly more due to the poet's pity than
to the woman's spirit. Again, Sebald is the first to feel remorse after
the murder. Ottima only begins to feel it when she thinks her lover is
ceasing to love her. I am not sure that to reverse the whole situation
would not be nearer to the truth of things; but that is matter of
discussion. Then the subject-matter is sordid. Nothing relieves the
coarseness of Sebald, Ottima and Luca and their relations to one another
but the few descriptions of nature and the happy flash of innocence when
Pippa passes by. Nor are there any large fates behind the tale or large
effects to follow which might lift the crime into dignity. This mean,
commonplace, ugly kind of subject had a strange attraction for Browning,
as we see in _The Inn Album_, in _Red Cotton Nightcap Country_, and
elsewhere. I may add that it is curious to find him, in 1841, writing
exactly like a modern realist, nearly fifty years before realism of this
kind had begun. And this illustrates what I have said of the way in
which he anticipated by so many years the kind of work to which the
literary world should come. The whole scene between Sebald and Ottima
might have been written by a powerful, relentless modern novelist.

We have more of this realism, but done with great skill, humanity, even
tenderness, in the meeting and talk of the young harlotry on the steps
of the Duomo near the fountain. When we think of this piece of bold,
clear, impressionist reality cast into the midst of the proprieties of
literature in 1841, it is impossible not to wonder and smile. The girls
are excellently drawn and varied from each other. Browning's pity
gathers round them, and something of underlying purity, of natural grace
of soul, of tenderness in memory of their youth emerges in them; and the
charm of their land is round their ways. There was also in his mind, I
think, a sense of picturesqueness in their class when they were young,
which, mingling with his pity for them, attracted his imagination, or
touched into momentary life that roving element in a poet which resents
the barriers made by social and domestic purity. _Fifine at the F