Brownings Heroines | Page 9

Is it not plain from this that his artist's soul rejected the paltry fact? For
"blue" the hours of New Year's Day may be in Italy, but as "_long_
blue hours" they cannot, even there, be figured. I maintain that,
whatever it may be called, it is really Midsummer's Day on which
Pippa passes from Asolo through Orcana and Possagno, and back to
Asolo again.

+ + + + +
We see her first as she springs out of bed with the dawn's earliest touch
on her "large mean airy chamber" at Asolo[24:1]--the lovely little town
of Northern Italy which Browning loved so well. In that chamber, made
vivid to our imagination by virtue of three consummately placed
adjectives (note the position of "mean"), Pippa prepares for her one
external happiness in the year.
"Oh Day, if I squander a wavelet of thee,
A mite of my twelve hours'
treasure,
The least of thy gazes or glances,

One of thy choices or one of thy chances,

--My Day, if I squander such labour or leisure,
Then shame fall on
Asolo, mischief on me!"
I have omitted two lines from this eight-lined stanza, and omitted them
because they illustrate all too forcibly Browning's chief fault as a
lyric--and, in this case, as a dramatic--poet. Both of them are frankly
parenthetic; both parentheses are superfluous; neither has any
incidental beauty to redeem it; and, above all, we may be sure that
Pippa did not think in parentheses. The agility and (it were to follow an
indulgent fashion to add) the "subtlety" of Browning's mind too often
led him into like excesses: I deny the subtlety here, for these clauses are
so wholly uninteresting in thought that even as examples I shall not cite
them. But their crowning distastefulness is in the certitude we feel that,
whatever they had been, they never would have occurred to this lyrical
child. The stanza without them is the stanza as Pippa felt it. . . . In the
same way, the opening rhapsody on dawn which precedes her
invocation to the holiday is out of character--impossible to regard its
lavish and gorgeous images as those (however sub-conscious) of an
unlettered girl.
But all carping is forgotten when we reach

"Thy long blue solemn hours serenely flowing"--
a poet's phrase, it is true, yet in no way incongruous with what we can
imagine Pippa to have thought, if not, certainly, in such lovely diction
to have been able to express. Thenceforward, until the episodical lines
on the Martagon lily, the child and her creator are one. There comes the
darling menace to the holiday--
". . . But thou must treat me not
As prosperous ones are treated . . .

For, Day, my holiday, if thou ill-usest
Me, who am only Pippa--old
year's sorrow,
Cast off last night, will come again to-morrow:

Whereas, if thou prove gentle, I shall borrow
Sufficient strength of
thee for new-year's sorrow.
All other men and women that this earth

Belongs to, who all days alike possess,
Make general plenty cure
particular dearth,[26:1]
Get more joy one way, if another less:
Thou
art my single day, God lends to leaven
What were all earth else, with
a feel of heaven--
Sole light that helps me through the year, thy
sun's!"
Having made her threat and her invocation, she falls to thinking of
those "other men and women," and tells her Day about them, like the
child she is. They, she declares, are "Asolo's Four Happiest Ones."
Each is, in the event, to be vitally influenced by her song, as she
"passes" at Morning, Noon, Evening, and Night; but this she knows not
at the time, nor ever knows.
The first Happy One is "that superb great haughty Ottima," wife of the
old magnate, Luca, who owns the silk-mills. The New Year's morning
may be wet--
". . . Can rain disturb
Her Sebald's homage? all the while thy rain

Beats fiercest on her shrub-house window-pane,
He will but press the
closer, breathe more warm
Against her cheek: how should she mind
the storm?"
Here we learn what later we are very fully to be shown--that Ottima's

"happiness" is not in her husband.
The second Happy One is Phene, the bride that very day of Jules, the
young French sculptor. They are to come home at noon, and though
noon, like morning, should be wet--
". . . what care bride and groom
Save for their dear selves? 'Tis their
marriage day;

Hand clasping hand, within each breast would be
Sunbeams and
pleasant weather, spite of thee."
The third Happy One--or Happy Ones, for these two Pippa cannot
separate--are Luigi, the young aristocrat-patriot, and his mother.
Evening is their time, for it is in the dusk that they "commune inside
our turret"--
"The lady and her child, unmatched, forsooth,
She in her age, as
Luigi in his youth,
For true content . . ."
Aye--though the