When the first volume of Mr. Browning's new poem came before the
critical tribunals, public and private, recognised or irresponsible,
there was much lamentation even in quarters where a manlier humour
might have been expected, over the poet's choice of a subject. With
facile largeness of censure, it was pronounced a murky subject,
sordid, unlovely, morally sterile, an ugly leaf out of some ancient
Italian Newgate Calendar. One hinted in vain that wisdom is justified
of her children, that the poet must be trusted to judge of the
capacity of his own theme, and that it is his conception and treatment
of it that ultimately justify or discredit his choice. Now that the
entire work is before the world, this is plain, and it is admitted.
When the second volume, containing _Giuseppe Caponsacchi_, appeared,
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).
But, then, if the poet has lighted up for us these grim and appalling
depths, he has not failed to raise us too into the presence of
proportionate loftiness and purity.
"Tantum vertice in auras
Aetherias quantum radice in Tartara tendit."
Like the gloomy and umbrageous grove of which the Sibyl spake to the
pious Aeneas, the poem conceals a golden branch and golden leaves.
In the second volume, Guido, servile and false, is followed by
Caponsacchi, as noble alike in conception and execution as anything
that Mr. Browning has ever achieved. In the third volume, the austere
pathos of Pompilia's tale relieves the too oppressive jollity of Don
Giacinto, and the flowery rhetoric of Bottini; while in the fourth,
the deep wisdom, justice, and righteous mind of the Pope, reconcile
us to endure the sulphurous whiff from the pit in the confession of
Guido, now desperate, naked, and satanic. From what at first was sheer
murk, there comes out a long procession of human figures, infinitely
various in form and thought, in character and act; a group of men and
women, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean and
noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity or half-dumb with
misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick
of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface
of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it. And
they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness,
directness. Above all, they are every one of them men and women,
with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique
sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to
mere drapery. "I grant," said Lessing, "that there is also a beauty in
drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form? And shall
he who can attain to the greater, rest content with the less? I much
fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent
wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken of plastic art, but it has
a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. There too, the master is he
who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does
not labour and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral
drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife
with Antaeus, Laocoon writhing in the coils of the divine serpents,
the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with outward destiny or
inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality. The
capacity which it possesses for this presentation, at once so varied
and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the
highest expression and measure of the creative power of the poet; and
the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of
this double capacity is one reason why we should reckon _The Ring and
the Book_ as one of his masterpieces.
We may say this, and still not be blind to the faults of the poem.
Many persons agree that they find it too long, and if they find it so,
then for them it is too long. Others, who cannot resist the critic's
temptation of believing that a remark must be true if it only look
acute and specific, vow that the disclosure in the first volume of the
whole plan and plot vitiates subsequent artistic merit. If one
cannot enjoy what comes, for knowing beforehand what is coming, this
objection may be allowed to have a root in human nature; but then two
things might perhaps be urged on the other side,--first, that the
interest of the poem lies in the development and presentation of
character, on the one hand, and in the many sides which a single
transaction offered to as many minds, on the other; and therefore that
this true interest could not be marred by the bare statement what the
transaction was or, baldly looked at, seemed to be; and, second, that
the poem was meant to find its reader in a mood of mental repose,
ready to receive the poet's impressions, undisturbed by any agitating
curiosity as to plot or final outcome. A more valid accusation touches
the many verbal perversities, in which a poet has less right than
another to indulge. The compound Latin and English of Don Giacinto,
notwithstanding the fan of the piece, still grows a burden to the
flesh. Then there are harsh and formless lines, bursts of metrical
chaos, from which a writer's dignity and self-respect ought surely
to be enough to preserve him. Again, there are passages marked by a
coarse violence of expression that is nothing short of barbarous (for
instance, ii. 190, or 245). The only thing to be said is, that the
countrymen of Shakespeare have had to learn to forgive uncouth
outrages on form and beauty to fine creative genius. If only one could
be sure that readers, unschooled as too many are to love the simple
and elevated beauty of such form as Sophocles or as Corneille gives,
would not think the worst fault the chief virtue, and confound the
poet's bluntnesses with his admirable originality. It is certain that
in Shakespeare's case his defects are constantly fastened upon, by
critics who have never seriously studied the forms of dramatic art
except in the literature of England, and extolled as instances of
his characteristic mightiness. It may well be, therefore, that the
grotesque caprices which Mr. Browning unfortunately permits to himself
may find misguided admirers, or, what is worse, even imitators. It
would be most unjust, however, while making due mention of these
things, to pass over the dignity and splendour of the verse in
many places, where the intensity of the writer's mood finds worthy
embodiment in a sustained gravity and vigour and finish of diction not
to be surpassed. The concluding lines of the _Caponsacchi_ (comprising
the last page of the second volume), the appeal of the Greek poet in
_The Pope_, one or two passages in the first _Guido_ (e.g. vol. ii.,
p. 156, from line 1957), and the close of the _Pompilia_, ought to be
referred to when one wishes to know what power over the instrument
of his art Mr. Browning might have achieved, if he had chosen to
discipline himself in instrumentation.
When all is said that can be said about the violences which from
time to time invade the poem, it remains true that the complete work
affects the reader most powerfully with that wide unity of impression
which it is the highest aim of dramatic art, and perhaps of all art,
to produce. After we have listened to all the whimsical dogmatising
about beauty, to all the odious cant about morbid anatomy, to all the
well-deserved reproach for unpardonable perversities of phrase and
outrages on rhythm, there is left to us the consciousness that a
striking human transaction has been seized by a vigorous and profound
imagination, that its many diverse threads have been wrought into a
single, rich, and many-coloured web of art, in which we may see traced
for us the labyrinths of passion and indifference, stupidity and
craft, prejudice and chance, along which truth and justice have to
find a devious and doubtful way. The transaction itself, lurid
and fuliginous, is secondary to the manner of its handling and
presentment. We do not derive our sense of unity from the singleness
and completeness of the horrid tragedy, so much as from the power
with which its own circumstances as they happened, the rumours which
clustered about it from the minds of men without, the many moods,
fancies, dispositions, which it for the moment brought out into light,
playing round the fact, the half-sportive flights with which lawyers,
judges, quidnuncs of the street, darted at conviction and snatched
hap-hazard at truth, are all wrought together into one self-sufficient
and compacted shape.
But this shape is not beautiful, and the end of art is beauty? Verbal
fanaticism is always perplexing, and, rubbing my eyes, I ask whether
that beauty means anything more than such an arrangement and
disposition of the parts of the work as, first kindling a great
variety of dispersed emotions and thoughts in the mind of the
spectator, finally concentrates them in a single mood of joyous, sad,
meditative, or interested delight. The sculptor, the painter, and the
musician, have each their special means of producing this final
and superlative impression; each is bound by the strictly limited
capability in one direction and another of the medium in which he
works. In poetry it is because they do not perceive how much more
manifold and varied are the means of reaching the end than in the
other expressions of art, that people insist each upon some particular
quiddity which, entering into composition, alone constitutes it
genuinely poetic, beautiful, or artistic. Pressing for definition, you
never get much further than that each given quiddity means a certain
Whatness. This is why poetical criticism is usually so little
catholic. A man remembers that a poem in one style has filled him with
consciousness of beauty and delight. Why conclude that this style
constitutes the one access to the same impression? Why not rather
perceive that, to take contemporaries, the beauty of _Thyrsis_ Is
mainly produced by a fine suffusion of delicately-toned emotion; that
of _Atalanta_ by splendid and barely rivalled music of verse; of _In
Memoriam_ by its ordered and harmonious presentation of a sacred mood;
of the _Spanish Gypsy_, in the parts where it reaches beauty, by
a sublime ethical passion; of the _Earthly Paradise_, by sweet and
simple reproduction of the spirit of the younger-hearted times? There
are poems by Mr. Browning in which it is difficult, or, let us frankly
say, impossible, for most of us at all events and as yet, to discover
the beauty or the shape. But if beauty may not be denied to a work
which, abounding in many-coloured scenes and diverse characters, in
vivid image and portraiture, wide reflection and multiform emotion,
does further, by a broad thread of thought running under all, bind
these impressions into one supreme and elevated conviction, then
assuredly, whatever we may think of this passage or that, that episode
or the other, the first volume or the third, we cannot deny that _The
Ring and the Book_, in its perfection and integrity, fully satisfies
the conditions of artistic triumph. Are we to ignore the grandeur of
a colossal statue, and the nobility of the human conceptions which it
embodies, because here and there we notice a flaw in the marble, a
blemish in its colour, a jagged slip of the chisel? "It is not force
of intellect," as George Eliot has said, "which causes ready repulsion
from the aberration and eccentricities of greatness, any more than it
is force of vision that causes the eye to explore the warts in a
face bright with human expression; it is simply the negation of high
sensibilities."
Then, it is asked by persons of another and still more rigorous
temper, whether, as the world goes, the subject, or its treatment
either, justifies us in reading some twenty-one thousand and
seventy-five lines, which do not seem to have any direct tendency to
make us better or to improve mankind. This objection is an old enemy
with a new face, and need not detain us, though perhaps the crude
and incessant application of a narrow moral standard, thoroughly
misunderstood, is one of the intellectual dangers of our time. You may
now and again hear a man of really masculine character confess that
though he loves Shakespeare and takes habitual delight in his works,
he cannot see that he was a particularly moral writer. That is to say,
Shakespeare is never directly didactic; you can no more get a system
of morals out of his writings than you can get such a system out
of the writings of the ever-searching Plato. But, if we must be
quantitative, one great creative poet probably exerts a nobler,
deeper, more permanent ethical influence than a dozen generations of
professed moral teachers. It is a commonplace to the wise, and an
everlasting puzzle to the foolish, that direct inculcation of morals
should invariably prove so powerless an instrument, so futile a
method. The truth is that nothing can be more powerfully efficacious
from the moral point of view than the exercise of an exalted creative
art, stirring within the intelligence of the spectator active thought
and curiosity about many types of character and many changeful issues
of conduct and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the range of
his reflections on mankind, ever kindling his sympathies into the warm
and continuous glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and fills
men with that love of humanity which is the best inspirer of virtue.
Is not this why music, too, is to be counted supreme among moral
agents, soothing disorderly passion by diving down into the hidden
deeps of character where there is no disorder, and touching the
diviner mind? Given a certain rectitude as well as vigour of
intelligence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, expands the
imagination, enlivens meditation upon the great human drama, is
essentially moral. Shakespeare does all this, as if sent Iris-like
from the immortal gods, and _The Ring and the Book_ has a measure of
the same incomparable quality.
A profound and moving irony subsists in the very structure of the
poem. Any other human transaction that ever was, tragic or comic or
plain prosaic, may be looked at in a like spirit, As the world's talk
bubbled around the dumb anguish of Pompilia, or the cruelty and hate
of Guido, so it does around the hourly tragedies of all times and
places.
"The instinctive theorizing whence a fact
Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look."--
"Vibrations in the general mind
At depth of deed already out of reach."--
"Live fact deadened down,
Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away:"--
if we reflect that these are the conditions which have marked the
formation of all the judgments that we hold by, and which are vivid in
operation and effect at this hour, the deep irony and the impressive
meaning of the poem are both obvious:--
"So learn one lesson hence
Of many which whatever lives should teach,
This lesson that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind" (iv. 234).
It is characteristic of Mr. Browning that he thus casts the moral of
his piece in an essentially intellectual rather than an emotional
form, appealing to hard judgment rather than to imaginative
sensibility. Another living poet of original genius, of whom we have
much right to complain that he gives us so little, ends a poem in two
or three lines which are worth quoting here for the illustration they
afford of what has just been said about Mr. Browning:--
"Ah, what dusty answer gets the soul,
When hot for certainties in this our life!--
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean's force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore?"[1]
[Footnote 1: Mr. George Meredith's _Modern Love_.]
This is imaginative and sympathetic in thought as well as expression,
and the truth and the image enter the writer's mind together, the one
by the other. The lines convey poetic sentiment rather than reasoned
truth; while Mr. Browning's close would be no unfit epilogue to a
scientific essay on history, or a treatise on the errors of the human
understanding and the inaccuracy of human opinion and judgment. This
is the common note of his highest work; hard thought and reason
illustrating themselves in dramatic circumstance, and the thought
and reason are not wholly fused, they exist apart and irradiate with
far-shooting beams the moral confusion of the tragedy. This is, at any
rate, emphatically true of _The Ring and the Book_. The fulness
and variety of creation, the amplitude of the play and shifting of
characters and motive and mood, are absolutely unforced, absolutely
uninterfered with by the artificial exigencies of ethical or
philosophic purpose. There is the purpose, full-grown, clear in
outline, unmistakeable in significance. But the just proprieties of
place and season are rigorously observed, because Mr. Browning, like
every other poet of his quality, has exuberant and adequate delight in
mere creation, simple presentment, and returns to bethink him of the
meaning of it all only by-and-by. The pictures of Guido, of Pompilia,
of Caponsacchi, of Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, of Pope
Innocent, are each of them full and adequate, as conceptions of
character in active manifestation apart from the truth which the whole
composition is meant to illustrate, and which clothes itself in this
most excellent drama.
The scientific attitude of the intelligence is almost as markedly
visible in Mr. Browning as the strength of his creative power. The
lesson of _The Ring and the Book_ is perhaps as nearly positive as
anything poetic can be. It is true that ultimately the drama ends in
a vindication of what are called the ways of God to man, if indeed
people are willing to put themselves off with a form of omnipotent
justice which is simply a partial retribution inflicted on the
monster, while torture and butchery fall upon victims more or
less absolutely blameless. As if the fact of punishment at length
overtaking the guilty Franceschini were any vindication of the justice
of that assumed Providence, which had for so long a time awarded
punishment far more harsh to the innocent Pompilia. So far as you
can be content with the vindication of a justice of this less than
equivocal quality, the sight of the monster brought to the
"Close fetid cell,
Where the hot vapour of an agony,
Struck into drops on the cold wall, runs down
Horrible worms made out of sweat and tears,"--
may in a sense prove satisfactory enough. But a man must be very dull
who in reading the poem does not perceive that the very spirit of it
points to the thousand hazards which even this fragment of justice had
to run in saving itself, and bringing about such partially righteous
consummation as destiny permits. True opinion fares yet more
perilously. _Half-Rome_, the _Other Half-Rome_, the _Tertium Quid_,
which is perhaps most masterly and finished of the three, show us
how ill truth sifts itself, to how many it never comes at all, how
blurred, confused, next door to false, it is figured even to those who
seize it by the hem of the garment. We may, perhaps, yawn over the
intermingled Latin and law of Arcangeli, in spite of the humour of
parts of it, as well as over the vapid floweriness of his rival; but
for all that, we are touched keenly by the irony of the methods by
which the two professional truth-sifters darken counsel with words,
and make skilful sport of life and fact. The whole poem is a parable
of the feeble and half-hopeless struggle which truth has to make
against the ways of the world. That in this particular case truth and
justice did win some pale sort of victory does not weaken the force
of the lesson. The victory was such and so won as to stir in us awful
thoughts of fatal risks and certain defeats, of falsehood a thousand
times clasped for truth, of fact a thousand times banished for
fancy:--
"Because Pompilia's purity prevails,
Conclude you, all truth triumphs in the end?
So might those old inhabitants of the ark,
Witnessing haply their dove's safe return,
Pronounce there was no danger all the while
O' the deluge, to the creature's counterparts,
Aught that beat wing i' the world, was white or soft,
And that the lark, the thrush, the culver too,
Might equally have traversed air, found earth,
And brought back olive-branch In unharmed bill.
Methinks I hear the Patriarch's warning voice--
'Though this one breast, by miracle, return,
No wave rolls by, in all the waste, but bears
Within it some dead dove-like thing as dear,
Beauty made blank and harmlessness destroyed!'"
(iv. 218).
Or, to take another simile from the same magnificent passage, in which
the fine dignity of the verse fitly matches the deep truth of the
preacher's monitions:--
"Romans! An elder race possessed your land
Long ago, and a false faith lingered still,
As shades do, though the morning-star be out.
Doubtless, some pagan of the twilight day
Has often pointed to a cavern-mouth,
Obnoxious to beholders, hard by Rome,
And said,--nor he a bad man, no, nor fool,--
Only a man, so, blind like all his mates,--
'Here skulk in safety, lurk, defying law,
The devotees to execrable creed,
Adoring--with what culture ... Jove, avert
Thy vengeance from us worshippers of thee!...
What rites obscene--their idol-god, an Ass!'
So went the word forth, so acceptance found,
So century re-echoed century,
Cursed the accursed,--and so, from sire to son,
You Romans cried, 'The offscourings of our race
Corrupt within the depths there: fitly, fiends
Perform a temple-service o'er the dead:
Child, gather garment round thee, pass nor pry!'
So groaned your generations: till the time
Grew ripe, and lightning hath revealed, belike,--
Thro' crevice peeped into by curious fear,--
Some object even fear could recognise
I' the place of spectres; on the illumined wall,
To-wit, some nook, tradition talks about,
Narrow and short, a corpse's length, no more:
And by it, in the due receptacle,
The little rude brown lamp of earthenware,
The cruse, was meant for flowers, but held the blood,
The rough-scratched palm-branch, and the legend left
_Pro Christo_. Then the mystery lay clear:
The abhorred one was a martyr all the time,
A saint whereof earth was not worthy. What?
Do you continue in the old belief?
Where blackness bides unbroke, must devils be?
Is it so certain, not another cell
O' the myriad that make up the catacomb,
Contains some saint a second flash would show?
Will you ascend into the light of day
And, having recognised a martyr's shrine,
Go join the votaries that gape around
Each vulgar god that awes the market-place?"
(iv. 219).
With less impetuosity and a more weightily reasoned argument the Pope
confronts the long perplexity and entanglement of circumstances with
the fatuous optimism which insists that somehow justice and virtue do
rule in the world. Consider all the doings at Arezzo, before and after
the consummation of the tragedy. What of the Aretine archbishop, to
whom Pompilia cried "Protect me from the fiend!"--
"No, for thy Guido is one heady, strong,
Dangerous to disquiet; let him bide!
He needs some bone to mumble, help amuse
The darkness of his den with; so, the fawn
Which limps up bleeding to my foot and lies,
--Come to me, daughter,--thus I throw him back!"