Then, finding that all Norbert’s future depends on the Queen, she is supposed to sacrifice herself again, this time for Norbert’s sake.  She will give him up to the Queen, for the sake of his career; and she tells the Queen, before Norbert, that he has confessed to her his love for the Queen—­another lie!  Norbert is indignant—­he may well be—­and throws down all this edifice of falsehood.  The Queen knows then the truth, and leaves them in a fury.  Constance and Norbert fly into each other’s arms, and the tramp of the soldiers who come to arrest them is heard as the curtain falls.

I do not believe that Browning meant to make self-sacrifice the root of Constance’s doings.  If he did, he has made a terrible mess of the whole thing.  He was much too clear-headed a moralist to link self-sacrifice to systematic lying.  Self-sacrifice is not self-sacrifice at all when it sacrifices truth.  It may wear the clothes of Love, but, in injuring righteousness, it injures the essence of love.  It has a surface beauty, for it imitates love, but if mankind is allured by this beauty, mankind is injured.  It is the false Florimel of self-sacrifice.  Browning, who had studied self-sacrifice, did not exhibit it in Constance.  There is something else at the root of her actions, and I believe he meant it to be jealousy.  The very first lie she urges her lover to tell (that is, to let the Queen imagine he loves her) is just the thing a jealous woman would invent to try her lover and the Queen, if she suspected the Queen of loving him, and him of being seduced from her by the worldly advantage of marrying the Queen.  And all the other lies are best explained on the supposition of jealous experiments.  At the last she is satisfied; the crowning test had been tried.  Through a sea of lying she had made herself sure of Norbert’s love, and she falls into his arms.  Had Browning meant Constance to be an image of self-sacrifice, he would scarcely have written that line when Norbert, having told the truth of the matter to the Queen, looks at both women, and cries out, “You two glare, each at each, like panthers now.”  A woman, filled with the joy and sadness of pure self-sacrifice, would not have felt at this moment like a panther towards the woman for whom she had sacrificed herself.

Even as a study of jealousy, Constance is too subtle.  Jealousy has none of these labyrinthine methods; it goes straight with fiery passion to its end.  It may be said, then, that Constance is not a study of jealousy.  But it may be a study by Browning of what he thought in his intellect jealousy would be.  At any rate, Constance, as a study of self-sacrifice, is a miserable failure.  Moreover, it does not make much matter whether she is a study of this or that, because she is eminently wrong-natured.  Her lying is unendurable, only to be explained or excused by the madness of jealousy, and she, though jealous, is not maddened enough by jealousy to excuse her lies.  The situations she causes are almost too ugly.