"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.
CHAPTER VII.
AFTERMATH.
Which wins—Earth's poet or the Heavenly Muse?
—Aristophanes' Apology.
The publication of The Ring and the Book marks in several ways a turning-point in Browning's career. Conceived and planned before the tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems, pervaded by his wife's spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love. But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace. With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness. He lived in the world, and frankly "liked earth's way," enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure. The little knot of critics whose praise even of Men and Women and Dramatis Personæ; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness, found [their] voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the story of Pompilia. Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward FitzGerald, held their ground. And while the tone of even hostile criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects, seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of Pacchiarotto.
From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship. But the decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his life. Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured, provoked, or bewildered the reading world. Everything was now planned on a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of The Ring and the Book became normal. He gave free rein to his delight in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton Night-cap Country and The Inn Album; and the "special pleaders," Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge. A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power. His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still. Not that his high spirituality is insecure, [his] heroic idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere "clever man," and seek their nutriment and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the transmuting work of imagination has been already done. It is no accident that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek tragedy, so unlike his own creations, became in these years for the first time an effective source of poetry. The poems of this decade form thus an odd motley series—realism and romance interlaced but hardly blent, Aeschylus and Euripides, the divine helper Herakles and the glorious embodiment of the soul of Athens, Balaustion, emerging and re-emerging after intervals occupied by the chicaneries of Miranda or the Elder Man. No inept legend for the Browning of this decade is the noble song of Thamuris which his Aristophanes half mockingly declaimed. "Earth's poet" and "the heavenly Muse" are not allies, and they at times go different ways.
Hervé Riel (published March 1871) is less characteristic of Browning in purely literary quality than in the hearty helpfulness which it celebrates, and the fine international chivalry by which it was inspired. The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon them. [Sympathy] with the French sufferers induced Browning to do violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith for publication in The Cornhill. Most of its French readers doubtless heard of Hervé Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time. His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets. But they recognised the poet of The Ring and the Book, Hervé has no touch of Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,—summoned in a supreme emergency for which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.
A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him. Balaustion's Adventure was, as the charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the agony of Athens. Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble fragmentary "prologue" to a Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes), a command of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more Elizabethan than Greek. The incongruity of Greek dramatic methods with his own [seems] to have speedily checked his progress; but Euripides, the author of the Greek Hippolytus, retained a peculiar fascination for him, and it was on another Euripidean drama that he now, in the fulness of his powers, set his hand. The result certainly does not diminish our sense of the incongruity. Keenly as he admired the humanity and pathos of Euripides, he challenges comparison with Euripides most successfully when he goes completely his own way. He was too robustly original to "transcribe" well, and his bold emphatic speech, curbed to the task of reproducing the choice and pregnant sobriety of Attic style, is apt to eliminate everything but the sobriety. The "transcribed" Greek is often yet flatter than "literal" versions of Greek verse are wont to be, and when Browning speaks in his own person the style recovers itself with a sudden and vehement bound, like a noble wild creature abruptly released from restraint. Among the finest of these "recoveries" are the bursts of description which Balaustion's enthusiasm interjects between the passages of dialogue. Such is the magnificent picture of the coming of Herakles. In the original he merely enters as the chorus end their song, addressing them with the simple inquiry, "Friends, is Admetos haply within?" to which the chorus reply, like civil retainers, "Yes, Herakles, he is at home." Browning, or his Balaustion, cannot permit the mighty undoer of the tragic harms to come on in this homely fashion. A great interrupting voice rings suddenly [through] the dispirited maunderings of Admetos' house-folk; and the hearty greeting, "My hosts here!" thrills them with the sense that something good and opportune is at hand:—