e
making valetudinarians of us all. Our public is beginning to measure
the right and possible in art by the superficial probabilities of life
and manners within a ten-mile radius of Charing Cross. Is it likely,
asks the critic, that Duke Silva would have done this, that Fedalma
would have done that? Who shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi
acted thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils so? The poser
is triumphant, because the critic is tacitly appealing to the normal
standard of probabilities in our own day. In the tragedy of Pompilia
we are taken far from the serene and homely region in which some of
our teachers would fain have it that the whole moral universe can be
snugly pent up. We see the black passions of man at their blackest;
hate, so fierce, undiluted, implacable, passionate, as to be hard of
conception by our simpler northern natures; cruelty, so vindictive,
subtle, persistent, deadly, as to fill us with a pain almost too great
for true art to produce; greediness, lust, craft, penetrating a whole
stock and breed, even down to the ancient mother of "that fell house
of hate,"--

"The gaunt grey nightmare in the furthest smoke,
The hag that gave these three abortions birth,
Unmotherly mother and unwomanly
Woman, that near turns motherhood to shame,
Womanliness to loathing: no one word,
No gesture to curb cruelty a whit
More than the she-pard thwarts her playsome whelps
Trying their milk-teeth on the soft o' the throat
O' the first fawn, flung, with those beseeching eyes,
Flat in the covert! How should she but couch,
Lick the dry lips, unsheathe the blunted claw,
Catch 'twixt her placid eyewinks at what chance
Old bloody half-forgotten dream may flit,
Born when herself was novice to the taste,
The while she lets youth take its pleasure" (iv. 40).

But, then, if the poet has lighted up for us these grim and appalling
depths, he has not failed to raise us too into the presence of
proportionate loftiness and purity.

"Tantum vertice in auras
Aetherias quantum radice in Tartara tendit."

Like the gloomy and umbrageous grove of which the Sibyl spake to the
pious Aeneas, the poem conceals a golden branch and golden leaves.
In the second volume, Guido, servile and false, is followed by
Caponsacchi, as noble alike in conception and execution as anything
that Mr. Browning has ever achieved. In the third volume, the austere
pathos of Pompilia's tale reli