leave it in that beautiful and true simplicity.
She must philosophise:

"This is the note of evil: for good lasts" . . .

Pompilia was incapable of that: she could "say" the thing, as she says
it in that image of the dream--but she would have left it alone, she
would have made no maxim out of it. And the maxim, when it _is_ made,
says no more than the image had said.

Once again: her plea for Guido. That she should forgive him was
essential, but the pardon should have been blind pardon. No reason can
confirm it; and we should but have loved her more for seeking none. To
put in her mouth the plea that Guido had been deceived in his hope of
enrichment by marriage, and that his anger, thus to some extent
justified, was aggravated by her "blindness," by her not knowing
"whither he sought to drive" her with his charges of light conduct,

"So unaware, I only made things worse" . . .

--this is bad through and through; this is the excess of ingenuity which
misled Browning so frequently. There is no loveliness of pardon here;
but something that we cannot suffer for its gross humility. The aim of
Guido, in these charges, was filthiest evil: it revolts to hear the
victim, now fully aware--for the plea is based on her awareness--blame
herself for not "apprehending his drift" (could _she_ have used that
phrase?), and thus, in the madness of magnanimity, seem to lose all
sense of good and evil. It is over-subtle; it is not true; it has no
beauty of any kind. But Browning could not "leave things alone"; he had
to analyse, to subtilise--and this, which comes so well when it is
analytic and subtle minds that address us, makes the defect of his work
whenever an innocent and ignorant girl is made to speak in her own
person.

I shall not multiply instances; my aim is not destructive. But I think
the unmeasured praise of Browning by some of his admirers has worked
against, not for, him. It irritates to read of the "perfection" of this
speech--which has beauties so many and so great that the faults may be
confessed, and leave it still among the lovely things of our literature.

I turn now gladly to those beauties. Chief is the pride and love of the
new-made mother--never more exquisitely shown, and here the more
poignantly shown because she is on her death-bed, and has not seen her
little son again since the "great fortnight." She thinks how well it was
that he had been taken from her before that awful night at the Villa: