or his "incidents in the development of
souls" to the passion and sin-frayed lives of his own countrymen. But no
halo of seventeenth-century romance here tempers the sordid modernity of
the facts; the "James Lee" of this tragedy appears in person and is
drawn with remorseless insistence on every mean detail which announces
the "rag-and-feather hero-sham." Everything except his wit and eloquence
is sham and shabby in this Club-and-Country-house villain, who violates
more signally than any figure in poetic literature the canon that the
contriver of the tragic harms must not be totally despicable. A thief,
as Schiller said, can qualify for a tragic hero only by adding to his
theft the more heroic crime of murder; but Browning's Elder Man
compromises even the professional perfidies of a Don Juan with shady
dealings at cards and the like which Don Juan himself would have
scouted. In _Fifine_ the Don Juan of tradition was lifted up into and
haloed about with poetical splendours not his own; here he is depressed
into an equally alien sorriness of prose. But the decisive and
commanding figure, for Browning and for his readers, is of course his
victim and Nemesis, the Elder Lady. She is as unlike Pompilia as he is
unlike Guido; but we see not less clearly how the upleaping of the soul
of womanhood in the child, under the stress of foul and cruel wrongs,
has once more asserted its power over him. And if Pompilia often recalls
his wife, the situation of the Elder Lady may fairly remind us of that
of Marion Erle in _Aurora Leigh_. But many complexities in the working
out mark Browning's design. The betrayed girl, scornfully refusing her
betrayer's tardy offer of marriage, has sought a refuge, as the wife of
a clergyman, in the drudgery of a benighted parish. The chance meeting
of the two, four years after, in the inn parlour, their bitter
confessions, through the veil of mutual hatred, that life has been
ruined for both,--he, with his scandalous successes growing at last
notorious, she, the soul which once "sprang at love," now sealed
deliberately against beauty, and spent in preaching monstrous doctrines
which neither they nor their savage parishioners believe nor
observe,--all this is imagined very powerfully and on lines which would
hardly have occurred to any one else.

The _Pacchiarotto_ volume forms a kind of epilogue to the work of the
previous half-dozen years. Since _The Ring and the Book_ he had become a
famous personage;