men no longer found it sordid or ugly; the third, with Pompilia, convinced them that the subject was not, after all, so incurably unlovely; and the fourth, with The Pope, and the passage from the Friar’s sermon, may well persuade those who needed persuasion, that moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than on this and that in the transaction which has taken possession of his imagination.

The truth is, we have for long been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawing-rooms, by idylls, not robust and Theocritean, by verse directly didactic, that a rude blast of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to give a shock, that might well show in what simpleton’s paradise we have been living.  The ethics of the rectory parlour set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite verse, the everlasting glorification of domestic sentiment in blameless princes and others, as if that were the poet’s single province and the divinely-appointed end of all art, as if domestic sentiment included and summed up the whole throng of passions, emotions, strife, and desire; all this might seem to be 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).