Of the twelve parts — occupying in all about twenty-one thousand lines — the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of the implicated priest, Caponsacchi, with the meditation of the Pope, and with the pathetic utterance of Pompilia. It is not a dramatic poem in the sense that “Pippa Passes” is, for its ten Books (the first and twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues. “The Ring and the Book”, in a word, consists, besides the two extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a poetic Koh-i-Noor.
The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by Browning for a `lira’ (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865. Therein is set forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido Franceschini; and of that noble’s trial, sentence, and doom. It is much the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his predecessors. The story fascinated Browning, who, having in this book and elsewhere mastered all the details, conceived the idea of writing the history of the crime in a series of monodramatic revelations on the part of the individuals more or less directly concerned. The more he considered the plan the more it shaped itself to a great accomplishment, and early in 1866 he began the most ambitious work of his life.
An enthusiastic admirer has spoken of the poem as “one of the most extraordinary feats of which we have any record in literature.” But poetry is not mental gymnastics. All this insistence upon “extraordinary feats” is to be deprecated: it presents the poet as Hercules, not as Apollo: in a word, it is not criticism. The story is one of vulgar fraud and crime, romantic to us only because the incidents occurred in Italy, in the picturesque Rome and Arezzo of two centuries ago. The old bourgeois couple, Pietro and Violante Comparini, manage to wed their thirteen-year-old putative daughter to a middle-aged noble of Arezzo. They expect the exquisite repute of an aristocratic connection, and other tangible advantages. He, impoverished as he is, looks for a splendid dowry. No one thinks of the child-wife, Pompilia. She becomes the scapegoat, when the gross selfishness of the contracting parties stands revealed. Count Guido has a genius for domestic tyranny. Pompilia suffers. When she is about to become a mother she determines to leave her husband, whom she now dreads as well as dislikes. Since the child is to be the inheritor of her parents’ wealth, she will not leave it to the tender mercies of Count Guido. A young priest, a canon of Arezzo, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, helps her to escape. In due course she gives birth to a son. She has scarce time to learn the full sweetness of her maternity ere she is done to death like a trampled flower. Guido, who has held himself thrall to an imperative patience, till his hold upon the child’s dowry should be secure, hires four assassins, and in the darkness of night betakes himself to Rome. He and his accomplices enter the house of Pietro Comparini and his wife, and, not content with slaying them, also murders Pompilia. But they are discovered, and Guido is caught red-handed. Pompilia’s evidence alone is damnatory, for she was not slain outright, and lingers long enough to tell her story. Franceschini is not foiled yet, however. His plea is that he simply avenged the wrong done to him by his wife’s adulterous connection with the priest Caponsacchi. But even in the Rome of that evil day justice was not extinct. Guido’s motive is proved to be false; he himself is condemned to death. An appeal to the Pope is futile. Finally, the wretched man pays the too merciful penalty of his villainy.
There is nothing grand, nothing noble here: at most only a tragic pathos in the fate of the innocent child-wife Pompilia. It is clear, therefore, that the greatness of “The Ring and the Book” must depend even less upon its subject, its motive, than upon its being “an extraordinary feat” in the gymnastics of verse.
In a sense, Browning’s longest work is akin to that of his wife. Both “The Ring and the Book” and “Aurora Leigh” are metrical novels. The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences: the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends. If “The Ring and the Book” were deflowered of its blooms of poetry and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister “getting up” a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to, say, “The Moonstone”; its author would be insignificant beside the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The extraordinariness of the feat would then be but indifferently commented upon.
As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method, will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment. To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits. One must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians have done or refrained from doing.
“The Ring and the Book”, as I have said, was not begun in the year of its imagining.* It is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative, and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened in the fourth year of the poet’s widowerhood, for his happy married period of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.
—
* The title is explained as follows: — “The story of the Franceschini case,
as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence
to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed
in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold
prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.
The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file;
it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.
The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged,
and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning’s material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.
It was too HARD. It was `pure crude fact’, secreted from the fluid being
of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state
it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.
He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or — as he also calls it —
of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record
the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed,
first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised,
there broadly stamped with human thought and passion,
he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise
in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.” — Mrs. Orr.
—
On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase he read the book from end to end. “A Spirit laughed and leapt through every limb.” The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno: and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.
”Beneath
I’ the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air —
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch of tall datura, waxed and waned
The lamp-fly lured there, wanting the white flower.”
Scene by scene was re-enacted, though of course only in certain essential details. The final food for the imagination was found in a pamphlet of which he came into possession of in London, where several important matters were given which had no place in the volume he had picked up in Florence.
Much, far the greater part, of the first “book” is — interesting! It is mere verse. As verse, even, it is often so involved, so musicless occasionally, so banal now and again, so inartistic in colour as well as in form, that one would, having apprehended its explanatory interest, pass on without regret, were it not for the noble close — the passionate, out-welling lines to “the truest poet I have ever known,” the beautiful soul who had given her all to him, whom, but four years before he wrote these words, he had laid to rest among the cypresses and ilexes of the old Florentine garden of the dead.
”O lyric Love, half angel and half bird
And all a wonder and a wild desire, —
Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun,
Took sanctuary within the holier blue,
And sang a kindred soul out to his face, —
Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart —
When the first summons from the darkling earth
Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue,
And bared them of the glory — to drop down,
To toil for man, to suffer or to die, —
This is the same voice: can thy soul know change?
Hail then, and hearken from the realms of help!
Never may I commence my song, my due
To God who best taught song by gift of thee,
Except with bent head and beseeching hand —
That still, despite the distance and the dark,
What was, again may be; some interchange
Of grace, some splendour once thy very thought,
Some benediction anciently thy smile:
— Never conclude, but raising hand and head
Thither where eyes, that cannot reach, yet yearn
For all hope, all sustainment, all reward,
Their utmost up and on, — so blessing back
In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home,
Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud,
Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!”
. . . . .
Thereafter, for close upon five thousand words, the poem descends again to the level of a versified tale. It is saved from ruin by subtlety of intellect, striking dramatic verisimilitude, an extraordinary vigour, and occasional lines of real poetry. Retrospectively, apart from the interest, often strained to the utmost, most readers, I fancy, will recall with lingering pleasure only the opening of “The Other Half Rome”, the description of Pompilia, “with the patient brow and lamentable smile,” with flower-like body, in white hospital array — a child with eyes of infinite pathos, “whether a flower or weed, ruined: who did it shall account to Christ.”
In these three introductory books we have the view of the matter taken by those who side with Count Guido, of those who are all for Pompilia, and of the “superior person”, impartial because superciliously indifferent, though sufficiently interested to “opine”.
In the ensuing three books a much higher poetic level is reached. In the first, Guido speaks; in the second, Caponsacchi; the third, that lustrous opal set midway in the “Ring”, is Pompilia’s narrative. Here the three protagonists live and move before our eyes. The sixth book may be said to be the heart of the whole poem. The extreme intellectual subtlety of Guido’s plea stands quite unrivalled in poetic literature. In comparing it, for its poetic beauty, with other sections, the reader must bear in mind that in a poem of a dramatic nature the dramatic proprieties must be dominant. It would be obviously inappropriate to make Count Guido Franceschini speak with the dignity of the Pope, with the exquisite pathos of Pompilia, with the ardour, like suppressed molten lava, of Caponsacchi. The self-defence of the latter is a superb piece of dramatic writing. Once or twice the flaming volcano of his heart bursts upward uncontrollably, as when he cries —
”No, sirs, I cannot have the lady dead!
That erect form, flashing brow, fulgurant eye,
That voice immortal (oh, that voice of hers!) —
That vision of the pale electric sword
Angels go armed with — that was not the last
O’ the lady. Come, I see through it, you find,
Know the manoeuvre! Also herself said
I had saved her: do you dare say she spoke false?
Let me see for myself if it be so!”
Than the poignant pathos and beauty of “Pompilia”, there is nothing more exquisite in our literature. It stands alone. Here at last we have the poet who is the Lancelot to Shakespeare’s Arthur. It takes a supreme effort of genius to be as simple as a child. How marvellously, after the almost sublime hypocrisy of the end of Guido’s defence, after the beautiful dignity of Caponsacchi’s closing words, culminating abruptly in the heart-wrung cry, “O great, just, good God! miserable me!” — how marvellously comes upon the reader the delicate, tearful tenderness of the innocent child-wife —
”I am just seventeen years and five months old,
And, if I lived one day more, three full weeks;
’Tis writ so in the church’s register,
Lorenzo in Lucina, all my names
At length, so many names for one poor child,
— Francesca Camilla Vittoria Angela
Pompilia Comparini — laughable!”
Only two writers of our age have depicted women with that imaginative insight which is at once more comprehensive and more illuminative than women’s own invision of themselves — Robert Browning and George Meredith, but not even the latter, most subtle and delicate of all analysts of the tragi-comedy of human life, has surpassed “Pompilia”. The meeting and the swift uprising of love between Lucy and Richard, in “The Ordeal of Richard Feveral”, is, it is true, within the highest reach of prose romance: but between even the loftiest height of prose romance and the altitudes of poetry, there is an impassable gulf.
And as it is with simplicity so it is with tenderness. Only the sternly strong can be supremely tender. And infinitely tender is the poetry of “Pompilia” —
”Oh, how good God is that my babe was born,
— Better than born, baptised and hid away
Before this happened, safe from being hurt!
That had been sin God could not well forgive:
HE WAS TOO YOUNG TO SMILE AND SAVE HIMSELF — — ”
or the lines which tell how as a little girl she gave her roses not to the spick and span Madonna of the Church, but to the poor, dilapidated Virgin, “at our street-corner in a lonely niche,” with the babe that had sat upon her knees broken off: or that passage, with its exquisite naivete, where Pompilia relates why she called her boy Gaetano, because she wished “no old name for sorrow’s sake,” so chose the latest addition to the saints, elected only twenty-five years before —
”So, carefuller, perhaps,
To guard a namesake than those old saints grow,
Tired out by this time, — see my own five saints!”
or these —
”Thus, all my life,
I touch a fairy thing that fades and fades.
— Even to my babe! I thought, when he was born,
Something began for once that would not end,
Nor change into a laugh at me, but stay
For evermore, eternally quite mine — — ”
once more —
”One cannot judge
Of what has been the ill or well of life
The day that one is dying. . . .
Now it is over, and no danger more . . .
To me at least was never evening ye
t
But seemed far beautifuller than its day,
For past is past — — ”
Lovely, again, are the lines in which she speaks of the first “thrill of dawn’s suffusion through her dark,” the “light of the unborn face sent long before:” or those unique lines of the starved soul’s Spring (ll. 1512-27): or those, of the birth of her little one —
”A whole long fortnight; in a life like mine
A fortnight filled with bliss is long and much.
All women are not mothers of a boy. . . .
I never realised God’s birth before —
How he grew likest God in being born.
This time I felt like Mary, had my babe
Lying a little on my breast like hers.”
When she has weariedly, yet with surpassing triumph, sighed out her last words —
”God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i’ the dark to rise by. And I rise — — ”
who does not realise that to life’s end he shall not forget that plaintive voice, so poignantly sweet, that ineffable dying smile, those wistful eyes with so much less of earth than heaven?
But the two succeeding “books” are more tiresome and more unnecessary than the most inferior of the three opening sections — the first of the two, indeed, is intolerably wearisome, a desolate boulder-strewn gorge after the sweet air and sunlit summits of “Caponsacchi” and “Pompilia”. In the next “book” Innocent XII. is revealed. All this section has a lofty serenity, unsurpassed in its kind. It must be read from first to last for its full effect, but I may excerpt one passage, the high-water mark of modern blank-verse: —
Robert Browning - Delphi Poets Series Page 392