The Ring and the Book
The publication of _Dramatis Personae_ marks an advance in Browning's
growing popularity; a second edition, in which some improvements were
effected, was called for in 1864, the year of its first publication.
"All my new cultivators," Browning wrote, "are young men"; many of them
belonged to Oxford and Cambridge. But he was resolved to consult his own
taste, to take his own way, and let popularity delay or hasten as it
would--"pleasing myself," he says, "or aiming at doing so, and thereby,
I hope, pleasing God." His life had ordered itself as seemed best to
him--a life in London during the months in which the tide flows and
sparkles; then summer and autumn quietude in some retreat upon the
French coast. The years passed in such a uniformity of work and rest,
with enjoyment accompanying each of these, that they may almost be
grasped in bundles. In 1865, the holiday was again at Sainte-Marie, and
the weather was golden; but he noticed with regret that the old church
at Pornic, where the beautiful white girl of his poem had been buried,
was disappearing to give space in front of a new and smart erection of
brick and stucco. His Florence, as he learnt, was also altering, and he
lamented the change. Every detail of the Italian days lived in his
memory; the violets and ground ivy on a certain old wall; the fig tree
behind the Siena villa, under which his wife would sit and read, and
"poor old Landor's oak." "I never hear of any one going to Florence," he
wrote in 1870, "but my heart is twitched." He would like to "glide for a
long summer-day through the streets and between the old
stone-walls--unseen come and unheard go." But he must guard himself
against being overwhelmed by recollection: "Oh, me! to find myself some
late sunshiny Sunday afternoon, with my face turned to Florence--'ten
minutes to the gate, ten minutes _home_!' I think I should fairly end it
all on the spot."[93]
Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaments,
or new barbarous structures, run up beside Poggio, were happening. In
May 1866 Browning's father, kind and cheery old man, was unwell; in June
Miss Browning telegraphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris
twenty-four hours before the end. The elder Browning had almost
completed his eighty-fifth year. To the last he retained what his son
described as "his own strange sweetness of soul." It was the close of a
useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep
affection. The occasion was not one for intemperate grief, but the sense
of loss was great. Miss Browning, whose devotion during many years first
to her mother, then to her widowed father, had been entire, now became
her brother's constant companion. They rested for the summer at Le
Croisic, a little town in Brittany, in a delightfully spacious old
house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushing
waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque
with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers. Their
enjoyment was unspoilt even by some weeks of disagreeable weather, and
to the same place, which Browning has described in his _Two Poets of
Croisic_--
Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts
Spitefully north,
they returned in the following summer. During this second visit
(September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroism, _Hervé
Riel_, was written, though its publication belongs to four years
later.[94]
In June 1868 came grief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from
outward communication with a portion of what was most precious in his
past life. Arabel Barrett, his wife's only surviving sister, who had
supported him in his greatest sorrow, died in Browning's arms. "For many
years," we are told by Mr Gosse, "he was careful never to pass her house
in Delamere Terrace." Although not prone to superstition, he had noted
in July 1863 a dream of Miss Barrett in which she imagined herself
asking her dead sister Elizabeth, "When shall I be with you?" and
received the answer, "Dearest, in five years." "Only a coincidence," he
adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, "but noticeable." That summer, after
wanderings in France, Browning and his sister settled at Audierne, on
the extreme westerly point of Brittany, "a delightful, quite unspoiled
little fishing town," with the ocean in front and green lanes and hills
behind. It was in every way an eventful year. In the autumn his new
publishers, Smith, Elder & Co., produced the six-volume edition of his
Poetical Works, on the title-page of which the author describes himself
as "Robert Browning, M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford."
The distinction, partly due to Jowett's influence, had been conferred a
year previously. In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be
educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett. Acquaintance
quickly ripened into friendship, which was not the less genuine or
cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteem for Browning's poems.
"Ought one to admire one's friend's poetry?" was a difficult question of
casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one time proposed. Much of
Browning's work appeared to him to be "extravagant, perverse,
topsy-turvy"; "there is no rest in him," Jowett wrote with special
reference to the poems "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day," which he
regarded as Browning's noblest work. But for the man his admiration was
deep-based and substantial. After Browning's first visit to him in June
1865, Jowett wrote that though getting too old to make, as he supposed,
new friends, he had--he believed--made one. "It is impossible to speak
without enthusiasm of Mr Browning's open, generous nature and his great
ability and knowledge. I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible
poet in the world, entirely free from vanity, jealousy, or any other
littleness, and thinking no more of himself than any ordinary man. His
great energy is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most
of the remainder of life. Of personal objects he seems to have none
except the education of his son."[95] Browning's visits to Oxford and
Cambridge did not cease when he dropped away from the round of visiting
at country houses. He writes with frank enjoyment of the almost
interminable banquet given at Balliol in the Lent Term, 1877, on the
occasion of the opening of the new Hall. Oxford conferred upon him her
D.C.L. in 1882, on which occasion a happy undergraduate jester sent
fluttering towards the new Doctor's head an appropriate allusion in the
form of a red cotton night-cap. The Cambridge LL.D. was conferred in
1879. In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of
London. In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election,
for the Lord Rectorship of the University of St Andrews, as successor to
John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined.[96] The great event of
this year in the history of his authorship was the publication in
November and December of the first two volumes of _The Ring and the
Book_. The two remaining volumes followed in January and February 1869.
[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE "THE BOOK" WAS
FOUND BY BROWNING.
_From a photograph by_ ALINARI.]
In June 1860 Browning lighted, among the litter of odds and ends exposed
for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the "square old
yellow book," part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude
fact from which his poem of the Franceschini murder case was developed.
The price was a lira, "eightpence English just." As he leaned by the
fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered
the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97].
That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while
from Felice church opposite came
the clear voice of the cloistered ones,
Chanting a chant made for mid-summer nights,
he gave himself up to the excitement of re-creating the actors and
re-enacting their deeds in his imagination:
I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,
Before attempting smithcraft.
According to Mr Rudolf Lehmann, but possibly he has antedated the
incident, Browning at once conceived the mode in which the subject could
be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards
adopted: "'When I had read the book,' so Browning told me, 'my plan was
at once settled. I went for a walk, gathered twelve pebbles from the
road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it.
Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poem is divided,
and I adhered to that arrangement to the last.'"[98] When in the autumn
he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the vellum-bound quarto was with
him, but the persons from whom he sought further light about the murder
and the trial could give little information or none. Smithcraft did not
soon begin. He offered the story, "for prose treatment" to Miss Ogle, so
we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of
statement, offered it "for poetic use to one of his leading
contemporaries." We have seen that in a letter of 1862 from Biarritz,
Browning speaks of the Roman murder case as being the subject of a new
poem already clearly conceived though unwritten. In the last section of
_The Ring and the Book_, he refers to having been in close converse with
his old quarto of the Piazza San Lorenzo during four years:
How will it be, my four-years' intimate,
When thou and I part company anon?
The publication of _Dramatis Personae_ in 1864 doubtless enabled
Browning to give undivided attention to his vast design. In October of
that year he advanced to actual definition of his scheme. When staying
in the south of France he visited the mountain gorge which is connected
with the adventure of the Roland of romance, and there he planned the
whole poem precisely as it was carried out. "He says," Mr W.M. Rossetti
enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868),
"he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan--some three hours in
the early part of the day; he seldom or never, unless in quite brief
poems, feels the inspiring impulse and sets the thing down into words at
the same time--often stores up a subject long before he writes it. He
has written his forthcoming work all consecutively--not some of the
later parts before the earlier."[99]
When Carlyle met Browning after the appearance of _The Ring and the
Book_, he desired to be complimentary, but was hardly more felicitous
than Browning himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity:
"It is a wonderful book," declared Carlyle, "one of the most wonderful
poems ever written. I re-read it all through--all made out of an Old
Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants
forgetting."[100] A like remark might have been made respecting the book
which, in its method and its range of all English books most resembles
Browning's poem, and which may indeed be said to take among prose works
of fiction a similar place to that held among poetical creations by
Browning's tale of Guido and Pompilia. Richardson's _Clarissa_ consists
of eight volumes made out of an Old Bailey story, or what might have
been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a
happy or sorrowful oblivion. But then we should never have known two of
the most impressive figures invented by the imagination of man, Clarissa
and her wronger; and had we not heard their story from all the
participators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the
microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds
with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every
reader. Out of the infinitesimally little emerges what is great; out of
the transitory moments rise the forms that endure. It is of little
profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected
his purpose in four volumes instead of eight, or whether Browning ought
to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of
twenty thousand. No one probably has said of either work that it is too
short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical
Polonius--"This is too long." But neither _Clarissa_ nor _The Ring and
the Book_ is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer
is triumphantly effected; and while we wish that the same effect could
have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert
confidently that this was possible.
It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost
as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not
told even once. Nine different speakers tell nine different stories,
stories of varying incidents about different persons--for the Pompilia
of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other,
as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest. In the end we are
left to invent the story for ourselves--not indeed without sufficient
guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are
a discipline in distinguishing the several values of human testimony. We
become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the
market-place, and shall recognise them if we meet them again. Gossipry
on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the
nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who
play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior
foolishness of wisdom. The advocacy which consists of professional
self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to
the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one--that which
commends the advocate himself, his ingenious wit, and his flowers of
rhetoric. The criminal is allowed his due portion of veracity and his
fragment of truth--"What shall a man give for his life?" He has enough
truth to enable him to fold a cloud across the light, to wrench away the
sign-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to remove the land-marks,
to set up false signal fires upon the rocks. And then are heard three
successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to
our mind the words, "But there is a spirit in man; and the inspiration
of the Almighty giveth them understanding." First the voice of the pure
passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in
its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its
carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except
the deliverance of a message--and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it
please, ironical. It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his
wrath were kindled: "Behold my belly is as wine which hath no vent; it
is ready to burst like new bottles. I will speak that I may be
refreshed." And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi's truth is the
whole truth; he speaks like a man newly converted, still astonished by
the supernatural light, and inaccessible to many things visible in the
light of common day. Next, a voice from one who is human indeed "to the
red-ripe of the heart," but who is already withdrawn from all the
turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woman who is still a
child; of a mother who is still virginal; of primitive instinct, which
comes from God, and spiritual desire kindled by that saintly knighthood
that had saved her; a voice from the edge of the world, where the dawn
of another world has begun to tremble and grow luminous,--uttering its
fragment of the truth. Last, the voice of old age, and authority and
matured experience, and divine illumination, old age encompassed by
much doubt and weariness and human infirmity, a solemn, pondering voice,
which, with God somewhere in the clear-obscure, goes sounding on a dim
and perilous way, until in a moment this voice of the anxious explorer
for truth changes to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the armed
doomsman of righteousness.
Truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that,
Browning would say, is the concern of God. And so, at the close, we are
directed to take to heart the lesson
That our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.
But there are degrees of approximation to truth and of remoteness from
it. Truth as apprehended by pure passion, truth as apprehended by
simplicity of soul ("And a little child shall lead them"), truth as
apprehended by spiritual experience--such respectively make up the
substance of the monologues of Caponsacchi, of Pompilia, and of the
Pope. For the valuation, however, of this loftier testimony we require a
sense of the level ground, even if it be the fen-country. A perception
of the heights must be given by exhibiting the plain. If we were carried
up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that
we had not become inhabitants of some Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is
where we ordinarily live and move; it has its rights, and is worth
understanding for its own sake. Therefore we shall mix our mind with
that of "Half-Rome" and "The Other Half-Rome" before we climb any mounts
of transfiguration or enter any city set upon a hill. The "man in the
street" is a veritable person, and it is good that we should make his
acquaintance; even the man in the _salon_ may speak his mind if he will;
such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us
better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of
Caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of Pompilia,
the profound searchings of spirit that proceed all through the droop of
that sombre February day in the closet of the Pope. And, then, at the
most tragic moment and when pathos is most poignant, life goes on, and
the world is wide, and laughter is not banished from earth. Therefore
Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Procurator of the Poor, shall make
his ingenious notes for the defence of Count Guido, and cite his
precedents and quote his authorities, and darken counsel with words, all
to be by and by ecclesiasticized and regularized and Latinized and
Ciceroized, while more than half the good man's mind is occupied with
thought of the imminent "lovesome frolic feast" on his boy Cinone's
birth-night, which shall bring with it lamb's fry and liver, stung out
of its monotony of richness by parsley-sprigs and fennel. Yes, and we
shall hear also the other side--how, in a florilegium of Latin, selected
to honour aright the Graces and the Muses and the majesty of Law,
Johannes-Baptista Bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own
genius by showing, with due exordium and argument and peroration, that
Pompilia is all that her worst adversaries allege, and yet can be
established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's
learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce.
The secondary personages in Richardson's "Clarissa" grow somewhat faint
in our memories; but the figures of his heroine and of Lovelace remain
not only uneffaceable but undimmed by time. Four of the _dramatis
personae_ of Browning's poem in like manner possess an enduring life,
which shows no decline or abatement after the effect of the monologues
by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers themselves
almost forgotten. Count Guide Franceschini is not a miracle of evil
rendered credible, like Shakespeare's Iago, nor a strange enormity of
tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley. He has no
spirit of diabolic revelry in crime; no feeling for its delicate
artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror.
He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence. Sin may have its
strangeness in beauty; but Guido does not gleam with the romance of sin.
If Browning once or twice gives his fantasy play, it is in describing
the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Pompilia is
borne, the cave and its denizens--the "gaunt gray nightmare" of a
mother, mopping and mowing in the dusk, the brothers, "two obscure
goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other," with Guido
himself as the main monster. Yet the Count, short of stature,
"hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard" is not a monster but a man;
possessed of intellectual ability and a certain grace of bearing when
occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the
rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, and makes a
skilful defence. Browning does not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious
human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable
villain, who would have been disdained by the genius of the dramatist
Webster as wanting in romance. But like some of Webster's saturnine,
fantastic assistants or tools in crime, Guido has failed in everything,
is no longer young, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is
half-poisoned by its acrid juices. He is godless in an age of godless
living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays
the licentious imagination of an age of license. He plays a poor part in
the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging
desperately to the world and to life. A disinterested loyalty to the
powers of evil might display a certain gallantry of its own, but, though
Guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in
it--there is always a valid reason, a sordid motive for his rage. And in
truth he has grounds of complaint, which a wave of generous passion
would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of
his life, might well make a bad man mad. His wife, palmed off upon the
representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless
father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and
her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the Archbishop
as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter
aversion. He is cheated of the dowry which lured him to marriage. He is
pointed at with smiling scorn by the gossips of Arezzo. A gallant of the
troop of Satan might have devised and executed some splendid revenge;
but Guido is ever among the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who
are base before they are bold. When he makes his final pleading for life
in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like
that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is
rendered shrill by the intensity of imagination with which he pictures
to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of
his death. His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the
guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself. When all other
resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon God, who has made him
what he is. It was a fine audacity of Browning in imagining the last
desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted
Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to
carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity,
"Christ,--Maria,--God," one degree farther, and make the murderer last
of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he
dares to name by the name of his own crime, a name which that crime
might seem to have sequestered from all other uses:--
"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as
strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience
than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance
to evil and championship of the right. Her purity is not the purity of
ice but of fire. When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body
forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose. Others
may yield to the eye of God a "timid leaf" and an "uncertain bud,"
While--see how this mere chance sown, cleft-nursed seed
That sprang up by the wayside 'neath the foot
Of the enemy, this breaks all into blaze,
Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire
To incorporate the whole great sun it loves
From the inch-height whence it looks and longs. My flower,
My rose, I gather for the breast of God.
As she lies on her pallet, dying "in the good house that helps the poor
to die," she is far withdrawn from the things of time; her life, with
all its pleasures and its pains, seems strange and far away--
Looks old, fantastic and impossible:
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
Two possessions, out of what life has brought, remain with her--the
babe, who while yet unborn had converted her from a sufferer to a
defender, and the friend who has saved her soul. Even motherhood itself
is not the deepest thing in Pompilia's nature. The little Gaetano, whom
she had held in her arms for three days, will change; he will grow
great, strong, stern, a tall young man, who cannot guess what she was
like, who may some day have some hard thought of her. He too withdraws
into the dream of earth. She can never lose him, and yet lose him she
surely must; all she can do is by dying to give him "out-right to God,
without a further care," so to be safe. But one experience of Pompilia's
life was quite out of time, and belongs by its mere essence to eternity.
Having laid her babe away with God, she must not even "think of him
again, for gratitude"; and her last breath shall spend itself in doing
service to earth by striving to make men know aright what earth will for
a time possess and then, forever, heaven--God's servant, man's friend,
the saviour of the weak, the foe of all who are vile--and to the gossips
of Arezzo and of Rome the fribble and coxcomb and light-of-love priest,
Caponsacchi.
If any point in the whole long poem, _The Ring and the Book_, can be
described as central, it must be found in the relations, each to the
other, of Caponsacchi and Pompilia. The truth of it, as conceived by
Browning, could hardly be told otherwise than in poetry, for it needs
the faith that comes through spiritual beauty to render it
comprehensible and credible, and such beauty is best expressed by art.
It is easy to convince the world of a passion between the sexes which is
simply animal; nor is art much needed to help out the proof. Happily the
human love, in which body and soul play in varying degrees their parts,
and each an honoured part, is in widest commonalty spread. But the love
that is wholly spiritual seems to some a supernatural thing, and if it
be not discredited as utterly unreal (which at certain periods, if
literature be a test, has been the case), it is apt to appear as a thing
phantom-like, tenuous, and cold. But, in truth, this reality once
experienced makes the other realities appear the shadows, and it is an
ardour as passionate as any that is known to man. Its special note is a
deliverance from self with a joy in abandonment to some thing other than
self, like that which has been often recorded as an experience in
religious conversion; when Bunyan, for example, ceased from the efforts
to establish his own righteousness and saw that righteousness above him
in the eternal heavens, he walked as a man suddenly illuminated, and
could hardly forbear telling his joy to the crows upon the plough-land;
and so, in its degree, with the spiritual exaltation produced by the
love of man and woman when it touches a certain rare but real altitude.
If a poet can succeed in lifting up our hearts so that they may know for
actual the truth of these things, he has contributed an important
fragment towards an interpretation of human life. And this Browning has
assuredly done. The sense of a power outside oneself whose influence
invades the just-awakened man, the conviction that the secret of life
has been revealed, the lying passive and prone to the influx of the
spirit, the illumination, the joy, the assurance that old things have
passed away and that all things have become new, the acceptance of a
supreme law, the belief in a victory obtained over time and death, the
rapture in a heart prepared for all self-sacrifice, entire
immolation--these are rendered by Browning with a fidelity which if
reached solely by imagination is indeed surprising, for who can discover
these mysteries except through a personal experience?[101] If the senses
co-operate--as perhaps they do--in such mysteries, they are senses in a
state of transfiguration, senses taken up into the spirit--"Whether in
the body or out of the body I cannot tell." When Caponsacchi bears the
body of Pompilia in a swoon to her chamber in the inn at Castelnuovo, it
is as if he bore the host. From the first moment when he set eyes upon
her in the theatre,
A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad,
he is delivered from his frivolous self, he is solemnized and awed; the
form of his worship is self-sacrifice; his first word to her--"I am
yours "--is
An eternity
Of speech, to match the immeasurable depth
O' the soul that then broke silence.
To abstain from ever seeing her again would be joy more than pain if
this were duty to her and to God. For him the mere revelation of
Pompilia would suffice. His inmost feeling is summed up with perfect
adequacy in a word to the Judges: "You know this is not love, Sirs--it
is faith."
There is another kind of faith which comes not suddenly through passion
but slowly through thought and action and trial, and the long fidelity
of a life. It is that of which Milton speaks in the lines:
Till old experience do attain
To something of Prophetic strain.
This is the faith of Browning's Pope Innocent, who up to extreme old age
has kept open his intelligence both on the earthward and the Godward
sides, and who, being wholly delivered from self by that devotion to
duty which is the habit of his mind, can apprehend the truth of things
and pronounce judgment upon them almost with the certitude of an
instrument of the divine righteousness. And yet he is entirely human,
God's vicegerent and also an old man, learned in the secrets of the
heart, patient in the inquisition of facts, weighing his documents,
scrutinising each fragment of evidence, burdened by the sense of
responsibility, cheered also by the opportunity of true service, grave
but not sad--
Simple, sagacious, mild yet resolute,
With prudence, probity and--what beside
From the other world he feels impress at times;
a "grey ultimate decrepitude," yet visited by the spiritual fire which
touches a soul whose robe of flesh is worn thin; not unassailed by
doubts as to the justice of his final decision, but assured that his
part is confidently to make the best use of the powers with which he has
been entrusted; young of heart, if also old, in his rejoicing in
goodness and his antipathy to evil.
_The Ring and the Book_ is a great receptacle into which Browning
poured, with an affluence that perhaps is excessive, all his powers--his
searchings for truth, his passion, his casuistry, his feeling for
beauty, his tenderness, his gift of pity, his veiled memories of what
was most precious in the past, his hopes for the future, his worldly
knowledge, his unworldly aspirations, his humour, such as it was, robust
rather than delicate. Could the three monologues which tell how in
various ways it strikes a Roman contemporary have been fused into a
single dialogue, could the speeches of the two advocates have been
briefly set over, one against the other, instead of being drawn out at
length, we might still have got the whole of Browning's mind. But we
must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his
own business best. Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed
with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Rome,
which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm.
Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of
the motherhood of Pompilia. Never were the gropings of intellect and the
intuitions of the spirit shown by him in their weakness and their
strength with such a lucid subtlety as in the deliberations and
decisions of the Pope. The whole poem which he compares to a ring was
the ring of a strong male finger; but the posy of the ring, and the
comparison is again his own, tells how it was a gift hammered and filed
during the years of smithcraft "in memoriam"; in memory and also with a
hope.
The British Public, whom Browning addresses at the close of his poem,
and who "liked him not" during so many years, now when he was not far
from sixty went over to his side. _The Ring and the Book_ almost
immediately passed into a second edition. The decade from 1869 onwards
is called by Mrs Orr the fullest period in Browning's life. His social
occupations and entertainments both in London and for a time as a
visitor at country-houses became more numerous and absorbing, yet he had
energy for work as well as for play. During these ten years no fewer
than nine new volumes of his poetry appeared. None of them are London
poems, and Italy is for the present almost forgotten; it is the scene of
only two or three short pieces, which are included in the volume of
1876--_Pacchiarotto and how he worked in distemper; with other Poems_.
The other pieces of the decade as regards their origin fall with a
single exception into two groups; first those of ancient Greece,
suggested by Browning's studies in classical drama; secondly those,
which in a greater or less degree, are connected with his summer
wanderings in France and Switzerland. The dream-scene of Prince
Hohenstiel-Schwangau is Leicester Square; but this also is one of the
poems of France. _The Inn Album_ alone is English in its characters and
their surroundings. Such a grouping of the works of the period is of a
superficial nature, and it can be readily dismissed. It brings into
prominence, however, the fact that Browning, while resolved to work out
what was in him, lay open to casual suggestions. He had acquired
certain methods which he could apply to almost any topic. He had
confidence that any subject on which he concentrated his powers of mind
could be compelled to yield material of interest. It cannot be said that
he exercised always a wise discretion in the choice of subjects; these
ought to have been excellent in themselves; he trusted too much to the
successful issue of the play of his own intellect and imagination around
and about his subjects. _The Ring and the Book_ had given him practice,
extending over several years, in handling the large dramatic monologue.
Now he was prepared to stretch the dramatic monologue beyond the bounds,
and new devices were invented to keep it from stagnating and to carry it
forward. Imaginary disputants intervene in the monologue; there are
objections, replies, retorts; a second player in the game not being
found, the speaker has to play against himself.
In the story of the Roman murder-case fancy was mingled with fact, and
truth with falsehood, with a view to making truth in the end the more
salient. The poet had used to the full his dramatic right of throwing
himself into intellectual sympathy with persons towards whom he stood in
moral antagonism or at least experienced an inward sense of alienation.
The characteristic of much of his later poetry is that it is for ever
tasking falsehood to yield up truth, for ever (to employ imagery of his
own) as a swimmer beating the treacherous water with the feet in order
that the head may rise higher into the pure air made for the spirit's
breathing. Browning's genius united an intellect which delighted in the
investigation of complex problems with a spiritual and emotional nature
manifesting itself in swift and simple solutions of those problems; it
united an analytic or discursive power supplied by the head with an
intuitive power springing from the heart. He employed his brain to twist
and tangle a Gordian knot in order that in a moment it might be cut with
the sword of the spirit. In the earlier poems his spiritual ardours and
intuitions were often present throughout, and without latency, without
reserve; impassioned truth often flashed upon the reader through no
intervening or resisting medium. In _The Ring and the Book_, and in a
far greater degree in some subsequent poems, while the supreme authority
resides in the spiritual intuitions or the passions of the heart, their
instantaneous, decisive work waits until a prolonged casuistry has
accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the
process of the poet than truth. And yet it is never actually so. Rather
to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to
seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will
track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot
of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as
the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist. The masculine
characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning's
intellectual casuistry--a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and
they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be
uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the
female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in _The Inn Album_,
and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is
either a divine revelation--the vision seen from a higher and clearer
standpoint--or a dictate of pure human passion. Eminent moments in life
had an extraordinary interest for Browning--moments when life, caught up
out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its
guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth
through some noble ardour of the heart. Therefore it did not seem much
to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious
book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and
falsehood, in view of the fact that a shining moment is at last to
spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right
from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness. Browning's
readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness
and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth.[102]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 93: Letter to Miss Blagden, Feb. 24, 1870, given by Mrs Orr,
p. 287.]
[Footnote 94: Vivid descriptions of Le Croisic at an earlier date may be
found in one of Balzac's short stories.]
[Footnote 95: _Life of Jowett_ by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, i.
400, 401.]
[Footnote 96: A repeated invitation in 1877 was also declined. In 1875
Browning was nominated by the Independent Club to the office of Lord
Rector of Glasgow University.]
[Footnote 97: Such a book would naturally attract Browning, who, like
his father, had an interest in celebrated criminal cases. In his
_Memories_ (p. 338), Kegan Paul records his surprise at a dinner-party
where the conversation turned on murder, to find Browning acquainted "to
the minutest detail" with every _cause célèbre_ of that kind within
living memory.]
[Footnote 98: _An Artist's Reminiscences_, by R. Lehmann (1894), p.
224.]
[Footnote 99: Rossetti Papers, p. 302.]
[Footnote 100: So the story was told by Dante Rossetti, as recorded by
Mrs Gilchrist; she says that she believed the story was told of himself
by Carlyle.]
[Footnote 101: The passage specially referred to is in Caponsacchi's
monologue, II. 936-973, beginning with "Thought? nay, sirs, what shall
follow was not thought."]
[Footnote 102: I have used here some passages already printed in my
_Studies in Literature_.]