will be content with me,
whom the Queen loves." Norbert objects, and no wonder, to this lying
business, but he does it; and the Queen runs to Constance, crying, "I am
loved, thank God! I will throw everything aside and marry him. I
thought he loved you, but he loves me." Then Constance, wavering from
truth again, says that the Queen is right. Norbert does love her. And
this is supposed by some to be a noble self-sacrifice, done in pity for
the Queen. It is much more like jealousy.

Then, finding that all Norbert's future depends on the Queen, she is
supposed to sacrifice herself again, this time for Norbert's sake. She
will give him up to the Queen, for the sake of his career; and she tells
the Queen, before Norbert, that he has confessed to her his love for the
Queen--another lie! Norbert is indignant--he may well be--and throws
down all this edifice of falsehood. The Queen knows then the truth, and
leaves them in a fury. Constance and Norbert fly into each other's arms,
and the tramp of the soldiers who come to arrest them is heard as the
curtain falls.

I do not believe that Browning meant to make self-sacrifice the root of
Constance's doings. If he did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole
thing. He was much too clear-headed a moralist to link self-sacrifice to
systematic lying. Self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice at all when it
sacrifices truth. It may wear the clothes of Love, but, in injuring
righteousness, it injures the essence of love. It has a surface beauty,
for it imitates love, but if mankind is allured by this beauty, mankind
is injured. It is the false Florimel of self-sacrifice. Browning, who
had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in Constance. There is
something else at the root of her actions, and I believe he meant it to
be jealousy. The very first lie she urges her lover to tell (that is, to
let the Queen imagine he loves her) is just the thing a jealous woman
would invent to try her lover and the Queen, if she suspected the Queen
of loving him, and him of being seduced from her by the worldly
advantage of marrying the Queen. And all the other lies are best
explained on the supposition of jealous experiments. At the last she is
satisfied; the crowning test had been tried. Through a sea of lying she
had made herself sure of Norbert's love, and she falls into his arms.
Had Browning meant Constance to be an image of self-sacrifice, he would
scarcely have written that line when Norbert, ha