BOOKS.

MR. BROWNING'S NEW POEM.*

As Mr. Browning issues his new poem in instalments, we may- well suppose that he wishes it to be read, and studied, and con- ceived in instalments ; indeed, that, with the help his prologue gives us, each of the subsequent parts (of which each volume, except the first, which contains two, will seemingly contain three> will form a whole in itself, organically complete, though suited, like each of the parts of the old Greek trilogies, to constitute, in conjunc- tion with the other poetic facets or developments of the same story, a still more impressive and various whole. So far as we can judge from the quarter now presented to us, no one of Mr. Browning's works is likely to take a stronger hold on the public mind, if any so- strong,—the only disadvantage being what the public may think its alarming length, though four small volumes about a tragedy so rich in picture and passion as this do not strike us as too much for any one who can really enter into Mr. Browning's works. Any- how, the publication in instalments will do much to get over this difficulty. A public that has once tasted will not be satisfied to desist till it has drunk off all it can get of the draught, and this little volume is certainly in itself by no means alarming, offering as it does two separate pauses to the reader, and rising in fascina- tion as it travels round each separate wind of the spiral in which. the narrative mounts upwards towards a complete view of the tragedy on which it is based.

The story itself, as far as the mere germ goes, is easily told. Mr. Browning found on a bookstall in Florence,—the descrip- tion of the scene of the discovery is one of the most graphic pas- sages of the poem,—amidst much rubbish, an old book, part print, part MS., purporting to be the actual pleadings in a Roman mur- der case of the year 1698, in which one Count Guido Franceschini, of Arezzo, with four cutthroats in his pay, murdered his wife, a child of seventeen years who had a fortnight ago borne him an heir, and with her the old couple who had brought her up, and who had at first given themselves out as her parents. The Count and his four accomplices were arrested before the death of the wife (Pompilia), who survived her wounds four days. Count Guido pleaded, first, that the murder was a justifiable vindication of his honour, since his wife had fled from his house to Rome with a certain handsome priest, Canon Caponsacchi, and had been incited to this crime by the old couple who had brought her up, and who had passed themselves off on her husband as her parents. To this the prosecuting counsel rejoined that he by his horrible cruelty and treachery had deliberately set a trap for her, intending to drive her from his home in this Canon's company in order that he himself might get a divorce and still keep her property,—that the girl was pure of all guilt, and that the letters produced as hers to Caponsacchi had been deliberately forged by the husband, she herself being unable either to read or write ;—on which the judgment of the tribunal was death to Guido and his accomplices. Thereupon, however, there was an appeal to the Pope in person, as Count Guido, though a layman, had taken some steps towards holy orders, and was to a certain slight extent entitled to the special privileges of the priesthood ; whereupon the good old Pope, Innocent XII., then eighty-six years of age, and near his end, reviewed the case himself, at the instance, amongst others, of the • The Ring and the Boot. By Robert Browning, BLA., Honorary Fellow of Bolliol College, Oxford. In 4 vols. 'Vol. L Smith and Elder. ISM

Emperor's Envoy, who took the side of the nobleman ; and after reviewing it, ordered the execution to take place immediately, in

the most public spot in Rome. Such is the mere skeleton of the story. Mr. Browning makes it, of course, after his fashion, the occasion for a rich and shrewd semi-dramatic picture of all the various influences at work in the Roman society of the day ; of the provincial society in the country towns of the Pope's dominions ; of the poor nobility, the hangers-on of the Church, who danced attendance on the Cardinals, hoping for profitable sinecures ; of the professional Roman lawyers, deep in ecclesiastical precedents, and Ciceronian eloquence, and in the verses of Horace and Ovid, who pleaded in the case ; of the eloquent and brilliant worldly Church- man of the time, part priest, part fashionable poet ; and finally, of the populace of Rome itself. It is part of Mr. Browning's plan to give us the view taken of this great case from all sides. In this volume, after his own prologue, he gives us the view favourable to Count Guido taken by one-half of Rome, and then the view favour- able to his victim taken by the other half of Rome. In the three sub-

sequent volumes he is to give us, first, the educated or critical view of the pending trial taken iu the most refined Roman drawing- rooms ; then the criminal's own defence ; then the dying wife's state- ment of her own case ; then the speech of the handsome young Canon who took her away from Count Guido's cruelty at Arezzo ; then the lawyers' pleadings on either side ; finally, the working of the old Pope's mind on the day when ho gives the final judgment ; then Count Guido's last confession ; and last, the poet's own final presentation of the pure gold of the tragedy, set free from all the alloys of accidental onesided criticism.

Here is room enough for the free working of Mr. Browning's genius, and in this first volume, which is all we at present have, Mr. Browning's genius certainly has its fullest swing. He over- flows, as he always overflows, in intellectual point, in acute com- ment, in quaint illustration. He is, as he always is, semi-dramatic, with the keenest of all eyes for every qualifying circumstance which alters the point of view of each age and each individual,— never quite dramatic, for we never lose sight of the critical eye of the poet himself, who discriminates all these different shades of thought, and tosses them off with a sharpness of outline, and sometimes an intellectual touch of caricature, often a sharp sarcasm, that could not have proceeded from the inside of the situation he is painting for us, that could only pro- ceed from one outside it like himself, but who is looking (very keenly) into it. He paints, as he always paints, with wonderful swiftness and brilliance, but also with a certain wilful carelessness and singularity,—somewhat like the qualities shown in old David Cox's fine water-colour sketches,—and with a singular contempt for sweetness and finish of style. In fertility of intellectual resource there is no poetry anywhere like Mr. Browning's; in the brilliancy of his descriptions of character he has no rival ; but for beauty of form he seems to us to have, as usual, almost a contempt.

We do not mean that there are not here and there one or two lines of perfect loveliness,—not only in thought, but in expression, —but that even the very finest are marred by the close proximity of crabbed English, and grammar so condensed as to be either grating or excessively obscure, and that very frequently his narra- tive, though lucid enough in drift, is couched in almost carefully eccentric English,—singular nouns with no article, and used in the abstract sense ; plural adjectives accumulated on one sub- stantive as the Germans only pile them ; new-coined combina- tions of nouns like "ring-thing," the need for the coinage not being very clear ; oddly interpolated ejaculations (quaint gestures of the narrator, as it were, interspersed in the narrative); and now and then a parenthesis, which is so long, striking, and interesting in itself as to break the current of the story in which it is imbedded, and give a grotesque effect to the whole, as if one gem were imbedded in the surface of another,—a curiosity, com- pounded of two beauties, but so compounded as to be itself not

beautiful, only odd. Mr. Browning begins his story very charac- teristically. He says :—

" Do you see this square old yellow Book, I toss

I' the air, and catch again, and twirl about By the crumpled vellum covers,—pure crude fact, Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard, And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since ?"

That seems to us highly expressive even of the intellectual fashion in which Mr. Browning treats his subjects, tossing them in the air to catch them again, twirling them about by their crumpled out- side surfaces, and generally displaying his sense of mastery, and the enjoyment which belongs to it, by acts not unfrequently some- thing resembling caprice. Thus, the random, boyish, and almost freakish account of what Mr. Browning did with his intellectual

prize when he had got it, seems to us as remarkable a piece of exuberance of intellectual spirits as ever an imaginative writer of the first order indulged in :—

" I took my book to Rome first, tried truth's power

On likely people. ' Have you met such names?

Is a tradition extant of such facts ?

Your law coarts stand, your records frown a-row : What if I rove and rummage?' ' —Why, you'll waste Your pains and end as wise as you began!'

Every one snickered : 'Names and facts thus old Are newer much than Europe news wo find

Down in to-day's Diario. Records, quotha?

Why, the French burned them, what else do the French?

The rap-and-rending nation ! And it tells Against the Church, no doubt,—another gird At the Temporality, your Trial, of course?'

—Quito otherwise this time,' submitted I; 'Clean for the Church and dead against the world, The flesh and the devil, does it tell for once.'

—The rarer and the happier ! All the same, Content you with your treasure of a book, And waive what's wanting! Take a friend's advice !

It's not the custom of the country. Mend

Your ways indeed and we may stretch a point :

Go got you manned by Manning and new-manned By Newman and, mayhap, wise-manned to boot By Wiseman, and we'll see or else wo won't!

Thanks meantime for the story, long and strong, A pretty piece of narrative enough, Which scarce ought so to drop out, one would think, From the more curious annals of our kind.

Do you tell the story, now, in off-hand style, Straight from the hook? Or simply hero and then).

(The while you vault it through the loose and largo) Hang to a hint? Or is there book at all, And don't you deal in poetry, make-believe, And the white lies it sounds like ?' "

Characteristic of Mr. Browning though they be, these extremely bad puns on Manning's, Newman's, and Wiseman's names do not seem to us fit elements for a prologue which is to introduce us to so great a theme, although boldly, freely, and buoyantly treated, as is usual with Mr. Browning. When overlooking the irregularities of style, the wilful caprices of the poet's immense and inexhaustible intellectual animation, we come to speak of the power with which the subject is treated, it is almost impossible to speak too highly. Always remembering that Mr. Browning's modes of thought never change as he passes from one point of sight to another; that, while rendering each new view, individual or local, or it may be a class or party view,—with equal force and ability, the style of discourse, the springy, sharp definitions, the acute discriminations, the rapier-like thrusts of logic, are all the poet's own, and used by every one of his characters in succession,—it is impossible to speak too highly of the power with which he paints one " facet " after another of the tragedy he has taken for his theme. His own argument of what he is going to give us is itself, barring the puns and such oddities, as brilliant a picture in miniature of the social and moral conditions affecting the public view of such a crime as Count Guido Franceschini's in 1698, as was ever drawn of the past. The sketch of the view taken by that half of Rome favourable to Count Guido's pardon begins perhaps in a strain of thought somewhat too plebeian for the admirably intellectual characterizations in which the supposed speaker afterwards indulges. It seems to us, for instance, scarcely the same critic who was so eloquent about the fine effect presented by the bodies of the poor old murdered pair when laid out in the Church of San Lorenzo with a profusion of wax-lights all round them, and who afterwards gives us this description of the Canon Caponsacchi,—but whether it be or not, the description is not the less vivid :—

" And lo

There in a trine did turn up life and light, The man with the aureole„ sympathy made flesh, The all-consoling Caponsacchi, Sir !

A priest—what else should the consoler be?

With goodly shoulderblade and proper leg,

A portly make and a symmetric shape,

And curls that clustered to the tonsure quite.

This was a bishop in the bud, and now

A canon full-blown so far: priest, and priest

Nowise exorbitantly overworked, The courtly Christian, not so much Saint Paul As a saint of Cannes household: there posed he Sending his god-glance after his shot shaft, Apollos turned Apollo, while the snake Pompilia writhed transfixed through all her spires."

Or take the description in the same division of the poem of how Count Guido's passion was excited on hearing of the birth of an heir whom he had supposed (or rather is by the speaker supposed to have supposed) to be illegitimate,—how

"The overburdened mind

Broke down, what was a brain became a blaze In fury of the moment."

Or again, take this dramatic excuse for a man who revenges an insult to his personal honour by an act of personal violence, with- out calling in the aid of law :—

" Rad Guido, in the twinkling of an eye,

Summed up the reckoning, promptly paid himself, That morning when he came up with the pair At the wayside inn,—exacted his just debt By aid of what first mattock, pitchfork, axe Came to hand in the helpful stable-yard, And with that axe, if Providence so pleased, Cloven each head, by some Rolando-stroke,

In one clean cut from crown to clavicle,—

Slain the priest-gallant, the wife-paramour, Sticking, for all defence, in each skull's cleft The rhyme and reason of the stroke thus dealt, To-wit, those letters and last evidence

Of shame, each package in its proper place,—

Bidding who pitied uudistend the skulls,—

I say, the world had praised the man. But no !

That were too plain, too straight, too simply just!

He hesitates, calls Law, forsooth! to help.

And law, distasteful to who calls in law When honour is beforehand and would serve, What wonder if law hesitate iu turn, Plead her disuse to calls o' the kind, reply, Smiling a little, "Tis yourself assess The worth of what's lost, sum of damage done : What you touched with so light a finger-tip, You whose concern it was to grasp the thing, Why must law gird herself and grapple with ?

Law, alien to the actor whose warm blood

Asks heat from law, whose veins run lukewarm milk,—

What you dealt lightly with, shall law make out Heinous, forsooth ?"

Still more powerful is, we think, the third division of the poem, which gives the popular form of the view favourable to the victims and against the murderer. It is again, of course, Mr. Browning who speaks behind the mask ; but the mask is good, and the voice behind tells as carefully what the supposed speaker might have felt, as if it did not give it in Mr. Browning's idiom. How fine is the sarcasm here :—

" Though really it does seem as if she here, Pompilia, living so and dying thus,

Has had undue experience how much crime A heart can hatch. Why was she made to learn —Not you, not I, not even Molinos' self— What Guido Franceschini's heart could hold ?

Thus saintahip is effected probably ; No sparing saints the process !—which the more

Tends to the reconciling us, no saints, To sinnership, immunity and all."

—how powerful the description of Count Guido driving his wife, " hemmed in by her household bars," to destruction by chasing her " about the coop of daily life ;" how grand and touching the picture of the battered mind of the old confessor who was so sure of Pompilia's innocence !—

" Even that poor old bit of battered brass Beaten out of all shape by the world's sins, Common utensil of the lazar-house- Confessor Celestine groans, "Tis truth, All truth, and only truth : there's something else,

Some presence in the room beside us all, Something that every lie expires before : No question she was pure from first to last."

In short, the little volume, as a whole, contains perhaps more of Mr. Browning's brilliant intellectual flashes of many-coloured light than almost any of his hitherto published works.

For pathos, and what comes near to lyric fire, there is no passage like that apostrophe which ends the prologue, the first couplet of which is the most truly inspired in all the range of his poems ; but why has he ended such a passage with three lines so utterly obscure,—open to so many guesses and so little certainty,— as those which conclude it :—

" 0 lyric Love! half-angel and half-bird And all a wonder and a wild desire,—

Boldest of hearts that ever braved the sun, Took sanctuary within the holier blue,

And sang a kindred soul out to his face,— Yet human at the red-ripe of the heart—

When the first summons from the darkling earth Reached thee amid thy chambers, blanched their blue, And bared them of the glory—to drop down,

To toil for man, to suffer or to die,—

This is the same voice : can thy soul know change ?

Hail, then, and harken from the realms of help !

Never may I commence my song, my due To God who best taught song by gift of thee,

Except with bent head and beseeching hand—

That still, despite the distance and the dark, What was, again may be ; some interchange 01 grace, some splendour once thy very thought,

Some benediction anciently thy smile:— Never conclude, but raising hand and head

Thither where eyes, that cannot reach yet yearn For all hope, all snstainment, all reward, Their utmost up and on,—so blessing back In those thy realms of help, that heaven thy home, Some whiteness which, I judge, thy face makes proud, Some wanness where, I think, thy foot may fall!"

Mr. Browning describes "the British public" in this poem as "ye who like me not," adding a grim "God love you,"—some- what as clergymen pray for their enemies,—but if it does not like him, it is only because while, with so great a power of lucidity, he will spoil his finest poetry by careless hieroglyphics such as these, —the mere shorthand of a poet, which to him, no doubt, recalls with sufficient precision what was in his own mind when be wrote it, but what certainly is not adapted to call it up for the first time in those who cannot know, from what is written, whether they have ever yet bad it in their mind or not. But it is scarcely true that the British public- love not Mr. Browning. They love him more and more, at all events. And the more they love him, the less they like the carelessness with which a poet of so much power of speech slurs over the great faults in his own style. Still, if the other three volumes of this poem are equal to the first, they will add greatly to the rich mines of intellectual wealth, full partly of gold ore, in less degree of sifted gold, to be found in Mr. Browning's writings.