BOOKS.

—+- MR. BROWNING'S NEW POEM.

TIIERE can be no doubt but that in a certain sense the alloy which Mr. Browning told us in his prologue was necessary to shape the pure gold of the ring into such a tempered, though fragile, circlet as would be fit for use, has been successfully manipulated. We have at last

"The rondttre brave, the lilied loveliness Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore, Prime nature with an added artistry,"

—in the exquisite and, we dare assert, immortal portraits of the dove-like yet indomitable Pompilia, and the gallant priestly knight-errant Caponsacchi, in their sharp contrast to the glaring, wolfish eyes of Count Guido's face,—

" Hawknose and yellowness and bush and all ;"

—with, above them all, the grand figure of the old Pope Innocent XLI. sitting in judgment,—a "grey ultimate decrepitude," as he calls himself,

"Yet sensible of fires that more and more Visit a soul in passage to the sky

Left nakeder than when flesh-robe was new."

Those four figures, of Pompilia and Caponsacchi, in their tragic conflict with Count Guido, of Guido himself, and the old Pope of eighty-six tottering on the verge of the grave, but fearing the grave and the repute he will leave behind him so little, and God so much, are both sculptured and painted for us, as only a master in imaginative art can sculpture and paint ; and we do not doubt that some part of the full effect may be due to that alloy which Mr. Browning warned us that he was compelled to use for the purpose of his moulding, and which he certainly has used somewhat prodigally. We do not dispute that had the contending views of Pompilia's murder taken by "Half Rome," and "the other Half Rome," and by that " Tertiutn Quid" whose tertiary quality we found it hard to guess,—and finally, the opposite pleadings of the counsel for the defence, Dominus IIyacinthus de Archangelis, and the still dismaler counsel for the prosecution, Juris Doctor Johannes-Baptista Bottinius,—we do not dispute, we say, that had

the contending views of these secondary authorities, who" darken counsel by words without knowledge," not been heard, the im

pression made upon us by the principals in the story, by the yellow wolfishness of Guido's malice, by the ethereal depth of blue in Pompilia's clinging but saintly love, by the bright intensity of flame in Caponsacchi's indignation, by the keen, spiritual truthfulness of the old Pope's discriminating judgment, might have been much less sharp and vivid than it is. Doubtless the foil of unreality has added something to the clear and telling expressiveness of reality. Doubtless the groping, uncertain fancy-pictures of the facts by those who talked of what they knew not, have done something to quicken our appreciation of the drawing where every stroke tells and a figure grows out so lifelike and characteristic from the background that it confutes and dissipates at once all the misty shapes which the vague surmises of others have attempted to pass off. We may admit even more. We may concede that the conditions of society under which this great crime, Mr. Browning's theme, took place, would scarcely have been so completely pictured without the hollow pleadings of the Roman lawyers on each side, the guzzling, punning old buffoon who defends Guido, and the watery-eyed, conventional, petty, and spiteful formalist who pleads for Pompilia. Doubtless these two

portraits add something towards the completeness and vividness of the picture of the society in which this tragedy occurred,—

just as the outline of the red-tape town-clerk of Ephesus adds a certain vividness to our apprehension of the character of St. Paul. Still we are compelled, after studying and reviewing carefully the whole course of this tragic story, to think that the alloy has been too freely used for the purposes of Mr. Browning's art.

In a story told, like this, in long semi-dramatic reaches, where the reader is closeted, as it were, with each character for a

couple of hours at a stretch, there is far less room for the use of an artistic foil, than in a proper drama, where the action and reaction of the secondary characters on the principals are rapid and effective. Polonius is a splendid foil to Hamlet, but we could hardly endure to let Poloniu,s hold us mentally by the button for an hour and a half or two hours, even though Shakespeare himself developed his character for us during that period. We think that what Mr. Browning saw to be neces sary for us in the way of putting in the background of Roman and Tuscan society, he might have very well done in his prologue, and that if he had kept the substance of the poem itself to the two discourses of the murderer, Count Guido,—that outburst of lean and crafty malignity before his condemnation, and of hoarse and naked hatred after it,—to the splendid address of Caponsacchi, the dying tale of the childlike mother Pompilia,—and the final judg ment and musings of the old Pope upon the case, he would have given us a poem very nearly as effective in its features, even to those who studied it, as the present, and with a certainty, moreover, of having, at least, five times as many eager and interested students. Without disputing at all the marvellous cleverness of old Arcangeli's legal Latin and selfish epicurism, we must confess that we found his buf foonery very hard reading indeed,—while Bottini's hollower and emptier conventionalism was well nigh inducing us to skip him outright. That we might have missed something in the finer effects of the whole, had we done so, we are ready to admit. All poetry probably needs the dull prose detail of life as a background to bring out its full meaning and force ; still, even the greatest poets dare not embody too much of this in their poems, and Mr. Browning seems to us to have endangered the fame of a noble poem, —the dramatic masterpiece of this great writer,—by giving us one-half of alloy to one-half of the highest imaginative painting. Of course, we do not mean that in the views of "Half Rome," and "the other Half Rome," of the " Tertium Quid," of Arcangeli, and of Bottini, there is not a large share of Mr. Brown ing's peculiar genius. Still, we believe that the group for the sake of which he wrote his poem would be complete without these interpolations, and that without them the poem would have commanded both a wider and a more unflagging interest.

With this qualification, it is not easy for us to expres too highly our admiration for the four great full-length portraits we have now before us. Of Count Guido we have partly spoken in reviewing the second volume of this poem, and of the noble figure of the Canon Caponsacchi we then said sufficient to fix upon it the attention of our readers. But in these two last volumes we have Pompilia the victim of the crime, and the old Pope, its final judge, in a most impressive and living portraiture. We doubt if Mr. Browning's poem will be perpetuated by any of his intellectual studies so long. Pompilia is a figure at once of the most original and simplest school of art. It has something of the loveliness of Raffaelle's Madonna della Seggia about it, but with more both of the child and of the saint. Her husband, a murderer, calls her the "pale poison my hasty hunger took for food," and speaks of her as like one of the favourite figures of Fm a Angelico,

"Who traces you some timid chalky ghost That turns the church into a charnel. Ay, Just such a pencil might depict my wife."

But that of course is the libel of the malignant and greedy man who can value nothing without a spice of wickedness in it, nothing that is not willing and even anxious to take a taint in his foul service. But the Pope understands her thoroughly. He makes it her special praise that having been "obedient to the end," "dutiful to the foolish parents first," "submissive next to the bad husband," she could, nevertheless,— " Rise from law to law, The old to the new, promoted at one cry 0' the trump of God to the new service, not To longer bear, but henceforth fight,—be found Sublime in now impatience with the foe ; Endure man and obey God ; plant firm foot On neck of man, tread man into the hell Meet for him, and obey God all the more."

There is alacrity, even valour, at the bottom of Pompilia, in spite of what her husband calls the "timid chalky ghost" in her ; she can seize his sword and point it at his breast when his cruelty and malignity pass all bounds ; and even he feels this. Mr. Browning, in the most dramatic passage in his whole great poem, makes Guido, when at last the procession enters his cell to lead him away to execution, call out in his last agony of terror :—

"Abate,—Cardinal,—Christ,—Maria,—God

Pompilia! will you let them murder me?"

—Pompilia standing at the very climax of his thought of everything Godlike, in spite of the fury of his hate. To her, dead, he appeals as to a power almost beyond God's, to save him. And yet with this high valour at the bottom of her, no more simple " woman child," as the old Pope finely calls her, was ever painted than Pompilia,—simple alike in her religious maternal love for the boy to whom she gave birth just a fortnight before her own murder, and in the confession of the pure depth and intensity of her devo tion to the young priest who saved her from her husband, and for whose purity of soul she fights as for her own. The Pope speaks of her as of a wayside flower that "Breaks all into blaze, Spreads itself, one wide glory of desire To incorporate the whole great sun it loves, From the inch-height whence it looks and longs."

And all these feelings are exquisitely painted in her last account of the tragedy she just survived. How fine and tender is this description of Caponsacchi's care and sympathy for her during the flight from her husband :—

" Is all told ? There's the journey : and where's time

To tell you how that heart burst out in shine ?

Yet certain points do press on me too hard.

Each place must have a name, though I forget: How strange it was—there where the plain begins

And the small river mitigates its flow—

When eve was fading fast, and my soul sank, And he divined what surge of bitterness, In overtaking me, would float me back

Whence I was carried by the striding day— So,—‘ This grey place was famous once,' said he—

And he began that legend of the place As if in answer to the unspoken fear, And told me all about a bravo man dead, Which lifted me and let my soul go on !

How did he know too,—at that town's approach By the rock-side,—that in coming near the signs, Of life, the house-roofs and the church and tower, I saw the old boundary and wall o' the world Rise plain as ever round me, hard and cold, As if the broken circlet joined again,

Tightened itself about me with no break,— As if the town would turn Arezzo's self,—

The husband there,—the friends my enemies, All ranged against me, not an avenue

I try, but would be blocked and drive me back

On him,—this other. . . oh the heart in that!

Did not he find, bring, put into my arms A now-born babe 7—and I saw faces beam Of the young mother proud to teach me joy, And gossips round expecting my surprise At the sudden hole through earth that lets in heaven.

I could believe himself by his strong will Had woven around me what I thought the world We went along in, every circumstance, Towns, flowers and faces, all things helped so well I For, through the journey, was it natural Such comfort should arise from first to last ?

As I look back, all is one milky way ; Still bettered more, the more remembered, so Do new stars bud while I but search for old,

And fill all gaps i' the glory, and grow him—

Him I now see make the shine everywhere."

How exquisitely natural that suggestion of hers, that she could almost believe that the young priest's "strong will" had created for her the whole world and its every circumstance in which she journeyed from Arezzo till overtaken by her husband at the last stage to Rome ; that she was travelling not in the broad every-day world that thwarts, and terrifies, and wearies, but in a world governed by the subjective law of his tenderly adjusting mind. And then look how finely the religious passion of the mother's heart is expressed :— . "I never realized God's birth before—

How he grew likost God in being born. This time I felt like Mary, had my babe Lying a little on my breast like hers."

And this, again, for the spiritual perfection of maternal love is scarcely equalled in all our language :—

" Even for my babe, my boy, there's safety thence—

From the sudden death of me, I mean: we poor Weak souls, how we endeavour to be strong!

I was already using up my life,—

This portion, now, should do him such a good, This other go to keep off such an ill ! The great life; see, a breath and it is gone !

So is detached, so left all by itself The little life, the fact which means so much.

Shall not God stoop the kindlier to His work, His marvel of creation, foot would crush, Now that the hand He trusted to receive And hold it, lots the treasure fall perforce ?

The better ; He shall have in orphanage His own way all the clearlier : if my babe

Outlive the hour—and he has lived two weeks—

It is through God who knows I am not by. Who is it makes the soft gold hair turn black, And sets the tongue, might lie so long at rest, Trying to talk ? Let us leave God alone! Why should I doubt He will explain in time What I feel now, but fail to find the words?"

Taken as a whole, the figure of Pompilia seems to us a masterpiece of delicate power. Passionate tenderness with equally passionate purity, submissiveness to calamity with strenuousness against evil, the trustfulness of a child with the suffering of a martyr, childishness of intellect with the visionary insight of a saint, all tinged with the ineffably soft colouring of an Italian heaven, breathe in every touch and stroke of this great picture.

The old Pope affords, perhaps, a fresher kind of subject, but one much easier, we should suppose, for Mr. Browning to draw.

It is a very fine figure. There is in it all the mark of venerable age, except any failure of intellectual power. The flashes of intellectual and spiritual light are of the thin, bright, Boreal kind. The Pope, Innocent XII., as Mr. Browning draws him, is at least no believer in the dogma which it is supposed that the Council of 1869 is to promulgate, on Papal infallibility. This is the gallant old man's tone in deliberating whether he shall or shall not dare condemn the aristocratic murderer to his rightful fate :—

"Yet my poor spark had for its source, the sun

Thither I sent the great looks which compel Light from its fount : all that I do and am Comes from the truth, or seen or else surmised, Remembered or divined, as mere man may : I know just so, nor otherwise. As I know, I speak,—what should I know, thou, and how speak Were there a wild mistake of eye or brain In the recorded governance above ?

If my own breath, only, blew coal alight I called celestial and the morning star ?

I, who in this world act resolvedly, Dispose of men, the body and the soul, As they acknowledge or gainsay this light I show them,—shall I too lack courage 7—leave I, too, the post of me, like those I blame ?

Refuse, with kindred inconsistency, Grapple with danger whereby souls grow strong?

I am near the end; but still not at the end ; All till the very end is trial in life: At this stage is the trial of my soul Danger to face, or danger to refuse ?

Shall I dare try the doubt now, or not dare ?"

Still more striking and finer is the old Pope's intetipretatiou of the sense in which the "weak things of this world " shall " confound

the mighty." It is the apparent weakness, he says, in a faith which appeals to the help and brings forth the love of man, till

he finds at last that it was in its weakness that its strength consisted, in its iraploriug appeal to the heart that the marvellous

power lay which coidd not have lain hid in the fiat of almighty strength :— "What but the weakness in a faith supplies

The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible, comports?

How can man love but what ho yearns to help ?

And that which men think weakness within strength, But angels know for strength and stronger yot What were it else but the first things made new, But repetition of the miracle, The divine instance of self-sacrifice That never ends and aye begins for man ?"

Of a piece with this suggestion is the old Pope's fiue presage that the power of Christ can only be restored through an approaching age of doubt, which shall shake the towers of the Church till they tremble, and dissipate the formal and conventional monotony of orthodoxy,—

" Till man stand out again, pale, resolute, Prepared to die,—that is, alive at last.

As we broke up that old faith of the world, Have we, next ago, to break up this the now— Faith, in tho thing, grown faith in the report— Whence need to bravely disbelieve report Through increased faith in thing reports belie ?"

The picture of the courageous old man's slight hesitation in the discharge of his terrible duty,—of the deep questions as to the truths whereon he and his office rest which that hesitation stirs,— of the plumbing of the most difficult problems of philosophy and faith as his mind travels round the intellectual horizon of his lonely eminence, of the gratitude with which he fixes his glance on Pompilia's spiritual loveliness as the one blossom "vouchsafed unworthy me, ten years a gardener of the untoward ground," of the anxious and doubtful admiration with which he notes Caponsacchi's impulsive nobleness, and of the half-anxiety and half-trust with which he observes the signs of moral decomposition—omens for those who are to come after him,—all is drawn so as to leave an indelible impression on any moderately sensitive imagination. As a work of art, we think Mr. Browning's poem imperfect. As we have noticed before, the truth of the picture is too entirely on one side to render the numerous pleadings on so many sides at all subservient to the result. Nearly half might, we think, have been omitted, not without the loss of marvellous work of its kind, but with great gain to the popularity of what remained. Still there is nothing in all his former works that will stay imprinted so indelibly on our minds as the four great figures of Guido, Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and Innocent.