# Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.")/"The Ring and the Book"

"THE RING AND THE BOOK"
Certain rare works of literature, like others of art and philosophy, appear too gigantic to have been wholly wrought out each by the one man who we yet know did accomplish it unaided. Such a work reminds us of a great cathedral, which, even if ultimately finished in accordance with the plans of the supreme architect who designed it, could not be completed under his own supervision or during his own lifetime, being too vast and elaborate for fulfilment in a single generation. And as such a colossal work "The Ring and the Book" has always impressed me; and, indeed, without straining comparison, one may pursue with regard to it the suggestion of a great Gothic cathedral. For here truly we find the analogues of the soaring towers and pinnacles, the multitudinous niches with their statues, the innumerable intricate traceries, the gargoyles wildly grotesque; and, within, the many-coloured light through the stained windows with the red and purple of blood predominant, the long pillared echoing aisles, the altar with its piteous crucifix and altar-piece of the Last Judgment, the organ and the choir pealing their Miserere and De Profundis and In Excelsis Deo, the side chapels, the confessionals, the fantastic wood-carvings, the tombs with their effigies sculptured ​supine; and beneath, yet another chapel, as of death, and the solemn sepulchral crypts. The counterparts of all this and all these, I dare affirm, may veritably be found in this immense and complicate structure, whose foundations are so deep and whose crests are so lofty. Only, as a Gothic cathedral has been termed a petrified forest, we must image this work as a vivified cathedral, thrilling hot swift life through all its "marble nerves":—
"It interpenetrates my granite mass;
Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass
Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers;
Upon the winds, among the clouds, 'tis spread;
It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,—
They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.'
We have all often read the anecdote of Newton, so told as to imply that the discovery of the law of gravitation was owing to the accidental arrest of his attention by the accidental fall of an apple. But apples have fallen by myriads ever since Eve was tempted to eat of one in Eden; yet we do not learn that any of them ever suggested that law until, in the garden at Woolsthorpe, one fell into a mind already teeming with meditations to the very verge of the discovery, and prepared to crystallise round any appropriate fact that should fall among them. Just so a certain square old yellow Book, a hundred and sixty-seven years old, small quarto size, with crumpled vellum covers, part print, part manuscript—print three-fifths, written supplement the rest—must have passed unsuggestive or unproductive through very many hands, and might have passed through millions ​more without suggesting anything better than a little romance or a magazine article; but a great poet one fierce June day (in 1865, as I read) picks it up for a lira, eightpence English just, from among the old and new trash of a stall on a step of the Ricardi Palace in the Square of San Lorenzo, Florence. It thus falls into a heart and mind full of learning and knowledge, thought, insight, genius, intense human sympathy, which all leap to crystallise around it in most living crystallisation; and we have as result this stupendous poem, stupendous far more by quality than by quantity, though numbering over twenty thousand lines; a work destined to rank among the world's masterpieces—"The Ring and the Book."
Mr. Swinburne, in his fine Critical Essay on George Chapman, devotes several pages to the vindication of Browning from the common charge of obscurity; pages not really discursive, for they shed clear light upon the proper main theme. I am loth to mutilate such admirably proportioned eloquence; but as it appears to me no less just than eloquent in its insistence on certain dominant qualities of Browning's genius, I cannot refrain from citing a few of its salient sentences, while commending the whole to the study of the reader; for why put poorly in one's own words what has been already put richly in another's?
"Now, if there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning's intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim. To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire. He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with ​any certainly the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward, as it lives along the animated line of its labour, springs from thread to thread, and darts from centre to circumference of the glittering and quivering web of living thought, woven from the inexhaustible stores of his perception, and kindled from the inexhaustible fire of his imagination. He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway. It is hopeless to enjoy the charm or to apprehend the gist of his writings except with a mind thoroughly alert, an attention awake at all points, a spirit open and ready to be kindled by the contact of the writer's:. . . we have but to come with an open and pliant spirit, untired and undisturbed by the work or the idleness of the day, and we cannot but receive a vivid and active pleasure in following the swift and fine radiations, the subtle play and keen vibration of its sleepless fires; and the more steadily we trace their course the more surely do we see that these forked flashes of fancy and changing lights of thought move unerringly around one centre, and strike straight in the end to one point."
Now, if Mr. Swinburne is right, as in my judgment he certainly is, the dominant qualities he has affirmed will naturally be most conspicuous in Browning's greatest work. Let us now go back to the Book:—
"'Romana Homicidiorum—nay, Better translate—'A Roman murder-case: Position of the entire criminal cause Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman, With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay, Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death By heading or hanging as befitted ranks, At Rome on February Twenty-two, Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety-eight: Wherein it is disputed if, and when,
Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape The customary forfeit.'
Word for word, So ran the title-page: murder, or else Legitimate punishment of the other crime, Accounted murder by mistake,—just that And no more, in a Latin cramp enough When the law had her eloquence to launch. But interfilleted with Italian streaks When testimony stooped to mother-tongue,— That, was this old square yellow book about."
Having secured his prize, the poet at once began reading it, and read on, though his path grew perilous among the piles of straw-work, the multitudinous upholstery and cast clothes of the square:—
"Still I read on, from written title-page To written index, on, through street and street, At the Strozzi, at the Pillar, at the Bridge; Till, by the time I stood at home again In Casa Guidi, by Felice Church, Under the doorway where the black begins With the first stone slab of the staircase cold, I had mastered the contents, knew the whole truth Gathered together, bound up in this book."
This was swift mastery, but swifter follows:—
"I fused my live soul and that inert stuff, Before attempting smithcraft, on the night After the day when—truth thus grasped and gained— The book was shut and done with and laid by."
He stepped out on the narrow terrace (to live in fame with Casa Guidi Windows—one house with a double immortality!) built over the street and opposite Felice Church, lighted for festival and filled with clear ​chanting, while the heavens were yet glowing with golden sunset; and there:—
"Over the roof o' the lighted church I looked
A bowshot to the street's end, north away
Out of the Roman gate to the Roman road
By the river, till I felt the Apennine."
And there and thence, already on that evening and night of the first day, the inert stuff fused into white heat, bloom-furnaced, in "the inexhaustible fire of his imagination," not then restless, but settled into a most steadfast, intense, irresistible burning, it was given him to see plainly, "in clear dream and solemn vision," all the scenes and actions and personages of the long-buried tragedy. In my narrow range of literature I know not any instance, not in Shakespeare or Shelley, not in Dante or Leopardi, not in Blake undiseased or Browning's own "Saul," more impressive and authentic of rapt prophetical possession and inspiration, the radiant trance whose sight pierces and strains into foresight, than is revealed in the marvellous passage from line 500 to line 660 in the first section, which bears the title of the whole poem. After full study and absorption of this overmastering vision, which was also pre-vision, one is prepared for whatever of astonishing the mass of the work may consist of or contain. Here is the opening of the vision:—
"And there would lie Arezzo, the man's town,
The woman's trap and cage and torture-place,
Also the stage where the priest played his part,
A spectacle for angels,—ay, indeed,
There lay Arezzo! Farther then I fared,
Feeling my way on through the hot and dense,
Romeward, until I found the wayside inn By Castelnuovo's few mean hut-like homes Huddled together on the hill-foot bleak, Bare, broken only by that tree or two Against the sudden bloody splendour poured Cursewise in his departure by the day On the low house-roof of that squalid inn Where they three for the first time and the last, Husband and wife and priest, met face to face. Whence I went on again, the end was near. Step by step, missing none and marking all, Till Rome itself, the ghastly goal, I reached. Why, all the while,—how could it otherwise? — The life in me abolished the death of things, Deep calling unto deep: as then and there Acted itself over again once more The tragic piece. I saw with my own eyes In Florence as I trod the terrace, breathed The beauty and the fearfulness of night. How it had run, this round from Rome to Rome."
For the supposed parents of the young wife Ponipilia lived at Rome, whence Guido, having married her for their money, took her and them to his native Arezzo. They, finding how they had been trapped, contrived somehow to escape to Rome, leaving Pompilia to the tender mercies of Guido and his satyr-family.
"These I saw, In recrudescency of baffled hate, Prepared to wring the uttermost revenge From body and soul thus left them: 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 St. George, Out again sprang the young good beauteous priest, Bearing away the lady in his arms, Saved for a splendid minute and no more."
He, having mastered the whole case, confirmed the judgment, and with his own hand ordered execution on the morrow, Saturday, February 22, 1698. But let the poet himself relate the catastrophes as revealed to him in the vision:—
​But, the truth being thus grasped and gained—grasped as by an eagle's talons, gained as by an eagle's swoop—the whole drama clearly revealed to him on the very night of the day which brought him the book, the poet did not at once set his hand to the work of unfolding it:—
He likewise, as he tells us toward the end of the work, searched in vain for any record of the subsequent fate of Pompilia's infant, Gaetano, who, six months after the execution, was decreed heir to his father Guido and to the putative maternal grandparents, and put under the guardianship of one Domenicho Tighetti, chosen by Pompilia herself ere she died of her wounds; and by the same decree her fame was thoroughly established in law.
Not till he came to London did Browning take pen in hand, with Italy as clear in the eye of his mind as if present to his bodily eyes: well may Mr. Swinburne note "the inexhaustible stores of his perception" with "the inexhaustible fire of his imagination." As we read in the opening section:—
And yet, when he has nearly finished the labour which he begins with such buoyant consciousness of strength:—
when, in his own words, the Ring is all but round and done—he can address the book as "my four-years' intimate." This immense work, charged and surcharged with learning, knowledge, ever-active subtle intellect, ever-vital passion, whether of sympathy or antipathy, ever-realising imagination, all thought out and wrought out in only four years!—the fact appears almost incredible to one whose mind moves at about the common sluggish rate. This poem, which, when I first studied it, grew beyond me and above me more and more with the profoundly impressive suggestion, still overawing, of a vast Gothic cathedral no single generation could accomplish; which, at the most grudging estimate, is an achievement whereon, "itself by itself solely," even a mighty artist could be content to challenge the ages, secure of a noble fame; this, I found on nearing the end, had been all reared in such a small section of the architect's life. The unpromising seed of an old yellow eightpenny book chanced to fall into the right rich soil, into the one mind and heart in the ​world most proper to develop it to the uttermost, and in four brief years it had grown prodigiously, into this vivified cathedral, this immense perennial forest, abounding and superabounding with innumerably manifold life.
Pondering this, we can better appreciate one sentence I have quoted from Mr. Swinburne: "He never thinks but at full speed; and the rate of his thought is to that of another man's as the speed of a railway to that of a waggon, or the speed of a telegraph to that of a railway." And it should be noted that these analogies, like all that are genuine, imply more truths than the naked terms express; imply more than the mere statements of comparative rates of mental speed. In ordinary cases we are apt to judge, and judge correctly, that tongue or pen runs the more swiftly the less weight it carries; and our common phrases of "gift of the gab" or "gabble," "itch of scribbling" or "scrawling," mark our contempt for such worse than worthless fluency. But there are supereminent commanding exceptions. The railway train not only runs ten times faster than the waggon, but also carries more than ten times the weight; the telegraph is not only incomparably swifter than the railway, but also incomparably more subtile and pregnant with intellect and emotion; and thus it is with certain men of superlative genius in comparison, first, with us common plodders; and, secondly, with men of genius, lofty indeed, but not supreme. Their intellects are as the eyes of Friedrich pictured by Carlyle: "Such a pair of eyes as no man or lynx, or lion of that century bore elsewhere, according to all the testimony ​we have. . . . Most excellent, potent, brilliant eyes, swift-darting as the stars, steadfast as the sun; grey, we said, of the azure-grey colour; large enough, not of glaring size; the habitual expression of them vigilance and penetrating sense, rapidity resting on depth." Or, as Heine measures their swiftness in the instance of Napoleon: "The great seven-league-boot thoughts wherewith the genius of the Emperor invisibly overstrode the world; and I believe that any one of these thoughts would have given a German author ample material for writing his whole life long."
Having thus at the very opening let us fully into the secrets of the book, exposed the plot of the tragedy, pourtrayed the leading personages, sketched the course of the trial and appeal, and even reaffirmed emphatically on his own part the final judgment of the Pope; having, in brief, deliberately sacrificed all that he might have gained by a slowly evolved narrative, the interest of expectancy, surprise, suspense, doubt, fear, terror: what is left for the poet to tell us in the remaining twenty thousand lines? do we not already know the whole drama? Confident in his unparalleled resources, Browning at once proceeds to make us aware how he just begins where an ordinary poet would end. In the second half of the first section he lays before us the ​complete plan, copious in details, of the structure he is about to erect. He has already told us the story? Well, he simply purposes to tell it over again no fewer than ten times, from as many different points of view, by as many different types or persons less one—for Guido speaks twice, in hope before the appeal, in reckless desperation on the night before his execution. A work immeasurably difficult, yet most triumphantly achieved. The interest is to be purely psychological, but of psychology living, not dead; as with Balzac, the analysis by its unrelenting intensity and subtlety, sustained and impelled by an imagination no less intense, develops into vital synthesis; in each of the ten following sections Browning, having penetrated to the inmost soul of his creature, from that centre commands both soul and body to his service in complete self-revelation; so that we have ten monodramas, to use Mr. Swinburne's term, all on the same subject, but varying infinitely by the variance in the characters and circumstances of the speakers.
In the dedication of "Sordello," written twenty-five years after the poem itself, Browning says: "The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul; little else is worth study." And at the end of this Ring and Book he writes:—
​It lives, and is likely to live as long as any masterwork of our generation.
First we are to hear how Half-Rome, with a typical worthy for its mouthpiece, found for Guido much excuse. Then how to the other Half-Rome, Pompilia seemed a saint and martyr both. Then:—
These choric representatives are no mere abstract voices; they and all their appropriate surroundings are realised, embodied, drawn and coloured with the like precision and clearness, the like fulness of characteristic detail, as the real persons and scenes of the drama. These actors follow; first Count Guido before the governor and judges, doing his best man's service for himself, in the guise of frank confession, wrung from him by—
Caponsacchi comes next:—
For the pleadings were all in writing; fortunately for the poet and ourselves, as they were thus preserved entire in the yellow book. So we next read:—
And then:—
Then we have the manner of the judgment of the Pope on the appeal:—
The closing section, called "The Book and the Ring," is an epilogue corresponding to the prologue of "The Ring and the Book;" each concluding with an impassioned apostrophe to the poet's Lyric Love, half angel and half bird, buried there in Florence some years before.
As I have said already, these iterations and reiterations of the same terrible story, told by so many typical and historical personages as beheld from so ​many standpoints, are the very reverse of monotonous; each new relation tends to deepen and expand the impression left by all that preceded it. The persistent repetition is as that of the smith's hammer-strokes welding the red-hot iron into shape, or rather as that of the principal theme in a great Beethoven fugue, growing ever more and more potent and predominant as its vast capabilities are more and more developed through countless intricate variations, and transmutations of time and key and structure and accompaniment. Only, to adequately evolve these capabilities, we must have the consummate master; an imperial genius wielding unlimited resources; an insuppressible, irresistible fire fed with inexhaustible fuel. I know of but one other living English poet to whom we can turn for the like supreme analytic synthesis, the patient analysis of a most subtle and unappeasable intellect, the organic synthesis of a most vivid and dramatic imagination; which the better critics at length publicly recognised in the "Egoist," after almost ignoring or wholly underrating them in the "Modern Love," the "Ordeal of Richard Feverel," the "Emilia in England," the "Adventures of Harry Richmond," and other great original works of George Meredith.
Of course, I have no intention of reviewing in detail the several sections of this vast and multiplex achievement; on which, as many commentaries might be written, and I humbly opine to somewhat better purpose, as the Germans have lavished upon Goethe's "Faust." Our professional judges have not been slow to acknowledge the chivalrous splendour of the Caponsacchi and the exquisite pathetic beauty of the Pompilia. Indeed, one may remark of Browning and ​his Pompilia, as of Dante and his Beatrice, that whenever she is brought in, however austere or terrible or vile the surroundings, immediately an ineffable sweetness, a Divine tenderness, suffuses and thrills the verse. The marvellous power and insight of the two Guido sections have been equally acknowledged. The excellent critic of the Westminster Review gave his verdict against the couple devoted to the lawyers; "the malt is the best in England, but the beer is bad." In this I cannot concur. To me they represent the grinning gargoyles and grotesque carvings of the Gothic cathedral; the "noble grotesque" of Ruskin, the sport of a strong and earnest, not the serious business of a weak and frivolous mind. the passage from which I have already quoted, Mr. Swinburne, referring to such pieces as the two Guidos, writes: "This work of exposition by soliloquy, and apology by analysis, can only be accomplished or undertaken by the genius of a great special pleader, able to fling himself with all his heart and all his brain, with all the force of his intellect and all the strength of his imagination, into the assumed part of his client; to concentrate on the cause in hand his whole power of illustration and illumination, and bring to bear upon one point at once all the rays of his thought in one focus." But what infinite contempt, genial and jolly in the first case, acrid in the other, Browning pours out upon these professional hireling special pleaders! His own object in such pieces as "Bishop Blougram's Apology," "Mr. Sludge, 'the Medium,'" the "Prince of Hohenstiel-Schwangau," is by no means to prove black white and white black, to make the worse appear the better reason, but to bring a seeming monster and ​perplexing anomaly under the common laws of nature, by showing how it has grown to be what it is, and how it can with more or less of self-illusion reconcile itself to itself. The one great section to which I think less than justice has been done is that of the Pope, with its awful prelude:—
"Ere I confirm or quash the Trial here Of Guido Franceschini and his friends, Read,—how there was a ghastly Trial once Of a dead man by a live man, and both, Popes: Thus—in the antique penman's very phrase."
I know nothing that surpasses the wisdom, the true saintliness, the invincible firmness of the great good old Pope in this decisive monologue.
An author whom we should love for that sole sentence, wrote of his wife, "To love her was a liberal education." It would be scarcely rash to say the like of this one greatest work of our poet, who has wrought so much else that is only less great.
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