Part 12 (2/2)

Other changes sadder than the loss of old Norman pillars and ornaio, were happening In May 1866 Browning's father, kind and cheery old raphed for her brother, and he arrived in Paris twenty-four hours before the end The elder Browning had alhty-fifth year To the last he retained what his son described as ”his own strange sweetness of soul” It was the close of a useful, unworldly, unambitious life, full of innocent enjoyment and deep affection The occasion was not one for inte, whose devotion during many years first to her mother, then to her ed father, had been entire, now became her brother's constant companion They rested for the suhtfully spacious old house, with the sea to right and left, through whose great rushi+ng waves Browning loved to battle, and, inland, a wild country, picturesque with its flap-hatted, white-clad, baggy-breeched villagers Their enjoyreeable weather, and to the sa has described in his _Two Poets of Croisic_--

Croisic, the spit of sandy rock which juts Spitefully north,

they returned in the following su this second visit (September 1867) that most spirited ballad of French heroiss to four years later[94]

In June 1868 carief of a kind that seemed to cut him off from outward communication with a portion of as most precious in his past life Arabel Barrett, his wife's only surviving sister, who had supported hi's arms ”For many years,” we are told by Mr Gosse, ”he was careful never to pass her house in Delah not prone to superstition, he had noted in July 1863 a drea her dead sister Elizabeth, ”When shall I be with you?” and received the answer, ”Dearest, in five years” ”Only a coincidence,” he adds in a letter to Miss Blagden, ”but noticeable” That su and his sister settled at Audierne, on the extrehtful, quite unspoiled little fishi+ng toith the ocean in front and green lanes and hills behind It was in every way an eventful year In the autumn his new publishers, Smith, Elder & Co, produced the six-volue of which the author describes hi, MA, Honorary Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford”

The distinction, partly due to Jowett's influence, had been conferred a year previously In 1865, Browning, who desired that his son should be educated at Oxford, first became acquainted with Jowett Acquaintance quickly ripened into friendshi+p, which was not the less genuine or cordial because Jowett had but a qualified esteeht one to admire one's friend's poetry?” was a difficult question of casuistry which the Master of Balliol at one ti's work appeared to hiant, perverse, topsy-turvy”; ”there is no rest in him,” Jorote with special reference to the poearded as Browning's noblest work But for the man his ad's first visit to hi too old to make, as he supposed, new friends, he had--he believed--made one ”It is ienerous nature and his great ability and knowledge I had no idea that there was a perfectly sensible poet in the world, entirely free fro no y is very remarkable, and his determination to make the most of the remainder of life Of personal objects he see's visits to Oxford and Cae did not cease when he dropped away fro at country houses He writes with frank enjoyiven at Balliol in the Lent Ter of the new Hall Oxford conferred upon hiraduate jester sent fluttering towards the new Doctor's head an appropriate allusion in the fore LLD was conferred in 1879 In 1871 he was elected a Life Governor of the University of London In 1868 he was invited to stand, with the certainty of election, for the Lord Rectorshi+p of the University of St Andrews, as successor to John Stuart Mill, an honour which he declined[96] The great event of this year in the history of his authorshi+p was the publication in Nove and the Book_ The two re volumes followed in January and February 1869

[Illustration: PIAZZA DI SAN LORENZO, FLORENCE, WHERE ”THE BOOK” WAS FOUND BY BROWNING

_Frohted, a the litter of odds and ends exposed for sale in the Piazza San Lorenzo, Florence, upon the ”square old yellow book,” part print, part manuscript, which contained the crude fact from which his poem of the Franceschini htpence English just” As he leaned by the fountain and walked through street and street, he read, and had mastered the contents before his foot was on the threshold of Casa Guidi[97]

That night his brain was a-work; pacing the terrace of Casa Guidi, while from Felice church opposite ca a chant ave hi the actors and re-enacting their deeds in his iination:

I fuseds to Mr Rudolf Leh at once conceived the mode in which the subject could be treated in poetry, and it was precisely the mode which was afterwards adopted: ”'When I had read the book,' so Browning told athered twelve pebbles from the road, and put them at equal distances on the parapet that bordered it

Those represented the twelve chapters into which the poeement to the last'”[98] When in the autumn he journeyed with his wife to Rome, the velluht further light about the ive little inforin He offered the story, ”for prose treatle, so we are informed by Mrs Orr, and, she adds, but with less assurance of state contemporaries” We have seen that in a letter of 1862 fro the subject of a new poeh unwritten In the last section of _The Ring and the Book_, he refers to having been in close converse with his old quarto of the Piazza San Lorenzo during four years:

Hoill it be, my four-years' intimate, When thou and I part company anon?

The publication of _Draive undivided attention to his vast design In October of that year he advanced to actual definition of his sche in the south of France he visited the e which is connected with the adventure of the Roland of romance, and there he planned the whole poem precisely as it was carried out ”He says,” Mr WM Rossetti enters in his diary after a conversation with Browning (15 March 1868), ”he writes day by day on a regular systematic plan--some three hours in the early part of the day; he seldo i down into words at the sa before he writes it He has written his forthco work all consecutively--not some of the later parts before the earlier”[99]

When Carlyleand the Book_, he desired to be co himself had sometimes been when under a like necessity: ”It is a wonderful book,” declared Carlyle, ”one of the h--all ht have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting”[100] A like re the book which, in its lish books 's poe prose works of fiction a si's tale of Guido and Poht voluht have been such, which one short newspaper paragraph could have dismissed to a happy or sorrowful oblivion But then we should never have knoo of the ination of er; and had we not heard their story from all the participators and told with Richardson's characteristic interest in the microscopy of the human heart, it could never have possessed our minds with that full sense of its reality which is the experience of every reader Out of the infinitesireat; out of the transitory moments rise the forms that endure It is of little profit to discuss the question whether Richardson could have effected his purpose in four voluht to have contented himself with ten thousand lines of verse instead of twenty thousand No one probably has said of either work that it is too short, and many have uttered the sentence of the critical Polonius--”This is too long” But neither _Clarissa_ nor _The Ring and the Book_ is one of the Hundred Merry Tales; the purpose of each writer is triumphantly effected; and while ish that the same effect could have been produced by means less elaborate, it is not safe to assert confidently that this was possible

It has often been said that the story is told ten times over by almost as many speakers; it would be more correct to say that the story is not told even once Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons--for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest In the end we are left to invent the story for ourselves--not indeed without sufficient guidance towards the truth of things, since the successive speeches are a discipline in distinguishi+ng the several values of human testimony We become familiar with idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the ain Gossipry on this side is checked and controlled by gossipry on that; and the nicely balanced indifferentism of men emasculate, blank of belief, who play with the realities of life, is set forth with its superior foolishness of wisdom The advocacy which consists of professional self-display is exhibited genially, humorously, an advocacy horn-eyed to the truth of its own case, to every truth, indeed, save one--that which coenious wit, and his flowers of rhetoric The criive for his life?” He has enough truth to enable hin-posts and reverse their pointing hands, to renal fires upon the rocks And then are heard three successive voices, each of which, and each in a different way, brings to our mind the words, ”But there is a spirit in iveth the” First the voice of the pure passion of manhood, which is naked and unashamed; a voice terrible in its sincerity, absolute in its abandonment to truth, prophet-like in its carelessness of personal consequences, its carelessness of all except the deliverance of a e--and yet withal a courtly voice, and, if it please, ironical It is as if Elihu the son of Barachel stood up and his wrath were kindled: ”Behold my belly is as hich hath no vent; it is ready to burst like new bottles I will speak that I may be refreshed” And yet we dare not say that Caponsacchi's truth is the whole truth; he speaks like a ht, and inaccessible to ht of common day Next, a voice from one who is human indeed ”to the red-ripe of the heart,” but who is already withdrawn from all the turbulence and turbidity of life; the voice of a woinal; of primitive instinct, which comes frohthood that had saved her; a voice froe of the world, where the dawn of another world has begun to tree, and authority and e encompassed by much doubt and weariness and hu voice, which, with God so on a dim and perilous way, until in a es to the voice of the unalterable justicer, the arhteousness

Truth absolute is not attained by any one of the speakers; that, Browning would say, is the concern of God And so, at the close, we are directed to take to heart the lesson

That our huht, Our human testimony false, our fame And hurees of approximation to truth and of remoteness from it Truth as apprehended by pure passion, truth as apprehended by simplicity of soul (”And a little child shall lead them”), truth as apprehended by spiritual experience--such respectively ues of Caponsacchi, of Pompilia, and of the Pope For the valuation, however, of this loftier testiround, even if it be the fen-country A perception of the heightsthe plain If ere carried up in the air and heard these voices how should we know for certain that we had not become inhabitants of some Cloudcuckootown? And the plain is where we ordinarily live andfor its own sake Therefore we shall mix our mind with that of ”Half-Rome” and ”The Other Half-Rouration or enter any city set upon a hill The ”ood that we should make his acquaintance; even the man in the _salon_ may speak his mind if he will; such shallow excitements, such idle curiosities as theirs will enable us better to appreciate the upheaval to the depths in the heart of Caponsacchi, the quietude, and the rapt joy in quietude, of Pos of spirit that proceed all through the droop of that sombre February day in the closet of the Pope And, then, at the oes on, and the world is wide, and laughter is not banished froelis, Procurator of the Poor, shall enious notes for the defence of Count Guido, and cite his precedents and quote his authorities, and darken counsel ords, all to be by and by ecclesiasticized and regularized and Latinized and Ciceroized, while ht of the iht, which shall bring with it la out of its s and fennel Yes, and we shall hear also the other side--how, in a florilegiuht the Graces and the Muses and the majesty of Law, Johannes-Baptista Bottinius can do justice to his client and to his own genius by showing, with due exordiuument and peroration, that Poe, and yet can be established innocent, or not so very guilty, by her rhetorician's learning and legal deftness in quart and tierce

The secondary personages in Richardson's ”Clarissa” grow soures of his heroine and of Lovelace remain not only uneffaceable but undi's poe life, which shows no decline or abateues by the other speakers has been produced and the speakers theotten Count Guide Franceschini is not a o, nor a strange enormity of tyrannous hate and lust like the Count Cenci of Shelley He has no spirit of diabolic revelry in cri for its delicate artistry; he is under no spell of fascination derived from its horror

He is clumsy in his fraud and coarse in his violence Sin leaives his fantasy play, it is in describing the black cave of a palace at Arezzo into which the white Poray night in the dusk, the brothers, ”two obscure goblin creatures, fox-faced this, cat-clawed the other,” with Guido himself as the main monster Yet the Count, short of stature, ”hook-nosed and yellow in a bush of beard” is not a monster but a race of bearing when occasion requires; although wrenched and enfeebled by the torture of the rack he holds his ground, has even a little irony to spare, anddoes not need a lithe, beautiful, mysterious human panther, and is content with a plain, prosaic, serviceable villain, ould have been disdained by the genius of the dra in romance But like some of Webster's saturnine, fantastic assistants or tools in cri, chews upon the bitter root of failure, and is half-poisoned by its acrid juices He is Godless in an age of Godless living; cynical in a cynical generation; and ever and anon he betrays the licentious ie of license He plays a poor part in the cruel farce of life, and snarls against the world, while clinging desperately to the world and to life A disinterested loyalty to the powers of evil h Guido loathes goodness, his devotion to evil has no inverted chivalry in it--there is always a valid reason, a sordid rounds of coenerous passion would have swept away, but which, following upon the ill successes of his life, ht well make a bad man mad His wife, palmed off upon the representative of an ancient and noble house, is the child of a nameless father and a common harlot of Rome; she is repelled by his person; and her cold submission to what she has been instructed in by the Archbishop as the duties of a wife is more intolerable than her earlier remoter aversion He is cheated of the dohich lured hiossips of Arezzo A gallant of the troop of Satan e; but Guido is ever a the sutlers and camp-followers of the fiend, who are base before they are bold When hefor life in the cell of the New Prison by Castle Angelo, the animal cry, like that of a wild cat on whom the teeth of the trap have closed, is rendered shrill by the intensity of iination hich he pictures to himself the apparatus of the scaffold and the hideous circumstance of his death His effort, as far as it is rational, is to transfer the guilt of his deeds to anyone or everyone but himself When all other resources fail he boldly lays the offence upon God, who hasin i the last desperate shriek of the wretched man, uttered as the black-hatted Brotherhood of Death descend the stairs singing their accursed psalm, to carry the climax of appeal to the powers of charity, ”Christ,--Maria,--God,” one degree farther, and make the murderer last of all cry upon his victim to be his saviour from the death which he dares to naht seem to have sequestered from all other uses:--

”Pompilia, will you let the not as a pale, passive victi with a vivid, interior life, and not her lahich sumht Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire When the Pope would find for himself a symbol to body forth her soul, it is not a lily that he thinks of but a rose Others may yield to the eye of God a ”timid leaf” and an ”uncertain bud,”

While--see how thisup by the wayside 'neath the foot Of the enelory of desire To incorporate the whole great sun it loves Fros My flower, My rose, I gather for the breast of God

As she lies on her pallet, dying ”in the good house that helps the poor to die,” she is far withdrawn fros of time; her life, with all its pleasures and its pains, seee and far away--