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.