The traitor of the poem is “refinement every inch from brow to 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  When the traitor of this poem is withdrawn—­as was Guido—­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 through chilling to ice the heart within her, her reawakening to life, and the pain of that return to sensation, her measureless scorn of her betrayer, her exposure of his last fraud, and her self-sought death—­the lady is dangerously near the melodramatic heroine, and yet she is not a melodramatic but a tragic figure.  Far more than Pompilia, who knew the joy of motherhood, is she the martyr of love.  And yet, before she quits life, in her protective care of that somewhat formidable, somewhat ungainly baby, the huge boy, her champion, hero and snob, she finds a comforting maternal instinct at work: