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,