Life of Robert Browning [46]
of verse.
In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife.
Both "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels.
The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences:
the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends.
If "The Ring and the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry
and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister
"getting up" a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to,
say, "The Moonstone"; its author would be insignificant beside
the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The extraordinariness of the feat
would then be but indifferently commented upon.
As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method,
will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern
if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment.
To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind
not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight
which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable
to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits.
One must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body
alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians
have done or refrained from doing.
"The Ring and the Book", as I have said, was not begun in the year
of its imagining.* It is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative,
and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened
in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married period
of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.
--
* The title is explained as follows: -- "The story of the Franceschini case,
as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence
to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed
in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold
prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.
The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file;
it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.
The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged,
and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.
It was too HARD. It was `pure crude fact', secreted from the fluid being
of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state
it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.
He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or -- as he also calls it --
of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record
the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed,
first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised,
there broadly stamped with human thought and passion,
he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise
in what he set before them unadulterated human truth." -- Mrs. Orr.
--
On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase
he read the book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt
through every limb." The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds
to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno:
and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself
on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies
wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings
quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy
in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.
"Beneath
I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air --
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch
In a sense, Browning's longest work is akin to that of his wife.
Both "The Ring and the Book" and "Aurora Leigh" are metrical novels.
The one is discursive in episodes and spiritual experiences:
the other in intricacies of evidence. But there the parallel ends.
If "The Ring and the Book" were deflowered of its blooms of poetry
and rendered into a prose narrative, it might interest a barrister
"getting up" a criminal case, but it would be much inferior to,
say, "The Moonstone"; its author would be insignificant beside
the ingenious M. Gaboriau. The extraordinariness of the feat
would then be but indifferently commented upon.
As neither its subject, nor its extraordinariness as a feat, nor its method,
will withstand a searching examination, we must endeavour to discern
if transcendent poetic merit be discoverable in the treatment.
To arrive at a just estimate it is needful to free the mind
not merely from preconceptions, but from that niggardliness of insight
which can perceive only the minor flaws and shortcomings almost inevitable
to any vast literary achievement, and be blind to the superb merits.
One must prepare oneself to listen to a new musician, with mind and body
alert to the novel harmonies, and oblivious of what other musicians
have done or refrained from doing.
"The Ring and the Book", as I have said, was not begun in the year
of its imagining.* It is necessary to anticipate the biographical narrative,
and state that the finding of the parchment-booklet happened
in the fourth year of the poet's widowerhood, for his happy married period
of less than fifteen years came to a close in 1861.
--
* The title is explained as follows: -- "The story of the Franceschini case,
as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence
to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed
in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold
prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring.
The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file;
it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance.
The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged,
and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material
was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause.
It was too HARD. It was `pure crude fact', secreted from the fluid being
of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state
it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it.
He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or -- as he also calls it --
of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences
awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record
the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed,
first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised,
there broadly stamped with human thought and passion,
he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognise
in what he set before them unadulterated human truth." -- Mrs. Orr.
--
On the afternoon of the day on which he made his purchase
he read the book from end to end. "A Spirit laughed and leapt
through every limb." The midsummer heats had caused thunder-clouds
to congregate above Vallombrosa and the whole valley of Arno:
and the air in Florence was painfully sultry. The poet stood by himself
on his terrace at Casa Guidi, and as he watched the fireflies
wandering from the enclosed gardens, and the sheet-lightnings
quivering through the heated atmosphere, his mind was busy
in refashioning the old tale of loveless marriage and crime.
"Beneath
I' the street, quick shown by openings of the sky
When flame fell silently from cloud to cloud,
Richer than that gold snow Jove rained on Rhodes,
The townsmen walked by twos and threes, and talked,
Drinking the blackness in default of air --
A busy human sense beneath my feet:
While in and out the terrace-plants, and round
One branch