if on such an occasion as this—even with our natural impulse to shake ourselves free of reserves—some sharp choice between the dozen different aspects of one of the most copious of our poets becomes a prime necessity, though remaining at the same time a great difficulty, so in respect to the most voluminous of his works the admirer is promptly held up, as we have come to call it; finds himself almost baffled by alternatives. “the ring and the book” is so vast and so essentially gothic a structure, spreading and soaring and branching at such a rate, covering such ground, putting forth such pinnacles and towers and brave excrescences, planting its transepts and chapels and porticos, its clustered hugeness or inordinate muchness, that with any first approach we but walk vaguely and slowly, rather bewilderedly, round and round it, wondering at what point we had best attempt such entrance as will save our steps and light our uncertainty, most enable us to reach our personal chair, our indicated chapel or shrine, when once within. for it is to be granted that to this inner view the likeness of the literary monument to one of the great religious gives way a little, sustains itself less than in the first, the affronting mass; unless we simply figure ourselves, under the great roof, looking about us through a splendid thickness and dimness of air, an accumulation of spiritual presences or unprofaned mysteries, that makes our impression heavily general—general only—and leaves us helpless for reporting on particulars. the particulars for our purpose have thus their identity much rather in certain features of the twenty faces—either of one or of another of these—that the structure turns to the outer day and that we can, as it were, sit down before and consider at our comparative ease. i say comparative advisedly, for i cling to the dear old tradition that browning is “difficult”—which we were all brought up on and which i think we should, especially on a rich retrospective day like this, with the atmosphere of his great career settling upon us as much as possible, feel it a shock to see break down in too many places at once. selecting my ground, by your kind invitation, for sticking in and planting before you, to flourish so far as it shall, my little sprig of bay, i have of course tried to measure the quantity of ease with which our material may on that noted spot allow itself to be treated. there are innumerable things in “the ring and the book”—as the comprehensive image i began with makes it needless i should say; and i have been above all appealed to by the possibility that one of these, pursued for a while through the labyrinth, but at last overtaken and then more or less confessing its identity, might have yielded up its best essence as a grateful theme under some fine strong economy of prose treatment. so here you have me talking at once of prose and seeking that connection to help out my case.

from far back, from my first reading of these volumes, which took place at the time of their disclosure to the world, when i was a fairly young person, the sense, almost the pang, of the novel they might have constituted sprang sharply from them; so that i was to go on through the years almost irreverently, all but quite profanely if you will, thinking of the great loose and uncontrolled composition, the great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unreconciled parts, as a fiction of the so-called historic type, that is as a suggested study of the manners and conditions from which our own have more or less traceably issued, just tragically spoiled—or as a work of art, in other words, smothered in the producing. to which i hasten to add my consciousness of the scant degree in which such a fresh start from our author’s documents, such a reprojection of them, wonderful documents as they can only have been, may claim a critical basis. conceive me as simply astride of my different fancy, my other dream, of the matter—which bolted with me, as i have said, at the first alarm.

browning worked in this connection literally upon documents; no page of his long story is more vivid and splendid than that of his find of the book in the litter of a market-stall in florence and the swoop of practised perception with which he caught up in it a treasure. here was a subject stated to the last ounce of its weight, a living and breathing record of facts pitiful and terrible, a mass of matter bristling with revelations and yet at the same time wrapped over with layer upon layer of contemporary appreciation; which appreciation, in its turn, was a part of the wealth to be appreciated. what our great master saw was his situation founded, seated there in positively packed and congested significance, though by just so much as it was charged with meanings and values were those things undeveloped and unexpressed. they looked up at him, even in that first flush and from their market-stall, and said to him, in their compressed compass, as with the muffled rumble of a slow-coming earthquake, “express us, express us, immortalise us as we’ll immortalise you!”—so that the terms of the understanding were so far cogent and clear. it was an understanding, on their side, with the poet; and since that poet had produced “men and women,” “dramatic lyrics,” “dramatis person?” and sundry plays—we needn’t even foist on him “sordello”—he could but understand in his own way. that way would have had to be quite some other, we fully see, had he been by habit and profession not just the lyric, epic, dramatic commentator, the extractor, to whatever essential potency and redundancy, of the moral of the fable, but the very fabulist himself, the inventor and projector, layer down of the postulate and digger of the foundation. i doubt if we have a precedent for this energy of appropriation of a deposit of stated matter, a block of sense already in position and requiring not to be shaped and squared and caused any further to solidify, but rather to suffer disintegration, be pulled apart, melted down, hammered, by the most characteristic of the poet’s processes, to powder—dust of gold and silver, let us say. he was to apply to it his favourite system—that of looking at his subject from the point of view of a curiosity almost sublime in its freedom, yet almost homely in its method, and of smuggling as many more points of view together into that one as the fancy might take him to smuggle, on a scale on which even he had never before applied it; this with a courage and a confidence that, in presence of all the conditions, conditions many of them arduous and arid and thankless even to defiance, we can only pronounce splendid, and of which the issue was to be of a proportioned monstrous magnificence.

the one definite forecast for this product would have been that it should figure for its producer as a poem—as if he had simply said, “i embark at any rate for the golden isles”; everything else was of the pure incalculable, the frank voyage of adventure. to what extent the golden isles were in fact to be reached is a matter we needn’t pretend, i think, absolutely to determine; let us feel for ourselves and as we will about it—either see our adventurer, disembarked bag and baggage and in possession, plant his flag on the highest eminence within his circle of sea, or, on the other hand, but watch him approach and beat back a little, tack and turn and stand off, always fairly in sight of land, catching rare glimpses and meeting strange airs, but not quite achieving the final coup that annexes the group. he returns to us under either view all scented and salted with his measure of contact, and that for the moment is enough for us—more than enough for me at any rate, engaged for your beguilement in this practical relation of snuffing up what he brings. he brings, however one puts it, a detailed report, which is but another word for a story; and it is with his story, his offered, not his borrowed one—a very different matter—that i am concerned. we are probably most of us so aware of its general content that if i sum this up i may do so briefly. the book of the florentine rubbish-heap is the full account (as full accounts were conceived in those days) of the trial before the roman courts, with inquiries and judgments by the tuscan authorities intermixed, of a certain count guido franceschini of arezzo, decapitated, in company with four confederates—these latter hanged—on february 22, 1698, for the murder of his young wife pompilia comparini and her ostensible parents, pietro and violante of that ilk.

the circumstances leading to this climax were primarily his marriage to pompilia, some years before, in rome—she being then but in her thirteenth year—under the impression, fostered in him by the elder pair, that she was their own child and on this head heiress to moneys settled on them from of old in the event of their having a child. they had in fact had none, and had, in substitution, invented, so to speak, pompilia, the luckless base-born baby of a woman of lamentable character easily induced to part with her for cash. they bring up the hapless creature as their daughter, and as their daughter they marry her, in rome, to the middle-aged and impecunious count guido, a rapacious and unscrupulous fortune-seeker by whose superior social position, as we say, dreadfully decaduto though he be, they are dazzled out of all circumspection. the girl, innocent, ignorant, bewildered, scared and purely passive, is taken home by her husband to arezzo, where she is at first attended by pietro and violante and where the direst disappointment await the three. count guido proves the basest of men and his home a place of terror and of torture, from which at the age of seventeen, and shortly prior to her giving birth to an heir to the house, such as it is, she is rescued by a pitying witness of her misery, canon caponsacchi, a man of the world and adorning it, yet in holy orders, as men of the world in italy might then be, who clandestinely helps her, at peril of both their lives, back to rome, and of whom it is attested that he has had no other relation with her but this of distinguished and all-disinterested friend in need. the pretended parents have at an early stage thrown up their benighted game, fleeing from the rigour of their dupe’s domestic rule, disclosing to him vindictively the part they have played and the consequent failure of any profit to him through his wife, and leaving him in turn to wreak his spite, which has become infernal, on the wretched pompilia. he pursues her to rome, on her eventual flight, and overtakes her, with her companion, just outside the gates; but having, by the aid of the local powers, reachieved possession of her, he contents himself for the time with procuring her sequestration in a convent, from which, however, she is presently allowed to emerge in view of the near birth of her child. she rejoins pietro and violante, devoted to her, oddly enough, through all their folly and fatuity; and under their roof, in a lonely roman suburb, her child comes into the world. her husband meanwhile, hearing of her release, gives way afresh to the fury that had not at the climax of his former pursuit taken full effect; he recruits a band of four of his young tenants or farm-labourers and makes his way, armed, like his companions, with knives, to the door behind which three of the parties to all the wrong done him, as he holds, then lurk. he pronounces, after knocking and waiting, the name of caponsacchi; upon which, as the door opens, violante presents herself. he stabs her to death on the spot with repeated blows—like her companions she is off her guard; and he throws himself on each of these with equal murderous effect. pietro, crying for mercy, falls second beneath him; after which he attacks his wife, whom he literally hacks to death. she survives, by a miracle, long enough, in spite of all her wounds, to testify; which testimony, as may be imagined, is not the least precious part of the case. justice is on the whole, though deprecated and delayed, what we call satisfactory; the last word is for the pope in person, innocent xii. pignatelli, at whose deliberation, lone and supreme, on browning’s page, we splendidly assist; and count guido and his accomplices, bloodless as to the act though these appear to have been, meet their discriminated doom.

that is the bundle of facts, accompanied with the bundle of proceedings, legal, ecclesiastical, diplomatic and other, on the facts, that our author, of a summer’s day, made prize of; but our general temptation, as i say—out of which springs this question of the other values of character and effect, the other completeness of picture and drama, that the confused whole might have had for us—is a distinctly different thing. the difference consists, you see, to begin with, in the very breath of our poet’s genius, already, and so inordinately, at play on them from the first of our knowing them. and it consists in the second place of such an extracted sense of the whole, which becomes, after the most extraordinary fashion, bigger by the extraction, immeasurably bigger than even the most cumulative weight of the mere crude evidence, that our choice of how to take it all is in a manner determined for us: we can only take it as tremendously interesting, interesting not only in itself but with the great added interest, the dignity and authority and beauty, of browning’s general perception of it. we can’t not accept this, and little enough on the whole do we want not to: it sees us, with its tremendous push, that of its poetic, esthetic, historic, psychologic shoulder (one scarce knows how to name it), so far on our way. yet all the while we are in presence not at all of an achieved form, but of a mere preparation for one, though on the hugest scale; so that, you see, we are no more than decently attentive with our question: “which of them all, of the various methods of casting the wondrously mixed metal, is he, as he goes, preparing?” well, as he keeps giving and giving, in immeasurable plenty, it is in our selection from it all and our picking it over that we seek, and to whatever various and unequal effect find, our account. he works over his vast material, and we then work him over, though not availing ourselves, to this end, of a grain he himself doesn’t somehow give us; and there we are.

i admit that my faith in my particular contention would be a degree firmer and fonder if there didn’t glimmer through our poet’s splendid hocus-pocus just the hint of one of those flaws that sometimes deform the fair face of a subject otherwise generally appealing or promising—of such a subject in especial as may have been submitted to us, possibly even with the pretension to impose it, in too complete a shape. the idea but half hinted—when it is a very good one—is apt to contain the germ of happier fruit than the freight of the whole branch, waved at us or dropped into our lap, very often proves. this happens when we take over, as the phrase is, established data, take them over from existing records and under some involved obligation to take them as they stand. that drawback rests heavily for instance on the so-called historic fiction—so beautiful a case it is of a muddlement of terms—and is just one of the eminent reasons why the embarrassed muse of that form, pulled up again and again, and the more often the fine intelligence invokes her, by the need of a superior harmony which shall be after all but a superior truth, catches up her flurried skirts and makes her saving dash for some gap in the hedge of romance. now the flaw on this so intensely expressive face, that of the general donnée of the fate of pompilia, is that amid the variety of forces at play about her the unity of the situation isn’t, by one of those large straight ideal gestures on the part of the muse, handed to us at a stroke. the question of the whereabouts of the unity of a group of data subject to be wrought together into a thing of art, the question in other words of the point at which the various implications of interest, no matter how many, most converge and interfuse, becomes always, by my sense of the affair, quite the first to be answered; for according to the answer shapes and fills itself the very vessel of that beauty—the beauty, exactly, of interest, of maximum interest, which is the ultimate extract of any collocation of facts, any picture of life, and the finest aspect of any artistic work. call a novel a picture of life as much as we will; call it, according to one of our recent fashions, a slice, or even a chunk, even a “bloody” chunk, of life, a rough excision from that substance as superficially cut and as summarily served as possible, it still fails to escape this exposure to appreciation, or in other words to criticism, that it has had to be selected, selected under some sense for something; and the unity of the exhibition should meet us, does meet us if the work be done, at the point at which that sense is most patent. if the slice or the chunk, or whatever we call it, if it isn’t “done,” as we say—and as it so often declines to be—the work itself of course isn’t likely to be; and there we may dismiss it.

the first thing we do is to cast about for some centre in our field; seeing that, for such a purpose as ours, the subject might very nearly go a-begging with none more definite than the author has provided for it. i find that centre in the embracing consciousness of caponsacchi, which, coming to the rescue of our question of treatment, of our search for a point of control, practically saves everything, and shows itself moreover the only thing that can save. the more we ask of any other part of our picture that it shall exercise a comprehensive function, the more we see that particular part inadequate; as inadequate even in the extraordinarily magnified range of spirit and reach of intelligence of the atrocious franceschini as in the sublime passivity and plasticity of the childish pompilia, educated to the last point though she be indeed by suffering, but otherwise so untaught that she can neither read nor write. the magnified state is in this work still more than elsewhere the note of the intelligence, of any and every faculty of thought, imputed by our poet to his creatures; and it takes a great mind, one of the greatest, we may at once say, to make these persons express and confess themselves to such an effect of intellectual splendour. he resorts primarily to their sense, their sense of themselves and of everything else they know, to exhibit them, and has for this purpose to keep them, and to keep them persistently and inexhaustibly, under the fixed lens of his prodigious vision. he this makes out in them boundless treasures of truth—truth even when it happens to be, as in the case of count guido, but a shining wealth of constitutional falsity. of the extent to which he may after this fashion unlimitedly draw upon them his exposure of count guido, which goes on and on, though partly, i admit, by repeating itself, is a wondrous example. it is not too much to say of pompilia—pompilia pierced with twenty wounds, pompilia on her death-bed, pompilia but seventeen years old and but a fortnight a mother—that she acquires an intellectual splendour just by the fact of the vast covering charity of imagination with which her recording, our commemorated, avenger, never so as in this case an avenger of the wronged beautiful things in life, hangs over and breathes upon her. we see her come out to him, and the extremely remarkable thing is that we see it, on the whole, without doubting that it might just have been. nothing could thus be more interesting, however it may at moments and in places puzzle us, than the impunity, on our poet’s part, of most of these overstretchings of proportion, these violations of the immediate appearance. browning is deep down below the immediate with the first step of his approach; he has vaulted over the gate, is already far afield and never, so long as we watch him, has occasion to fall back. we wonder, for, after all, the real is his quest, the very ideal of the real, the real most finely mixed with life, which is in the last analysis the ideal; and we know, with our dimmer vision, no such reality as a franceschini fighting for his life, fighting for the vindication of his baseness, embodying his squalor, with an audacity of wit, an intensity of colour, a variety of speculation and illustration, that represent well-nigh the maximum play of the human mind. it is in like sort scarce too much to say of the exquisite pompilia that on her part intelligence and expression are disengaged to a point at which the angels may well begin to envy her; and all again without our once wincing so far as our consistently liking to see and hear and believe is concerned. caponsacchi regales us, of course, with the rarest fruit of a great character, a great culture and a great case; but caponsacchi is acceptedly and naturally, needfully and illustratively, splendid. he is the soul of man at its finest—having passed through the smoky fires of life and emerging clear and high. greatest of all the spirits exhibited, however, is that of the more than octogenarian pope, at whose brooding, pondering, solitary vigil, by the end of a hard grey winter day in the great bleak waiting vatican—“in the plain closet where he does such work”—we assist as intimately as at every other step of the case, and on whose grand meditation we heavily hang. but the pope strikes us at first—though indeed perhaps only at first—as too high above the whole connection functionally and historically for us to place him within it dramatically. our novel faces provisionally the question of dispensing with him, as it dispenses with the amazing, bristling, all too indulgently presented roman advocates on either side of the case, who combine to put together the most formidable monument we possess to browning’s active curiosity and the liveliest proof of his almost unlimited power to give on his readers’ nerves without giving on his own.

what remains with us all this time, none the less, is the effect of magnification, the exposure of each of these figures, in its degree, to that iridescent wash of personality, of temper and faculty, that our author ladles out to them, as the copious share of each, from his own great reservoir of spiritual health, and which makes us, as i have noted, seek the reason of a perpetual anomaly. why, bristling so with references to him rather than with references to each other or to any accompanying set of circumstances, do they still establish more truth and beauty than they sacrifice, do they still, according to their chance, help to make “the ring and the book” a great living thing, a great objective mass? i brushed by the answer a moment ago, i think, in speaking of the development in pompilia of the resource of expression, which brings us round, it seems to me, to the justification of browning’s method. to express his inner self—his outward was a different affair!—and to express it utterly, even if no matter how, was clearly, for his own measure and consciousness of that inner self, to be poetic; and the solution of all the deviations and disparities or, speaking critically, monstrosities, in the mingled tissue of this work, is the fact that whether or no by such convulsions of soul and sense life got delivered for him, the garment of life (which for him was poetry and poetry alone) got disposed in its due and adequate multitudinous folds. we move with him but in images and references and vast and far correspondences; we eat but of strange compounds and drink but of rare distillations; and very soon, after a course of this, we feel ourselves, however much or however little to our advantage we may on occasion pronounce it, in the world of expression at any cost. that, essentially, is the world of poetry—which in the cases known to our experience where it seems to us to differ from browning’s world does so but through this latter’s having been, by the vigour and violence, the bold familiarity, of his grasp and pull at it, moved several degrees nearer us, so to speak, than any other of the same general sort with which we are acquainted; so that, intellectually, we back away from it a little, back down before it, again and again, as we try to get off from a picture or a group or a view which is too much upon us and thereby out of focus. browning is “upon” us, straighter upon us always, somehow, than anyone else of his race; and we thus recoil, we push our chair back, from the table he so tremendously spreads, just to see a little better what is on it. this makes a relation with him that it is difficult to express; as if he came up against us, each time, on the same side of the street and not on the other side, across the way, where we mostly see the poets elegantly walk, and where we greet them without danger of concussion. it is on this same side, as i call it, on our side, on the other hand, that i rather see our encounter with the novelists taking place; we being, as it were, more mixed with them, or they at least, by their desire and necessity, more mixed with us, and our brush of them, in their minor frenzy, a comparatively muffled encounter.

we have in the whole thing, at any rate, the element of action which is at the same time constant picture, and the element of picture which is at the same time constant action; and with a fusion, as the mass moves, that is none the less effective, none the less thick and complete, from our not owing it in the least to an artful economy. another force pushes its way through the waste and rules the scene, making wrong things right and right things a hundred times more so—that breath of browning’s own particular matchless italy which takes us full in the face and remains from the first the felt rich coloured air in which we live. the quantity of that atmosphere that he had to give out is like nothing else in english poetry, any more than in english prose, that i recall; and since i am taking these liberties with him, let me take one too, a little, with the fruit of another genius shining at us here in association—with that great placed and timed prose fiction which we owe to george eliot and in which her projection of the stage and scenery is so different a matter. curious enough this difference where so many things make for identity—the quantity of talent, the quantity of knowledge, the high equality (or almost) of culture and curiosity, not to say of “spiritual life.” each writer drags along a far-sweeping train, though indeed browning’s spreads so considerably furthest; but his stirs up, to my vision, a perfect cloud of gold-dust, while hers, in “romola,” by contrast, leaves the air about as clear, about as white, and withal about as cold, as before she had benevolently entered it. this straight saturation of our author’s, this prime assimilation of the elements for which the name of italy stands, is a single splendid case, however; i can think of no second one that is not below it—if we take it as supremely expressed in those of his lyrics and shorter dramatic monologues that it has most helped to inspire. the rome and tuscany of the early ’fifties had become for him so at once a medium, a bath of the senses and perceptions, into which he could sink, in which he could unlimitedly soak, that wherever he might be touched afterwards he gave out some effect of that immersion. this places him to my mind quite apart, makes the rest of our poetic record of a similar experience comparatively pale and abstract. shelley and swinburne—to name only his compeers—are, i know, a part of the record; but the author of “men and women,” of “pippa passes,” of certain of the dramatic lyrics and other scattered felicities, not only expresses and reflects the matter; he fairly, he heatedly, if i may use such a term, exudes and perspires it. shelley, let us say in the connection, is a light and swinburne, let us say, a sound; browning alone of them all is a temperature. we feel it, we are in it at a plunge, with the very first pages of the thing before us; to which, i confess, we surrender with a momentum drawn from fifty of their predecessors, pages not less sovereign, elsewhere.

the old florence of the late spring closes round us; the hand of italy is at once, with the recital of the old-world litter of piazza san lorenzo, with that of the great glare and of the great shadow-masses, heavy upon us, heavy with that strange weight, that mixed pressure, which is somehow, to the imagination, at once a caress and a menace. our poet kicks up on the spot and at short notice what i have called his cloud of gold-dust. i can but speak for myself at least—something that i want to feel both as historic and esthetic truth, both as pictorial and moral interest, something that will repay my fancy tenfold if i can but feel it, hovers before me, and i say to myself that, whether or no a great poem is to come off, i will be hanged if one of the vividest of all stories and one of the sharpest of all impressions doesn’t. i beckon these things on, i follow them up, i so desire and need them that i of course, by my imaginative collaboration, contribute to them—from the moment, that is, of my finding myself really in relation to the great points. on the other hand, as certainly, it has taken the author of the first volume, and of the two admirable chapters of the same—since i can’t call them cantos—entitled respectively “half-rome” and “the other half-rome,” to put me in relation; where it is that he keeps me more and more, letting the closeness of my state, it must be owned, occasionally drop, letting the finer call on me even, for bad quarters-of-an-hour, considerably languish, but starting up before me again in vivid authority if i really presume to droop or stray. he takes his wilful way with me, but i make it my own, picking over and over as i have said, like some lingering talking pedlar’s client, his great unloosed pack; and thus it is that by the time i am settled with pompilia at arezzo i have lived into all the conditions. they press upon me close, those wonderful dreadful beautiful particulars of the italy of the eve of the eighteenth century—browning himself moving about, darting hither and thither in them, at his mighty ease: beautiful, i say, because of the quantity of romantic and esthetic tradition from a more romantic and esthetic age still visibly, palpably, in solution there; and wonderful and dreadful through something of a similar tissue of matchless and ruthless consistencies and immoralities. i make to my hand, as this infatuated reader, my italy of the eve of the eighteenth century—a vast painted and gilded rococo shell roofing over a scenic, an amazingly figured and furnished earth, but shutting out almost the whole of our own dearly-bought, rudely-recovered spiritual sky. you see i have this right, all the while, if i recognise my suggested material, which keeps coming and coming in the measure of my need, and my duty to which is to recognise it, and as handsomely and actively as possible. the great thing is that i have such a group of figures moving across so constituted a scene—figures so typical, so salient, so reeking with the old-world character, so impressed all over with its manners and its morals, and so predestined, we see, to this particular horrid little drama. and let me not be charged with giving it away, the idea of the latent prose fiction, by calling it little and horrid; let me not—for with my contention i can’t possibly afford to—appear to agree with those who speak of the franceschini-comparini case as a mere vulgar criminal anecdote.

it might have been such but for two reasons—counting only the principal ones; one of these our fact that we see it so, i repeat, in browning’s inordinately-coloured light, and the other—which is indeed perhaps but another face of the same—that, with whatever limitations, it gives us in the rarest manner three characters of the first importance. i hold three a great many; i could have done with it almost, i think, if there had been but one or two; our rich provision shows you at any rate what i mean by speaking of our author’s performance as above all a preparation for something. deeply he felt that with the three—the three built up at us each with an equal genial rage of reiterative touches—there couldn’t eventually not be something done (artistically done, i mean) if someone would only do it. there they are in their old yellow arezzo, that miniature milder florence, as sleepy to my recollection as a little english cathedral city clustered about a close, but dreaming not so peacefully nor so innocently; there is the great fretted fabric of the church on which they are all swarming and grovelling, yet after their fashion interesting parasites, from the high and dry old archbishop, meanly wise or ignobly edifying, to whom pompilia resorts in her woe and who practically pushes her way with a shuffling velvet foot; down through the couple of franceschini cadets, canon girolamo and abate paul, mere minions, fairly in the verminous degree, of the overgrown order or too-rank organism; down to count guido himself and to canon caponsacchi, who have taken the tonsure at the outset of their careers, but none too strictly the vows, and who lead their lives under some strangest profanest pervertedest clerical category. there have been before this the roman preliminaries, the career of the queer comparini, the adoption, the assumption of the parentship, of the ill-starred little girl, with the sordid cynicism of her marriage out of hand, conveying her presumptive little fortune, her poor handful of even less than contingent cash, to hungry middle-aged count guido’s stale “rank”; the many-toned note or turbid harmony of all of which recurs to us in the vivid image of the pieties and paganisms of san lorenzo in lucina, that banal little church in the old upper corso—banal, that is, at the worst, with the rare roman banalité; bravely banal, or banal with style—that we have all passed with a sense of its reprieve to our sight-seeing, and where the bleeding bodies of the still-breathing pompilia and her extinct companions are laid out on the greasy marble of the altar-steps. to glance at these things, however, is fairly to be tangled, and at once, in the author’s complexity of suggestion, to which our own thick-coming fancies respond in no less a measure; so that i have already missed my time to so much even as name properly the tremendous little chapter we should have devoted to the franceschini interior as revealed at last to comparini eyes; the sinister scene or ragged ruin of the aretine “palace,” where pride and penury and, at once, rabid resentment show their teeth in the dark and the void, and where pompilia’s inspired little character, clear silver hardened, effectually beaten and battered, to steel, begins to shine at the blackness with a light that fairly outfaces at last the gleam of wolfish fangs—the character that draws from guido, in his, alas, too boundless harangue of the fourth volume, some of the sharpest specifications into which that extraordinary desert, that indescribable waste of intellectual life, as i have hinted at its being, from time to time flowers.

“none of your abnegation of revenge!

fly at me frank, tug where i tear again!

away with the empty stare! be holy still,

and stupid ever! occupy your patch

of private snow that’s somewhere in what world

may now be growing icy round your head,

and aguish at your foot-print—freeze not me!”

i have spoken of the enveloping consciousness—or call it just the struggling, emerging, comparing, at last intensely living conscience—of caponsacchi as the indicated centre of our situation or determinant of our form, in the matter of the excellent novel; and know of course what such an indication lets me in for, responsibly speaking, in the way of a rearrangement of relations, in the way of liberties taken. to lift our subject out of the sphere of anecdote and place it in the sphere of drama, liberally considered, to give it dignity by extracting its finest importance, causing its parts to flower together into some splendid special sense, we supply it with a large lucid reflector, which we find only, as i have already noted, in that mind and soul concerned in the business that have at once the highest sensibility and the highest capacity, or that are, as we may call it, most admirably agitated. there is the awkward fact, the objector may say, that by our record the mind and soul in question are not concerned till a given hour, when many things have already happened and the climax is almost in sight; to which we reply, at our ease, that we simply don’t suffer that fact to be awkward. from the moment i am taking liberties i suffer no awkwardness; i should be very helpless, quite without resource and without vision, if i did. i said it to begin with: browning works the whole thing over—the whole thing as originally given him—and we work him; helpfully, artfully, boldly, which is our whole blest basis. we therefore turn caponsacchi on earlier, ever so much earlier; turn him on, with a brave ingenuity, from the very first—that is in rome if need be; place him there in the field, at once recipient and agent, vaguely conscious and with splendid brooding apprehension, awaiting the adventure of his life, awaiting his call, his real call (the others have been such vain shows and hollow stopgaps), awaiting, in fine, his terrible great fortune. his direct connection with pompilia begins certainly at arezzo, only after she has been some time hideously mismated and has suffered all but her direst extremity—that is of the essence; we take it; it’s all right. but his indirect participation is another affair, and we get it—at a magnificent stroke—by the fact that his view of franceschini, his fellow-aretine sordidly “on the make,” his measure of undesired, indeed of quite execrated contact with him, brushed against in the motley hungry roman traffic, where and while that sinister soul snuffs about on the very vague or the very foul scent of his fortune, may begin whenever we like. we have only to have it begin right, only to make it, on the part of two men, a relation of strong irritated perception and restless righteous convinced instinct in the one nature and of equally instinctive hate and envy, jealousy and latent fear, on the other, to see the indirect connection, the one with pompilia, as i say, throw across our page as portentous a shadow as we need. then we get caponsacchi as a recipient up to the brim—as an agent, a predestined one, up to the hilt. i can scarce begin to tell you what i see him give, as we say, or how his sentient and observational life, his fine reactions in presence of such a creature as guido, such a social type and image and lurid light, as it were, make him comparatively a modern man, breathed upon, to that deep and interesting agitation i have mentioned, by more forces than he yet reckons or knows the names of.

the direct relation—always to pompilia—is made, at arezzo, as we know, by franceschini himself; preparing his own doom, in the false light of his debased wit, by creating an appearance of hidden dealing between his wife and the priest which shall, as promptly as he likes—if he but work it right—compromise and overwhelm them. the particular deepest damnation he conceives for his weaker, his weakest victim is that she shall take the cleric caponsacchi for her lover, he indubitably willing—to guido’s apprehension; and that her castigation at his hands for this, sufficiently proved upon her, shall be the last luxury of his own baseness. he forges infernally, though grossly enough, an imputed correspondence between them, as series of love-letters, scandalous scrawls, of the last erotic intensity; which we in the event see solemnly weighed by his fatuous judges, all fatuous save the grave old pope, in the scale of pompilia’s guilt and responsibility. it is this atrocity that at the dénouement damns guido himself most, or well-nigh; but if it fails and recoils, as all his calculations do—it is only his rush of passion that doesn’t miss—this is by the fact exactly that, as we have seen, his wife and her friend are, for our perfect persuasion, characters of the deepest dye. there, if you please, is the finest side of our subject; such sides come up, such sides flare out upon us, when we get such characters in such embroilments. admire with me therefore our felicity in this first-class value of browning’s beautiful critical genial vision of his caponsacchi—vision of him as the tried and tempered and illuminated man, a great round smooth, though as yet but little worn gold-piece, an embossed and figured ducat or sequin of the period, placed by the poet in my hand. he gives me that value to spend for him, spend on all the strange old experience, old sights and sounds and stuffs, of the old stored italy—so we have at least the wit to spend it to high advantage; which is just what i mean by our taking the liberties we spoke of. i see such bits we can get with it; but the difficulty is that i see so many more things than i can have even dreamed of giving you a hint of. i see the arezzo life and the arezzo crisis with every “i” dotted and every circumstance presented; and when guido takes his wife, as a possible trap for her, to the theatre—the theatre of old arezzo: share with me the tattered vision and inhale the musty air!—i am well in range of pompilia, the tragically exquisite, in her box, with her husband not there for the hour but posted elsewhere; i look at her in fact over caponsacchi’s shoulder and that of his brother-canon conti, while this light character, a vivid recruit to our company, manages to toss into her lap, and as coming in guise of overture from his smitten friend, “a papertwist of comfits.” there is a particular famous occasion at the theatre in a work of more or less contemporary fiction—at a petty provincial theatre which isn’t even, as you might think, the place where pendennis had his first glimpse of miss fotheringay. the evening at the rouen playhouse of flaubert’s “madame bovary” has a relief not elsewhere equalled—it is the most done visit to the play in all literature—but, though “doing” is now so woefully out of favour, my idea would be to give it here a precious pendant; which connection, silly canon conti, the old fripperies and levities, the whole queer picture and show of manners, is handed over to us, expressly, as inapt for poetic illustration.

what is equally apt for poetic or for the other, indeed, is the thing for which we feel “the ring and the book” preponderantly done—it is at least what comes out clearest, comes out as straightest and strongest and finest, from browning’s genius—the exhibition of the great constringent relation between man and woman at once at its maximum and as the relation most worth while in life for either party; an exhibition forming quite the main substance of our author’s message. he has dealt, in his immense variety and vivacity, with other relations, but on this he has thrown his most living weight; it remains the thing of which his own rich experience most convincingly spoke to him. he has testified to it as charged to the brim with the burden of the senses, and has testified to it as almost too clarified, too liberated and sublimated, for traceable application or fair record; he has figured it as never too much either of the flesh or of the spirit for him, so long as the possibility of both of these is in each, but always and ever as the thing absolutely most worth while. it is in the highest and rarest degree clarified and disengaged for caponsacchi and pompilia; but what their history most concludes to is how ineffably it was, whatever happened, worth while. worth while most then for them or for us is the question? well, let us say worth while assuredly for us, in this noble exercise of our imagination. which accordingly shows us what we, for all our prose basis, would have found, to repeat my term once more, prepared for us. there isn’t a detail of their panting flight to rome over the autumn apennines—the long hours when they melt together only not to meet—that doesn’t positively plead for our perfect prose transcript. and if it be said that the mere massacre at the final end is a lapse to passivity from the high plane, for our pair of protagonists, of constructive, of heroic vision, this is not a blur from the time everything that happens happens most effectively to caponsacchi’s life. pompilia’s is taken, but she is none the less given; and it is in his consciousness and experience that she most intensely flowers—with all her jubilation for doing so. so that he contains the whole—unless indeed after all the pope does, the pope whom i was leaving out as too transcendent for our version. unless, unless, further and further, i see what i have at this late moment no right to; see, as the very end and splendid climax of all, caponsacchi sent for to the vatican and admitted alone to the papal presence. there is a scene if we will; and in the mere mutual confrontation, brief, silent, searching, recognising, consecrating, almost as august on the one part as on the other. it rounds us off; but you will think i stray too far. i have wanted, alas, to say such still other fond fine things—it being of our poet’s great nature to prompt them at every step—that i almost feel i have missed half my points; which will doubtless therefore show you these remarks in their nakedness. take them and my particular contention as a pretext and a minor affair if you will only feel them at the same time as at the worst a restless refinement of homage. it has been easy in many another case to run to earth the stray prime fancy, the original anecdote or artless tale, from which a great imaginative work, starting off after meeting it, has sprung and rebounded again and soared; and perhaps it is right and happy and final that one should have faltered in attempting by a converse curiosity to clip off or tie back the wings that once have spread. you will agree with me none the less, i feel, that browning’s great generous wings are over us still and even now, more than ever now; and also that they shake down on us his blessing.