iranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de
Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not
mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found
recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French
newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen
("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on
the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a
little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to
versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his
own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which
every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather
sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character
of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love
adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an
ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic
enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of
ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent
gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself
from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its
lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom
into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a
finished artist in life--a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection
in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not
very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar
contrast between those who "try the low thing and leave it done," and
those who aim higher and fail. Yet it must be owned that these
Browningesque ideas are not thoroughly wrought into the substance of the
poem; they are rather a sort of marginal embroidery woven on to a story
which, as a whole, has neither been shaped by Browning's hand nor
vitalised with his breath. Neither Clara nor Miranda can be compared in
dramatic force with his great creations; even Clara's harangue to the
Cousinry, with all its passion and flashing scorn, is true rather to her
generic character as the injured champion of her dead lord than to her
individual variety of it--the woman of subtle, inflexible, yet
calculating devotion. Miranda's soliloquy before he throws himself from
the Tower is a powerful piece of construction, bu