CHAPTER VI.
THE RING AND THE BOOK.
Tout passe.—L'art robuste
Seul a l'éternité.
Le buste
Survit à la cité.
Et la médaille austère
Que trouve un laboureur
Sous terre
Révèle un empereur.
—GAUTIER: L'Art.
After four years of silence, the Dramatis Personæ was followed by The Ring and the Book. This monumental poem, in some respects his culminating achievement, has its roots in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate which seems to occupy the entire [community], and which turns, not upon immortality, or spiritualism, or the nature of God, or the fate of man, but on the guilt or innocence of the actors in one pitiful drama,—a priest, a noble, an illiterate girl.
With the analytic exuberance of one to whom the processes of Art were yet more fascinating than its products, Browning has described how he discovered this forgotten tale and forged its glowing metal into the Ring. The chance finding of an "old square yellow book" which aroused his curiosity among the frippery of a Florentine stall, was as grotesquely casual an inception as poem ever had. But it was one of those accidents which, suddenly befalling a creative mind, organise its loose and scattered material with a magical potency unattainable by prolonged cogitation. The story of Pompilia took shape in the gloom and glare of a stormy Italian night of June 1860, as he watched from the balcony of Casa Guidi. The patient elaboration of after-years wrought into consummate expressiveness the donnée of that hour. But the conditions under which the elaboration was carried out were pathetically unlike those of the primal vision. Before the end of June in the following year Mrs Browning died, and Browning presently left Florence for ever. For the moment all the springs of poetry were dried up, and it is credible enough that, as Mrs Orr says, Browning abandoned all thought of a poem, and even handed over his material to another. But within a few months, it is clear, the story of Pompilia not merely recovered [its] hold upon his imagination, but gathered a subtle hallowing association with what was most spiritual in that vanished past of which it was the last and most brilliant gift. The poem which enshrined Pompilia was thus instinct with reminiscence; it was, with all its abounding vitality, yet commemorative and memorial; and we understand how Browning, no friend of the conventions of poetic art, entered on and closed his giant task with an invocation to the "Lyric Love," as it were the Urania, or heavenly Muse, of a modern epic.
The definite planning of the poem in its present shape belongs to the autumn of 1862. In September 1862 he wrote to Miss Blagden from Biarritz of "my new poem which is about to be, and of which the whole is pretty well in my head—the Roman murder-story, you know."[47] After the completion of the Dramatis Personæ in 1863-64, the "Roman murder-story" became his central occupation. To it three quiet early morning hours were daily given, and it grew steadily under his hand. For the rest he began to withdraw from his seclusion, to mix freely in society, to "live and like earth's way." He talked openly among his literary friends of [the] poem and its progress, rumour and speculation busied themselves with it as never before with work of his, and the literary world at large looked for its publication with eager and curious interest. At length, in November 1868, the first instalment was published. It was received by the most authoritative part of the press with outspoken, even dithyrambic eulogies, in which the severely judicial Athenæum took the lead. Confirmed sceptics or deriders, like Edward FitzGerald, rubbed their eyes and tried once again, in vain, to make the old barbarian's verses construe and scan. To critics trained in classical traditions the original structure of the poem was extremely disturbing; and most of FitzGerald's friends shared, according to him, the opinion of Carlyle, who roundly pronounced it "without Backbone or basis of Common-sense," and "among the absurdest books ever written by a gifted Man." Tennyson, however, admitted (to FitzGerald) that he "found greatness" in it,[48] and Mr Swinburne was in the forefront of the chorus of praise. The audience which now welcomed Browning was in fact substantially that which had hailed the first fresh runnels of Mr Swinburne's genius a few years before; the fame of both marked a wave of reaction from the austere simplicity and attenuated sentiment of the later Idylls of the King. Readers upon whom the shimmering exquisiteness of Arthurian knighthood began to pall turned with relish to Browning's [Italian] murder story, with its sensational crime, its mysterious elopement, its problem interest, its engaging actuality.
[47] W.M. Rossetti reports Browning to have told him, in a call, March 15, 1868, that he "began it in October 1864. Was staying at Bayonne, and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of his twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution." The date is presumably an error of Rossetti's for 1862 (Rossetti Papers, p. 302). Cf. Letter of Sept. 29, 1862 (Orr, p. 259).
[48] More Letters of E.F.G.
And undoubtedly this was part of the attraction of the theme for Browning himself. He had inherited his father's taste for stories of mysterious crime.[49] And to the detective's interest in probing a mystery, which seems to have been uppermost in the elder Browning, was added the pleader's interest in making out an ingenious and plausible case for each party. The casuist in him, the lover of argument as such, and the devoted student of Euripides,[50] seized with delight upon a forensic subject which made it natural to introduce the various "persons of the drama," giving their individual testimonies and "apologies." He avails himself remorselessly of all the pretexts for verbosity, for iteration, for sophistical invention, afforded by the cumbrous machinery of the law, and its proverbial delay. Every detail is examined from every point of view. Little that is sordid or revolting is suppressed. But then it is assuredly a mistake to represent, with one of the liveliest of Browning's recent exponents, that the story was for him, even at the outset, in the stage of "crude fact," merely a common and [sordid] tale like a hundred others, picked up "at random" from a rubbish-heap to be subjected to the alchemy of imagination by way of showing the infinite worth of "the insignificant." Rather, he thought that on that broiling June day, a providential "Hand" had "pushed" him to the discovery, in that unlikely place, of a forgotten treasure, which he forthwith pounced upon with ravishment as a "prize." He saw in it from the first something rare, something exceptional, and made wondering inquiries at Rome, where ecclesiasticism itself scarcely credited the truth of a story which told "for once clean for the Church and dead against the world, the flesh, and the devil."[51] The metal which went to the making of the Ring, and on which he poured his imaginative alloy, was crude and untempered, but it was gold. Its disintegrated particles gleamed obscurely, as if with a challenge to the restorative cunning of the craftsman. Above all, of course, and beyond all else, that arresting gleam lingered about the bald record of the romance of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. It was upon these two that Browning's divining imagination fastened. Their relation was the crucial point of the whole story, the point at which report stammered most lamely, and where the interpreting spirit of poetry was most needed "to abolish the death of things, deep calling unto deep." This process was itself, however, not sudden or simple. This first inspiration was superb, visionary, romantic,—in keeping [with] "the beauty and fearfulness of that June night" upon the terrace at Florence, where it came to him.
"All was sure,
Fire laid and cauldron set, the obscene ring traced,
The victim stripped and prostrate: what of God?
The cleaving of a cloud, a cry, a crash,
Quenched lay their cauldron, cowered i' the dust the crew,
As, in a glory of armour like Saint George,
Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest
Bearing away the lady in his arms
Saved for a splendid minute and no more."[52]
[49] Cf. II. Corkran, Celebrities and I (R. Browning, senior), 1903.
[50] It is perhaps not without significance that in the summer sojourn when The Ring and the Book was planned, Euripides was, apart from that, his absorbing companion. "I have got on," he writes to Miss Blagden, "by having a great read at Euripides,—the one book I brought with me."
[51] Ring and the Book, i. 437.
[52] Ring and the Book, i. 580-588.
Such a vision might have been rendered without change in the chiselled gold and agate of the Idylls of the King. But Browning's hero could be no Sir Galahad; he had to be something less; and also something more. The idealism of his nature had to force its way through perplexities and errors, beguiled by the distractions and baffled by the duties of his chosen career. Born to be a lover, in Dante's great way, he had groped through life without the vision of Beatrice, seeking to satisfy his blind desire, as perhaps Dante after Beatrice's death did also, with the lower love and scorning the loveless asceticism of the monk. The Church encouraged its priest to be "a fribble and a coxcomb"; and a fribble and a coxcomb, by his own confession, Caponsacchi became. But the vanities he mingled with never quite blinded him. He walked in the garden of the Hesperides bent on great adventure, [plucked] in ignorance hedge-fruit and feasted to satiety, but yet he scorned the achievement, laughing at such high fame for hips and haws.[53] Then suddenly flashed upon him the apparition, in the theatre, of
"A lady, young, tall, beautiful, strange and sad."
[53] Caponsacchi, 1002 f.
The gaze burnt to his soul, and the beautiful, sad, strange smile haunted him night and day; but their first effect was to crush and scatter all thoughts of love. The young priest found himself haunting the solemn shades of the Duomo instead of serenading countesses; vowed to write no more canzonets, and doubted much whether Marini were a better poet than Dante after all. His patron jocularly charged him with playing truant in Church all day long:—
"'Are you turning Molinist?' I answered quick:
'Sir, what if I turned Christian? It might be.'"
The forged love-letters he instantly sees through. They are the scorpion—blotch feigned to issue miraculously from Madonna's mouth. And then Pompilia makes her appeal. "Take me to Rome!" The Madonna has turned her face upon him indeed, "to summon me and signify her choice," and he at once receives and accepts
"my own fact, my miracle
Self-authorised and self-explained,"
in the presence of which all hesitation vanished,—nay, [thought] itself fell back before the tide of revealing emotion:—
"I paced the city: it was the first Spring.
By the invasion I lay passive to,
In rushed new things, the old were rapt away;
Alike abolished—the imprisonment
Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world
That pulled me down."
The bonds of his old existence snapped, the former heaven and earth died for him, and that death was the beginning of life:—
"Death meant, to spurn the ground.
Soar to the sky,—die well and you do that.
The very immolation made the bliss;
Death was the heart of life, and all the harm
My folly had crouched to avoid, now proved a veil
Hiding all gain my wisdom strove to grasp:
As if the intense centre of the flame
Should turn a heaven to that devoted fly
Which hitherto, sophist alike and sage,
Saint Thomas with his sober grey goose-quill,
And sinner Plato by Cephisian reed,
Would fain, pretending just the insect's good,
Whisk off, drive back, consign to shade again.
Into another state, under new rule
I knew myself was passing swift and sure;
Whereof the initiatory pang approached,
Felicitous annoy, as bitter-sweet
As when the virgin-band, the victors chaste,
Feel at the end the earthly garments drop,
And rise with something of a rosy shame
Into immortal nakedness: so I
Lay, and let come the proper throe would thrill
Into the ecstasy and outthrob pain."
But he presently discovered that his new task did not contravene, but only completed, the old ideal. The Church had offered her priest no alternative between the world and the cloister,—self-indulgence and self-slaughter. For ignoble passion her sole remedy was to crush passion altogether. She calls to the priest to renounce the fleshly woman and cleave to Her, the Bride who took his plighted troth; but it is a scrannel voice sighing from stone lungs:—
"Leave that live passion, come, be dead with me!"
From the exalted Pisgah of his "new state" he recognised that the true self-sacrifice, the perfect priesthood, lay by way of life, not death, that life and death
"Are means to an end, that passion uses both,
Indisputably mistress of the man
Whose form of worship is self-sacrifice."
Yet it is not this recognition, but the "passion" which ultimately determines his course. Love is, for Browning, in his maturity, deeper and more secure than thought; Caponsacchi wavers in his thinking, falls back upon the narrower conception of priesthood, persuades himself that his duty is to serve God:—
"Duty to God is duty to her: I think
God, who created her, will save her too
Some new way, by one miracle the more,
Without me."
But when once again he is confronted with the strange [sad] face, and hears once more the pitiful appeal, all hesitations vanish, and he sees no duty
"Like daring try be good and true myself,
Leaving the shows of things to the Lord of Show."
With the security of perfect innocence he flings at his judges as "the final fact"—
"In contempt for all misapprehending ignorance
Of the human heart, much more the mind of Christ,—
That I assuredly did bow, was blessed
By the revelation of Pompilia."
Thus, through all the psychologic subtlety of the portrait the groundwork of spiritual romance subsists. The militant saint of legend reappears, in the mould and garb of the modern world, subject to all its hampering conditions, and compelled to make his way over the corpses, not of lions and dragons only, but of consecrated duties and treasured instincts. And the matter-of-course chivalry of professed knighthood is as inferior in art as in ethics to the chivalry to which this priest, vowed to another service, is lifted by the vision of Pompilia.
Pompilia is herself, like her soldier saint, vowed to another service. But while he only after a struggle overcomes the apparent discrepancy between his duty as a priest and as a knight, she rises with the ease and swiftness of a perfectly pure and spiritual nature from the duty of endurance to the duty of resistance—
"Promoted at one cry
O' the trump of God to the new service, not
To longer bear, but henceforth fight, be found
Sublime in new impatience with the foe!"[54]
[54] The Pope, 1057.
And she carries the same fearless simplicity into her love. Caponsacchi falters and recoils in his adorations of her, with the compunction of the voluptuary turned ascetic; he hardly dares to call his passion by a name which the vulgar will mumble and misinterpret: she, utterly unconscious of such peril, glories in the immeasurable devotion
"Of my one friend, my only, all my own,
Who put his breast between the spears and me."
Pompilia is steeped in the remembrance of the poet's "Lyric Love." Remote enough this illiterate child must seem from the brilliant and accomplished Elizabeth Browning. But Browning's conception of his wife's nature had a significant affinity to his portrayal of Pompilia. She, he declared, was "the poet," taught by genius more than by experience; he himself "the clever person," effectively manipulating a comprehensive knowledge of life. Pompilia does indeed put her narrow experience to marvellous use; her blending of the infantine with the profound touches the bounds of possible consistency; but her naïve spiritual instinct is ever on the alert, and fills her with a perpetual sense of the strangeness of the things that happen, a "childlike, wondering yet subtle perception of the anomalies of life."
Spiritual simplicity has received no loftier tribute than from the most opulent and complex poetic intellect of our day. He loves to bring such natures into contrast with the cunning and cleverness of the world; to show an Aprile, a David, a Pippa loosening the tangle of more complicated lives with a song. Pompilia is a sister of the same spiritual household as these. But she is a far more wonderful creation than any of them; the same exquisite rarity of soul, but unfolded under conditions more sternly real, and winning no such miraculous alacrity of response. In lyrical wealth and swiftness Browning had perhaps advanced little since the days of Pippa; but how much he had grown in Shakespearian realism is fairly measured by the contrast between that early, half-legendary lyric child, by whose unconscious alchemy the hard hearts of Asolo are suddenly turned, and this later creation, whose power over her world, though not less real, is so much more slowly and hardly achieved. Her "song" is only the ravishing "unheard melody" which breathes like incense from her inarticulate childhood. By simple force of being what she is, she turns the priest into the saint, compels a cynical society to believe in spiritual love, and wins even from the husband who bought her and hated her and slew her the confession of his last desperate cry—
"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
In contrast with these two, who shape their course by [the] light of their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."
"Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?...
Slunk into corners!"
The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,—it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where [the] authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light. Was Caponsacchi blind?
"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun,
Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56]
[55] The Pope, 1550 f.
[56] The Pope, 1563.
It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the Cenci had this other, less famous, "Roman murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government. None of his unofficial heroes—[Paracelsus] or Sordello or Rabbi ben Ezra—has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. But the Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office. He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naïvely submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world. This summing-up of the case is in effect the poet's own, and is rich in the familiar prepossessions of Browning's individualist and unecclesiastical mind. He vindicates Caponsacchi more in the spirit of an antique Roman than of a Christian; he has open ears for the wisdom of the pagan world, and toleration for the human Euripides; scorn for the founder of Jesuitism, sympathy for the heretical Molinists; and he blesses the imperfect knowledge which makes faith hard. The Pope, like his creator, is "ever a fighter," and his last word is a peremptory rejection of all appeals for mercy, whether in the name of policy, Christian forgiveness, or "soft culture," and a resolve to
"Smite with my whole strength once more, ere end my part,
Ending, so far as man may, this offence."
And with this solemn and final summing-up—this quietly authoritative keynote into which all the clashing [discords] seem at length to be resolved—the poem, in most hands, would have closed. But Browning was too ingrained a believer in the "oblique" methods of Art to acquiesce in so simple and direct a conclusion; he loved to let truth struggle through devious and unlikely channels to the heart instead of missing its aim by being formally proclaimed or announced. Hence we are hurried from the austere solitary meditation of the aged Pope to the condemned cell of Guido, and have opened before us with amazing swiftness and intensity all the recesses of that monstrous nature, its "lips unlocked" by "lucidity of soul." It ends, not on a solemn keynote, but in that passionate and horror-stricken cry where yet lurks the implicit confession that he is guilty and his doom just—
"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?"
It is easy—though hardly any longer quite safe—to cavil at the unique structure of The Ring and the Book. But this unique structure, which probably never deterred a reader who had once got under way, answers in the most exact and expressive way to Browning's aims. The subject is not the story of Pompilia only, but the fortunes of her story, and of all stories of spiritual naïvete such as hers, when projected upon the variously refracting media of mundane judgment and sympathies. It is not her guilt or innocence only which is on trial, but the mind of man in its capacity to receive and apprehend the surprises of the spirit. The issue, triumphant for her, [is] dubious and qualified for the mind of man, where the truth only at last flames forth in its purity. Browning even hints at the close that "one lesson" to be had from his work is the falseness of human estimation, fame, and speech. But for the poet who thus summed up the purport of his twenty thousand verses, this was not the whole truth of the matter. Here, as always, that immense, even riotous, vitality of his made the hazards and vicissitudes of the process even more precious than the secure triumph of the issue, and the spirit of poetry itself lured him along the devious ways of minds in which personality set its own picturesque or lurid tinge upon truth. The execution vindicated the design. Voluble, even "mercilessly voluble," the poet of The Ring and the Book undoubtedly is. But it is the volubility of a consummate master of expression, in whose hands the difficult medium of blank verse becomes an instrument of Shakespearian flexibility and compass, easily answering to all the shifts and windings of a prodigal invention, familiar without being vulgar, gritty with homely detail without being flat; always, at its lowest levels, touched, like a plain just before sunrise, with hints of ethereal light, momentarily withheld; and rising from time to time without effort to a magnificence of phrase and movement touched in its turn with that suggestion of the homely and the familiar which in the inmost recesses of Browning's genius lurked so near—so vitally near—to the roots of the sublime.