boot-heel"; and in this respect it cannot be said that Browning's
villain departs widely from the conventional, melodramatic villain of
the stage. He has perhaps like the stage villain a little too much of
that cheap knowingness, which is the theatrical badge of the complete
man of the world, but which gentlemen in actual life do not ordinarily
affect. There is here and elsewhere in Browning's later poetry somewhat
too free an indulgence in this cheap knowingness, as if with a nod and a
wink he would inform us that he has a man of the world's acquaintance
with the shady side of life; and this is not quite good art, nor is it
quite good manners. The vulgarity of the man in the street may have a
redeeming touch of animal spirits, if not of _naivete_, in it; the
vulgarity of the man in the club, "refinement every inch" is beyond
redemption. The exhibition of Browning's traitor as having slipped lower
and lower down the slopes of baseness because he has been false to his
one experience of veritable love may remind us also of the melodramatic
stage villain; but the tragic and pathetic motives of melodrama, its
demonstrative heroisms, its stage generosities, its striking attitudes,
are really fictions founded upon fact, and the facts which give some
credit to the stage fictions remain for the true creator of tragedy to
discover and interpret aright. The melodramatic is often the truth
falsely or feebly handled; the same truth handled aright may become
tragic. There is much in Shakespeare's plays which if treated by an
inferior artist would at once sink from tragedy to melodrama. Browning
escapes from melodrama but not to such a safe position that we can quite
forget its neighbourhood. When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn--as
was Guido--

Into that sad obscure sequestered state
Where God unmakes but to remake the soul
He else made first in vain,

there will be found in him that he knew the worth of love, that he saw
the horror of the void in which he lived, and that for a moment--though
too late--a sudden wave of not ignoble passion overwhelmed his baser
self, even if only to let the fangs of the treacherous rock reappear in
their starkness and cruelty.

The lady, again, with her superb statue-like beauty, her low wide brow

Oppressed by sweeps of hair
Darker and darker as they coil and swathe
The crowned corpse-wanness whence the eyes burn black,

her passion, her despair, her recovery thr