The epic of the free speech and little things—so that heroic critic, the late G. K. Chesterton, described Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book. Here was a giant whom the great rescuer of giants in distress found irresistible. Twice as long as the Æneid, twice as long as Paradise Lost, twice as long as the Odyssey and one-third as long as the Iliad, Browning’s poem is obviously a great something, if only a great miscarriage. As epic, I think, despite Chesterton’s brilliant special pleading, it is not, and precisely for the reasons which he gives for the view. Epics deal with great things, not little things; they describe not humanity free but humanity bound by the primitive chains of Fate, ruled by some absolute tribunal of value or dogma. No such fixed or majestic background stands behind the Renaissance police-court story on which Browning based The Ring and the Book; on the contrary, the very nature of the search for Truth, which is Browning’s substitute, is that it is fluid, restless, uncertain, evolutionary. The stepping-stones by which we rise from our dead selves to higher things ascend into a mist and disappear from sight.
What Browning did produce was a great Victorian novel or, more accurately, the child of a misalliance between poetry and the novel. The Franceschini murder was essentially a novelist’s subject; it was as much concerned with intrigues of property as it was with the aspirations and corruption of the soul. One’s mind wanders to another nineteenth-century writer who had also found his subject in the faits divers. Just as Flaubert patiently wrote out the dossier of a similar scandal from Rouen and added to it the alloy of his own love-affair with Louise Colet and made Madame Bovary, so Browning put something of Elizabeth Barrett into his seventeenth-century Pompilia, and from the memory of his unforgettable crisis of conscience at the time of the elopement—an adventure in which, he felt, he had been on the brink of murder—narrated that flight with Caponsacchi, the priest, which was to lead to Pompilia’s death. Poetry abstracts drama from the dossier; Browning reverses the process. Finding the drama concise and abstract in the famous yellow book picked up on the second-hand bookstall in Rome, he multiplied and analysed it into the point of view of every possible spectator of the case. Not only were the leading characters given their say, but he collected the common gossip of the streets and even parodied his own subject in the two books which describe the esoteric high jinks of the lawyers. The poem is clamorous with rival voices of people; real people with characters, coats, hats, trades, names and addresses. This impression was not lost on Henry James. The great rival collector of Italian curiosities saw that The Ring and the Book was a Henry James novel gone wrong—not long enough among other things!
It is curious to note how these two Victorian connoisseurs moved instinctively towards a tale of scandal and spiritual corruption. The period’s growing interest in crime, its love of melodrama and its feeling for corruption have considerable social interest. The preoccupation grows stronger as the great bourgeois period becomes self-confident. Flaubert spent his life collecting objects of disgust; Henry James had the shocked expression of a bishop discovering something unspeakable in a museum; Browning, the casuist, becomes in Chesterton’s excellent words “a kind of cosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves’ kitchens and accused men publicly of virtue.” (If one resents Browning’s optimism today it is because of this ingenious complacency; surely one should accuse thieves of being thieves.) To be more particular, the thieves’ kitchens were a traditional interest of the Browning family. They had delicate consciences which were awkwardly allied to exuberant natures. Suburban Camberwell had been unable to contain the imaginations of the Bank of England clerk or of his precocious son. Sunday strollers, as they passed the Browning villa, could not have suspected that, inside, a child and his father were re-enacting the siege of Troy with chairs and tables, spouting epics and medieval romances to each other, re-arguing the battles of forgotten pedants, revelling in the dubious intrigue, the passion and the poisons of the Continent, and all the time keeping up to the minute on the crime story of the week. A man of the eighteenth century and a clerk, Browning’s father easily kept this learned escapism cool. The heroic couplet, as practised by Pope, did a good deal to soothe his savage breast. But it was otherwise in the nineteenth-century son. Liberty was in the air, shape lost its symmetry, energy blew itself out into the sublime or the grotesque.
The Ring and the Book is one of those detective stories in which we are given the crime and the murderer at the beginning. We are given an event as we ourselves might read of it in the newspaper and the object is to discover what is true and what is false in everyone’s story and in the crowd’s conjecture. Browning’s method complicates and recomplicates the suspense, shifts us from one foot to the other in growing agitation and excitement before the mystery.
Do we feel for Pompilia, still not dead, with twenty-five dagger-wounds in her? Very little. One is, of course, more moved than one is by the conventional corpse of a detective story; but not vastly more. The true incentive is to the brain, in watching this pile of evidence mount up and the next “point of view” undermine it. Now we are thrown into the common gossip of Rome and no one excels Browning in the rendering of rumour, scandal and the tunnellings of common insinuation:
At last the husband lifted an eyebrow—bent
On day-book and the study how to wring
Half the due vintage from the worn-out vines
At the villa, tease a quarter the old rent
From the farmstead, tenants swore would tumble soon—
Picked up his ear a-singing day and night
With “ruin, ruin”—and so surprised at last—
Why, what else but a titter? Up he jumps
Back to mind come those scratchings at the grange,
Prints of the paw about the outhouse; rife
In his head at once again are word and wink,
Mum here and budget there, the smell o’ the fox,
The musk of the gallant. “Friends, there’s
falseness here!”
The case for Pompilia and her priests never quite recovers from the effectiveness of Franceschini’s defence. His story is a false one. He is as villainous as lago; all the better he draws his own character: the down-at-heel noble, rich in tradition, empty in purse—“a brainful of belief, the noble’s lot”—cynical no doubt, but look how he has been treated; can he be blamed for bitterly resenting the trick played on him by Pompilia’s ignoble parents?
With the cunning of an excellent story-teller Browning gradually demolishes our credulity about Franceschini. We hear Caponsacchi, the priest. Can we believe that this handsome, cultivated, worldly young man, known for the slackness of his vows, came to desire the salvation and not the seduction of Pompilia? But we know our Browning by now, the “cosmic detective” nosing out virtue in our unlikeliest moments; and though Pompilia’s lawyer appears to be much fonder of his diction than careful of the interest of his client, we know that the unravelling of motive and evidence will eventually lead to her innocence. Her simple story comes from her own lips, artless and pathetic, as she dies. One more of those Victorian innocents, fragile, wraith-like, childish, affecting at their best, sickly at their worst, breathes her last in the Victorian phantasmagoria where ogre-like villains and corrupted worldings nudge and snarl together in the smoke. How they liked suffering in women.
The realism, Browning’s eye for the physical, conveys an extraordinary excitement. He cannot describe an emotion or sensation without putting a hat and coat on it:
Till sudden at the door a tap discreet
A visitor’s premonitory cough,
And poverty has reached him on her rounds.
Or
… Guido woke
After the cuckoo, so late, near noon day
With an inordinate yawning of the jaws,
Ears plugged, eyes gummed together, palate, tongue
And teeth one mud-paste made of poppy milk.
Or
The brother walking misery away
O’ the mountain side with dog and gun belike.
His people live, their thoughts live physically; indeed they live so physically that in the metaphors they breed a crowd of other things and other people, cramming the narrative until the main theme is blocked and obscured. A stuttering demagogue, said Chesterton. A crowd of thoughts, arguments, theories, casuistries, images, doubts and aspirations, in physical shape, are trying to get to the point of Browning’s pen all at once and they reduce him to illegibility.
The Ring and the Book of the seventies has become The Waste Land of to-day. The Browning bric-à-brac, the Browning personalities, the “points of view”, the arguments, have degenerated into a threadbare remnant:
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Shantih, shantih, the end of individualism and free speech. When one reads the heirs of Browning and especially the subjective, personal and obscure poets with their private worlds, their family jokes, their shop talk and code language, one sees what their work has lost in interest and meaning by the lack of that framework of dramatic realism which gives the cogency of event to Browning’s poems. There is a reason for this loss. Private life in the nineteenth century had its public sanction; nowadays private life is something which we live against the whole current of our time. For the moment.