The Ring and the Book (An Appreciation.)
by E. A. Skurray.
Volume 12, 1901, pgs. 858-872
(Continued from pg. 759.)
Part II.
The secret kept from Pietro is only revealed when Guido, and the priest his brother, come to claim her, and with her
The value of the victim's blood;
for, as Pompilia says, "I was the chattel that had caused the crime."
The sum settled, the agreement is made that they shall all live together at Arezzo. She says, "All since is blank . . . a terrific dream . . . I say blank, this is the note of evil, for good lasts." (As he also says in Abt Vogler--"There shall never be one lost good! The evil is null, is nought.")
At first only two things stand out at all: the friend who helped her, and the promise of the child; then memory returns: she confirms Caponsacchi's account of the letters and the trap laid by Guido. With great delicacy and dignity she speaks of her miserable married life, the natural shrinking of the pure mind from the evil and the vile. She could get no help from man, spurned by those to whom she turned,--
God's glimmer that came through the ruin-top
Was witness why all lights were quenched inside,
Henceforth I asked God counsel, not mankind.
Equally fine is what follows to--"dipt and drank." Her child she has given "outright to God: what guardianship could be safer?" Sent away into the country for security by that unselfish mother love. He does not need her now, so her remaining strength shall be used in defence of her champion, that "lustrous and pellucid soul"; to each the purity of the other stands revealed so clearly, they wonder the world cannot see it also:--
Shot itself out in white light, blazed the truth,
Through every atom of his act with me.
Made for each other, though in a sense separated, they had for each the trust of perfect knowledge:--
Could he be here, how he would speak for me.
Even when she saw him first at the theatre, she knew he would not have thrown the comfits; knew also that he was a man on whom she could have leant, with whom she would have been safe.
Two things are noteworthy: one is, how wonderfully the accounts coincide, the separate conclusions of each being verified by facts; the other, the perfect goodness of Pompilia. Learning through bitter experience that she is beset on all sides by temptations the most vile, she never once, even in thought, sought solace in sin. Tormented by cruelty the most bitter and galling, at which she only hints, for she will not harm Guido, we feel for her a reverence as towards a saint, and bow our heads as before the sanctity of a shrine.
Then we come to her own wonderful awakening in the springtime, to which, with its sweet common sights and sounds, she likens it; but the passage itself should be read from "How good to sleep" down to "leave all woes at once." With it comes the wish to escape, to save this other life; so that when that vile wretch Margherita just then appears, Pompilia says--
Tell Caponsacchi he may come.
All day I sent prayer-like incense up
To God the strong,
for she will use the professed devotion for good. It shall be like the fire which that virgin who had faith in God used wherewith to destroy her enemies; [Tracked to the cave where she has taken refuge, they kindle a fire to burn her out. She, by prayer, turns the fire on her would-be destroyers.] so will she "gasp the lightning and be saved." Instead of a false light, she found in Caponsacchi a star like that which led to the Holy Babe. How beautiful all that passage--"He was thy saint" to "this one heart brought me all the spring." What a human touch we have, when during their flight, a woman with true instinct lays the new-born babe in her arms: that mystery which is as "the sudden hole through earth that lets in heaven." Her action at the inn--when she flew at Guido with uplifted sword in defence of her deliverer, but "her angel held her back"--she exults in, for she says, that one time she saw the right, and fought for it. Though she was dying of cruel wounds she feels she is saved, because her soul was restored to her; for in the calm retirement of the convent she had been "traced round about with white to front the world."
The she passes judgment on all--herself, to whom this Christmas-tide had brought realisation of God's birth. She compares herself with Mary: "I had my babe lying a little on my breast like hers." She feels sure her parents, in spite of "flippery," are safe; moreover, it was well for her to have been rescued by Violante; yet the deed wrongly done always pricked, and was bound to work out the consequences of all wrong-doing. Even for Guido she is not without hope, for her blood "washes the pavement white," while how deep this truth--
But where will God be absent? In His face
Is light, but in His shadow healing too:
Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!
His soul and hers never touched: "I could not love him; but his mother did." Towards him she is more than fair: she recognises the injustice with which he had been treated, and forgives with the passionlessness of a divine forgiveness.
At last she has done with earth, and will "compose herself for God." How can she do so better than by thought for that noble friend, who taught her through human love what was the love of God, and showed her as only a good man can how divine woman may be to such a one? Nor shall this love die--it is immortal:--
O lover of my life, O soldier saint,
No work begun shall ever pause for death!
It awaits its completion in that heaven where "we have the real and true and sure."
In this Book, the heart of womanhood, motherhood, is laid bare. Of all the twelve it is the most perfect, both in conception and in execution: it is the one in which Browning most completely identifies himself with his subject; and we should wonder that a man so virile as he could so perfectly have drawn and understood a woman, had not Shakespeare and other geniuses taught us that it is from such pens that we must expect the purest, noblest, and most feminine types. Its pathos gives us a catch at the heart, and as we close, pity and admiration struggle for mastery, until we hardly know which is the stronger.
Books VIII and IX are occupied with the pleading of the counsel for and against Guido. First we have his, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelus, who gives us a rough sketch of the defence with all his motives exposed and the by-play so dear to Browning. Hyacinthus' thoughts are with his dearly loved son Giaciuto, whose birthday feast it is. He is intensely human, but he has no high aims: he never rises to a comprehension of the tragedy; his object rather is to outdo Bottinius, the Fisc, he so often apostrophizes--"A fico for your aggravations, Fisc," who, on his side, is only too ready with his retort, "Listen to me, thou archangelic swine"; or again, "whose feeding hath offuscated his wit," taunts to which his love of the table leave him vulnerable.
After the tragic tension of feeling caused by the last two characters, the drop to farce and by-play, jest and witticism, is so startling that it jars a little at first. Then we feel how large was Browning's humanity--that he was true to life, which is never all tragedy and gloom; comedy and farce, good and evil, tears and laughter, intermingle in infinite variety; so the heart of Browning was large enough to see this, and his intellect great enough to show this to us. Therefore he draws us Hyacinthus, brimful of life, with his jests and Latinisms, his plainly avowed worldly aims, his shrewd common sense.
A source of honest profit, and good fame,
Just so much work as keeps the brain from rust,
Just so much play as lets the heart expand.
The murder, unfortunately, has been confessed, otherwise he shows us how easily he could have twisted it round on Caponsacchi. Guido's presence at the villa he would have explained thus: he came at Christmas, the season of good-will, to pardon Pompilia, and finds the murder done.
These two Books are full of cleverness and smartness. There are, even in Book VIII, passages which almost rise to eloquence, as that one which begins,--
It should be always harder to convict,
In short, than to establish innocence,
only we feel it never rings quite true: both men are just typical lawyers of a low order.
Book IX Jures Doctor, Johannes Baptista Bottinus, follows. At the beginning he strikes a different note from that of his opponent, and we have that beautiful description of drawing a portrait and painting a picture to which reference has before been made. Special pleading, farce and gibe were all Guido's counsel could produce, but Bottinus feels that, in her, he has "a great theme, may my strength be adequate." In spite of this, he begins his argument ad hominem; even had her conduct been such as was supposed, surely it was but natural she should wish to escape from the harshness and cruelty of the ill-favoured husband, and that her choice of companion fell on the good-looking Canon, natural also to give him at least the semblance of love: "Thus would I defend the step, were the thing true which is fable." On Pompilia herself there are passages of the greatest beauty, e.g.:--
The innocent sleep soundly, sound she sleeps,
So let her slumber, there unguarded save
By her own chastity and triple mail.
. . .
So sleep thou on, secure whate'er betide,
For thou, too, hast thy problem hard to solve,
How so much beauty is compatible
With so much innocence.
Both counsels play up to the authority of the day--the priestly, as the Fisc says,
This comes of being born in modern times,
With priests for auditors; still it pays.
Interspersed are examples of Browning's philosophy: "Since low with high and good with bad is linked"; also, in the moral he draws after telling the story of S. Peter and John, Judas Iscariot and the fowl.
O the merry thought in memory of the fact,
That to keep wide awake is man's best aim.
The Fisc has a wish to exculpate Pompilia, "to draw the true effigies of a saint," "do justice to perfection in the sex"; but, after all, he is only a clever lawyer who would outdo his opponent: not noble himself, he cannot see the nobility and purity of others. He is too cute not to acknowledge that his defence and Pompilia's confession of perfect innocence do not tally. How can they be reconciled? Well, honestly, he thinks her confession simply a mistake: it spoils his defence, and, moreover, he does not believe it, but
Confession at the point of death,
Nam in articulo mortis, with the church
Passes for statement honest and sincere.
But it was done with a good motive to clear Caponsacchi and bring her husband to repentance, "so that sacrament obliterates the sin."
We have here another instance of Browning's artistic insight. Had the Pope followed the other two beautiful portraits, we should have been dazzled by want of shadow; whereas, through this interlude of the counsel, a neutral background is given as an appropriate setting for the next portrait, the Pope.
Book X.--The Pope. In this grand old Pope we have one of the finest conceptions in poetry. The Book may be divided into the soliloquy at the beginning, which contains the characteristic Browning philosophy: the Pope's judgment first of himself, of the events and the several actors in them; his meditations, analysis of his motives, and the final sentence. He will clear the ground by bringing himself first to that bar of judgment--his own conscience--so that he, the man, may be more fit in his official capacity "to speak, act, in place of Him--the Pope for Christ."
The statement that the truth lies in no portion, "yet evolvable from the whole," is characteristic of the method by which the poet has made the characters each add to the truth by degrees, whilst they only appear to tell their own version of the story. The Pope will not admit the fatalist theory. Guido is not a helpless puppet. It was the first deliberate act of wrong which made future ones easy; for there may be a time of which it could be said "making it harder to do wrong than right." None are given over to evil influences only. Guido had many chances, yet self-interest spoilt them all, and was the pivot on which he moved; even in his marriage, there was not one worthy or natural impulse, thus he is gradually drawn to crime, "the fine, felicity and flower of wickedness," so that, in the end, he subordinates "revenge, the manlier sin, to interest, the meaner." Unlike the other half-hearted advocates, the Pope sees through this mean soul, as he also recognises at once the white innocence of Pompilia: in one powerful line he exposes the iniquity of the forged letters, "but false to body and soul they figure forth."
He then goes on to show that Guido the astute is caught after the murder, like so many criminals, through his own oversight. We saw what a clever use Guido made of this in his defence; yet with great acumen the Pope points out that, even had he provided horses, he would not have escaped: his accomplices would have murdered him because of the promised pay withheld, for, to the end, his love of gain is his own hell and retribution.
The other actors are then reviewed, and so just is the Pope, that his deepest scorn is reserved for
This fox-faced horrible priest, this brother brute,
The Abate . . . Guido, I catch and judge,
Paul is past reach in this world and my time,
For a man may sink so low a to be unworthy of punishment because incapable of profiting by it. Girolamo, who adds lust to his crime--"Hell's own blue tint." Note how powerful the lines:--
The hag that gave these three abortive birth,
Unworthy mother, unwomanly woman that near
Turns motherhood to shame!
The Governor, worldly and supine, who treats Pompilia's wrongs with "a shrug of the shoulders and facetious word." The Archbishop, of whom he asks, was he the hireling who did turn and flee whilst the poor lamb was pressed by the wolf? Each are touched with a masterly hand until he comes to Pompilia. We must let the Pope's own words paint her:--
My flower,
My rose, I gather to the breast of God;
and his sentence, or rather benediction, on her,--
First of the first,
Such I pronounce Pompilia then as now,
Perfect in whiteness.
It is thus he interprets the old question always new--the position in which man stands towards woman:--
Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man:
That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield
Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,
The marvel of a soul like thine, Earth's flower,
She holds up to the softened gaze of God!
He is stirred to the depth by the contemplation of an innocence which has passed through the fiery furnace of knowledge. Her praise is that she was obedient to the light allotted, so she rose from law to law, and was found equal to the supreme demands made upon her: she did not despair of her own life, but, for the sake of the unborn child, had courage--
To worthily defend the trust of trust,
Life from the ever-living.
Consider how magnificent the humility of this grand old saint:--
Go past me
And get thy praise, and be not far to seek
Presently, when I shall follow if I may.
From Pompilia the natural sequence is, Caponsacchi, "my warrior priest." He does not spare his faults, but with the instinctive insight of one noble mind for another, he sees "how throughout all thy warfare thou wert pure," for he also had been able to rise to the greatness of the occasion: his breach of church discipline is blamed, his lay attire, the sword, while his chivalry is also recognised--
For catching quick the sense of the real cry.
. . .
At any fateful moment of the strange
Adventure, the strong passion of that strait,
Fear and suspense may have revealed too much,--
. . .
The perfect beauty of the body and soul
Thou savest in thy passion for God's sake.
Yet it was through temptation he was "pedestalled in triumph."
Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the hand and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise.
Through this supreme ordeal, this trifler--
Whose sword-hand was used to strike the lute,
retrieved the day and therefore deserved the words,--
Well done:
Work, be unhappy, but bear life, my son.
We come next to the Pope's judgment on the Comparini:--
Foul and fair,
Sadly mixed natures, self-indulgent, yet
Self-sacrificing too,
so they
Slide into silly crime at unaware.
It was through their honest love they were punished,
That looked most pure of speech,
for white will not neutralize black, and the penalty of sin must be paid.
The Pope's musings on the tragedy follow; and in the soliloquy which begins, "O Thou as represented here by me," we have Browning's criticism of life, the modern thoughts of an advanced thinker rather than those of an Italian Pope of the 17th century. That old question--the meaning of pain--is faced; why should it exist? Its object surely is to evolve--
The moral qualities of man, how else?
To make him love in turn and be beloved,
Enable man to wring from out all pain
All pleasure for a common heritage
To all eternity.
We are reminded how impossible it is for the lower intelligence to understand and judge the higher. He compares it with the argument of a child who says "the sea is angry, for it roars." We have these same metaphysics in Caliban upon Setebos; moreover, why try to discover the process of God's judgments.
So my heart be struck, What care I, by God's gloved hand or the bare?
Here is another thought familiar to students of Browning:--
Life is probation, and the earth no goal,
But starting point of man compel him strive.
[See Rabbi Ben Ezra: "Each sting that bids, nor sit, nor stand, but
go.]
With another modern thinker, Ruskin, he, with a large-hearted humanity, marvels not so much at the mystery of the pain and suffering of life, as at what we lose by not recognising its end; for the object of pain is the development and training of man's soul. The Pope sees with sorrow how men miss this: they refuse their co-operation, so their natures do not expand as they were intended to. Failure is on all sides; humanity sins and grovels. What is the reason? With a large-minded candour, he blames the conduct of the faithful few, Christians, who ought to leaven humanity, but who, on the contrary, disgrace their profession.
Nor is it individuals alone who do this, but also the corporate Christian life, like the Convent of Convertites where Pompilia was placed. If it should be objected that this is due to the corruption of human nature, "No so," retorts the Pope: human nature can be influenced for good, if you only appeal to that which is noble in it. Witness Caponsacchi. It was not thanks to the Church, but in spite of her teaching, her worldliness and laxity, that he acted nobly through the guidance of his own heart; yet is the heart itself an unstable guide, for see how his evil heart led the Abate astray. Consider also what the old philosophy did for the world before Christ. How unfavourably we compare with it; for Euripides might argue,--
You have the sunrise now, joins truth to truth,
Shoots life and substance into death and void;
while the Pope replies,--
Dare we, who miss the plain way in the blaze of day,
vaunt ourselves against philosophy which did so much for the world, though it could only creep on the ground, not fly? The truth is,
We have become too familiar with the light.
Is our failure due to the old forms having worn out? Is it not rather that they require readjustment?
From philosophy in the abstract, he returns to Guido and weighs the for and against. If his judgment is adverse, will it not be siding with the uneducated classes against civilization? Moreover, the present is hardly the time to remove landmarks--lessen the authority of husband over wife. Besides, is he not an old man? Why not perform one act of mercy before he dies! Yes,
But a voice other than yours
Quickens my spirit. Quis pro Domino?
For Guido's sake, more even than for that of abstract justice, his sentence must be death,
So may the truth be flashed out at one blow,
And Guido see one instant and be saved.
On receipt of this command,
Acquaint Count Guido and his fellow four
They die to-morrow.
What is our verdict on the Pope? Is it not that whilst he is one of Browning's most interesting creations, whilst there are passages of the greatest beauty and of the noblest sentiment, yet it is also less dramatic than the other portraits? The poet forgets his own individuality in a lesser degree. Some of the philosophizing is, at times, a little obscure, and by its length loses in power. Yet this is in itself more in accordance with the musings of an old man, with his slowly matured judgment, as one disposed to pause and consider--not to be carried away on a wave of enthusiasm. In all this, we are also reminded how we have listened to the judgment of a judge who is shortly, in his turn, required to appear before the bar of Eternal Justice.
Book XI. Guido. In this Book, Guido once again comes on the scene. Past hope of saving his life, the real man is revealed in all his utter meanness of soul, with all his cynical brutality exposed. Cardinal Acciainoli and the Abate Parciatichi come, presumably to make him repent. "Repent? Will that assist the engine half-way back?" he cries, referring to the guillotine of which just before he has given so grim and ghastly a description. In the following couplet he gives his own criticism of life:--
For pleasure being the sole good in the world,
Anyone's pleasure turns to someone's pain.
With great shrewdness he can unmask low and base motives, though he is as one colour-blind to greatness and goodness, even in the Pope. All the same, he is keen-sighted enough to detect the imperfections in religion, and of the hypocrites who profess it,--
The born baptized and bred Christian Atheist.
Like other sinners, he blames everyone and everything but himself: he pleads the excuse of heredity, the powerlessness of the will--the very little which turns the balance for good or evil:--
Do thou wipe out the being of me, and smear
This soul from off the white of things I blot.
I am one huge sheer mistake. Whose fault?
Not mine at least, who did not make myself!
What an awful power there is in these lines. He rails against religion, or rather the way in which it was represented to him; against the restraint his teachers imposed on him, which drove him to sin.
This Book is full of passages of extraordinary power. Once again, we have the story told, and with what consummate skill and dramatic force; it carries us away. How vivid the pictures he presents to us, as that, for example, of Pompilia's marriage, when he compares her with a heifer brought to the sacrifice, who,
Eyes tremblingly the altar and the priest.
Guido knew his audience, that he was speaking to hardened men of the world, who, only in degree or opportunity, differed from himself: he sees through the thin disguise of their clerical garb, and we can hardly forbear admiration at the keenness of his wit even when the sands of life are swiftly flowing out. Take his reply when the Abate corrects his mistake about Virgil:--
Right--thanks, Abate--though the Christian's dumb,
The Latinist's vivacious in you yet!
He unveils with contemptuous frankness, not only his own paganism, but that also of his companions. He turns with dramatic force to the Cardinal with a "You know me, I know you, and both know that!" They may profess Christianity, yet actually it is only a superstition, like the propitiations made to heathen gods,--
Pay toll here, there pursue your pleasures free!
The whole interview is most powerful: on the one hand, by reason of its learning--its intimacy with the classics--on the other, from its knowledge of the baser forms of human nature. Even the coarseness and sensualism we meet with in it--and it contains passages coarser than any we find elsewhere in Browning--are such as would be inevitable when a man like Guido unveils himself. Repent to men like these! Nay, rather does he glory in his baseness:--
I have bared, you bathe my heart--
It grows the stonier for your saving dew!
It is when we compare the two Guidos that we see how great an artist Browning is at his best, and how both are needed for the moral he wishes us to draw for ourselves out of the tragedy. One of his motives for the two pictures is that Guido should, in spite of himself, nay, through his very vileness, bring out the purity and beauty of Pompilia's character. We are shown the instinctive hatred of evil for good, the impossibility of light dwelling with darkness. He hates his wife because there was,
No touch in her of hate,
And it would prove her hell if I reached mine.
What a testimony to her saintliness! Her meek submission when left by her parents, "her stone strength of dumb despair," infuriates him,--
For this new game of giving up the game,
This worst offence of not offending more.
Still there is no touch of remorse, far less of repentance. See how he gloats over the details of his crime, his cruel stabs on Pietro's body, the denying him time for repentance. He shows us how plausible a tale he could have told, had not Pompilia lingered those four days,
As if she held God's hand,
While she leant back and looked her last at me.
Browning has, moreover, another object in this second portrayal of Guido: it is to vindicate the Pope's sentence of death; not only that it was a just one, but also to show that it was the only means by which awakening could come to one so base, so self-centered as he was. For, in spite of his brag--in spite of occasional glimpses that he still retains traces of noble birth--he is, in the end, only an abject coward, who cries out for bare life. The Pope saw that it was only by facing death sudden and ignominious that there was any hope that awakening could come for him: so, we have just a break in the clouds, a hint that even he is not quite beyond the pale in his last cry, which is to the wife he has murdered, the God in Whom he had boasted he had no belief,--
Christ, Maria, God . . .
Pompilia, will you let them murder me?
Book XII.--The Book and the Ring. The Book and the Ring contains letters and part of a sermon in which we are given an account of the events after they are over, with the varied gossip of the day, from "the Venetian" and our old friends the counsel. According to the former, Guido died penitent, "and, with the name of Jesus on his lips, received the fatal blow." The monk's sermon is quoted by the Fisc. In his mouth Browning puts one of those sentiments which show his insight into the power of ennobling motive:--
How human love in varied shapes might work,
As glory, or as rapture, or as grace,
wherein students of the poet recall his rooted belief of the mighty power of all love as an educator.
We may ask, why, after the tragic end of Book XI., these letters with their jests and trivialities? One reason, Browning tells us, was--to complete the story:--
To make the Ring that's all but round and done.
Another was to bring out still more clearly the perfect integrity of the Pope's judgment. Even her own counsel turns against Pompilia: she, whom he had sainted last week, is now "a person of dishonest life." The sisters at the convent condemn her, because her human mother-heart thought first of her son Gaetano, for whom she left her wealth in trust, instead of endowing the convent with it. Yet, in the end, the Pope's judgment is confirmed:--
In restitution of the fame
Of dead Pompilia quondam Guido's wife.
The poet ends by giving us his own motif. He told his story "Art's way," because it alone is a real representation: it makes the truth a living thing, and wins its entrance into the mind; in art, by dramatizing truth:--
Man no wise speaks to man,
Only to mankind. Art may tell a truth
Obliquely, so the thing shall breed the thought,
This is Browning's way of showing us, not only how good triumphed over evil, but even a deeper truth, viz., how evil, as represented by Guido, was necessary to bring out and develop the good in Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Had these three not been brought together, "one might have died a misused wife, one a poor noble of dubious character, one a high-bred but self-indulgent priest." [See Nettleship's Essays on Browning.]
Do we not feel, as we put the book down, that he has succeeded? That he has indeed told us a great truth; that a human document has been outspread before us, the very well-spring of human nature exposed: the heart of our common humanity, quivering, living, laid bare. The conception of four years' growth has come to full birth: his aim has been accomplished,--
To write a book shall mean beyond the facts,
Suffice the eye and save the soul beside.
Proofread by LNL, May 2009