REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
By <AUTHOR>ROBERT BROWNING</AUTHOR>, M. A. In two volumes. Vol. I. Boston : Fields, Osgood, & Co.
THIS extraordinary work is a novel, but not a fiction. It is an old Roman Law case, a criminal trial, whose peculiar interest absorbed all minds in Rome one hundred and seventy years ago, but which, fading away before the advance of new events, found its tomb in an old manuscript book, where it remained in all the silent security of yellow mould until exhumed by the poet. He found it in an “ old curiosity shop ” at Florence, recognized the fine ore mingled with its dust, and soon had that ore in his brainfurnace, streaming out in pure gold fit to be wrought by his cunning into the Ring, one half of whose finely chased curve is visible before us. A wondrous work of art it surely is ! One half the story, presumably, is before us, — 10,436 blank-verse lines,— yet through them the reader passes as on a current whose smooth stillness is that of a flood massed for its pitch over the precipice ; and the spell of the movement seems hardly to have been woven ere it is broken by the closing words, Miserable me ! ” which, In lieu of anything further to explain their portentous bearing, the reader will be apt to appropriate to his or her own condition in having to wait for the future volumes.
There is nothing new in making the interest of a story turn upon a crime and a trial, though novelists, rather than poets, have inclined to use that well-worn machinery. The court-room is the natural climax of so many plots and schemes in real life, its accompaniments are so normally dramatic, that fiction finds its own in resorting to it whenever it has a chance.
But there is a peculiarity in Mr. Browning’s use of the court-room. There is a trial, but our interest is not concentrated upon the outcome of it; we are informed, at the start, that the men charged with murder were all executed at a given time and place. The plot of the sensational novelist is thus ended very soon, the reader’s mind cleared of it as a thing which could remain only as an impediment. Where the novelist s work would end the poet’s task begins. The case is closed ; the victims are buried ; those who slew them are executed and buried also ; the judges lay aside their ermine ; the excitement of the street ebbs away to its next sensation; the disclosures are relegated to parchment, there to drift into a casual collection of odds and ends anywhere, in any Italian street, until Gabriel’s trump or the divining-rod of genius shall awaken them. By such wave of his wand the visible court-room and its splendid sensations of three mangled corpses and five arraigned murderers, a count at their head, vanish — to the horror and amazement of all orthodox story-tellers — utterly ; but it is only that they may pass inward; there the judges reappear as Reflection, Imagination, Conscience, presiding in a tribunal of Reason ; there stand they who wielded the dagger ; there lie they who fell beneath it, now naked, fleshless human passions, motives, affections, interests. No longer is this the drama of Guido Caponsacchi, and Pompilia before Tommati and others, A. D. 1698; it is the tragedy of human souls, the play and clash of emotions and passions which thrill each heart and brain, following their -purpose for good or evil along Broadway or Fleet Street this day. What matters it that judges found men guilty at the close of the seventeenth century, or that the Pope signed their death-warrant ; all the same would they be in their graves to-day ; but were they really guilty or not guilty ? That, too, were it a question of the validity of witnesses and testimony might be safely relegated to the gossips and judges of the past ; but being, as it is, a question of the facts of human nature, of the imperishable world of instincts and impulses, revolving in the breast of each and all, the verdict may be as breathlessly awaited as if the case were now banishing sleep in some startled city of living men and women.
The story may be briefly told, but not more briefly than in the poet’s own words : —
“Count Guido Franceschini the Aretine,
Descended of an ancient house, though poor,
A beak-nosed, bushy-bearded, black-haired lord,
Lean, pallid, low of stature, yet robust,
Fifty years old, — having four years ago
Married Pompilia Comparini, young,
Good, beautiful, at Rome, where she was born,
And brought her to Arezzo, where they lived
Unhappy lives, whatever curse the cause.
This husband, taking four accomplices,
Followed this wife to Rome, where she was fled
From their Arezzo to find peace again,
In convoy, eight months earlier, of a priest,
Aretine also, of still nobler birth,
Giuseppe Caponsacchi, — and caught her there,
Quiet in a villa on a Christmas night,
With only Pietro and Violante by,
Both her putative parents ; killed the three,
Aged, they, seventy each, and she, seventeen,
And, two weeks since, the mother of his babe
First born and heir to what the style was worth
O’ the Guido who determined, dared, and did
This deed just as he purposed, point by point.
Then, bent upon escape, but hotly pressed,
And captured with his co-mates that same night,
He, brought to trial, stood on this defence,—
Injury to his honor caused the act ;
That since his wife was false (as manifest
By flight from home in Such companionship),
Death, punishment deserved of the false wife,
And faithless parents who abetted her
I’ the flight aforesaid, wronged nor God nor man.
‘Nor false she, nor yet faithless they,’ replied
The accuser ; ‘ cloaked and masked this murder glooms ;
True was Pompilia, loyal too the pair ;
Out of the man’s own heart this monster curled,
This crime coiled with connivancy at crime,
His victim’s breast, he tells you, hatched and reared ;
Uncoil we, and stretch stark the worm of hell ! ’
A month the trial swayed this way and that,
Ere judgment settled down on Guido’s guilt ;
Then was the Pope, that good Twelfth Innocent,
Appealed to ; who well weighed what went before,
Affirmed the guilt, and gave the guilty doom.”
Such is the skeleton, clothed with various flesh and face by accuser and accused. Guido’s account is that he married the beautiful Pompilia in good faith, her parents seeking the match to raise their social position, paying therefor a certain dowry. They went to reside at Arezzo, on his estate, with the newly married pair. Finding less splendor there than they had hoped for, the parents leave, and then declare that Pompilia is not their child, Violante having deceived Pietro with the daughter of a woman of the town. On this ground they claim non-liability for the promised dowry. Presently he (Guido) suspects too much intimacy between Pompilia and a priest well known in the gay world ; finds certain letters that have passed between them. He discovers, too, a letter from her to a friend in Rome, saying that her putative parents had counselled her to poison him and make her escape to them at Rome. One morning he and his servants wake late, discover they have been drugged, perceive that the wife has fled, taking with her trinkets, moneys, etc. He pursues and overtakes the priest and Pompilia halting at an inn near Rome ; the priest dressed as a cavalier, with sword guarding the door. They all rush to the room where Pompilia is asleep ; she awakes, springs upon Guido, seizes his sword, and attempts to kill him, and, disarmed by persons around, denounces her husband as one from whose cruelty and effort to entrap her in the deepest guilt she is escaping. He finds in the room letters establishing the liason with the priest. The driver of the coach in which the two fled gives evidence of kisses during the journey. The count appeals to the law for redress. The courts relegate the priest to a quasi-exile in a pleasant village ; the wife is placed in a convent ; the husband is sufficiently punished by being the byword of his neighbors. Afterward Pompilia’s suffering health causes a relaxation of sentence, and she is removed to the villa of Pietro, Stung by gossip and ridicule, by Violante’s confession that a bastard had been palmed off upon him, — a lie, as he believes, meant to escape paying the dowry,—and by their possession of his child, by which claims might be made and further annoyance inflicted upon him; seeing, also, that by removing Pompilia from the convent, all that was aimed at in the guilty flight was attained, Guido with his retainers repaired to the villa, and, resolved to make sure of the guilt, gave the name of Caponsacchi at the door. It was opened by Violante, whom he slew ; Pietro fell next, and last Pompilia.
Such is Guido’s story. Pompilia, it turns out, was not killed at once, but survived long enough to declare, in her dying confession, her innocence. The version of the priest, reinforced by Pompilia’s dying words, is as follows. He, Caponsacchi, was, he confessed, a gay priest at Arezzo, and his eye had been caught by the beauty of Pompilia,— whom he had never seen save in public, — his admiration not being unobserved by the husband. One day a veiled woman came to his room, bringing a letter purporting to be from Pompilia, declaring her admiration for the handsome priest. To this he returned a cold reproof. Yet again and again the veiled woman came with letters from her “mistress,’’ appealing to his pity, but he returned only rebukes. At length a letter came from the same source, saying that her husband had discovered that a correspondence was going on, and advising him, the priest, to fly, or at least be careful not to come near the place she had before asked him to come. This roused his courage and curiosity, and he repaired to the spot at once. Instead of a watching, jealous husband, there was Pompilia at her window, with face and eye incapable of guile or sin, who spoke to him as one who had been writing her letters full of protestations of devotion. She could not herself, she Said, read or write ; but the woman who brought them explained their sense. She then told the terrible story of the tortures to which her parents had been, and she was still, subjected ; how she had vainly appealed to the archbishop and governor against their friend (a nobleman too) ; and now, in her last extremity, starving,she grasped the one crumb between her and death, even though the hand holding it were one which she could not touch.
“ Yon came in
Like a thief upon me. I this morning said,
In my extremity : ‘ Entreat the thief!
Try if he have in him no honest touch !
A thief might save me from a murderer.
'I was a thief said the last kind word to Christ.’ ”
But as they look upon one another, there rises the vague sense of horrible delusion. She cannot read or write, yet he has received letters; he has reproved, yet she talks of his devotion. The fearful conspiracy flashes upon him, and all his gay thoughts are over ; the world of fashion recedes ; now, for the first time, he is God’s, with God’s task before him, — a dragon to conquer, a soul to rescue. Thus came the flight. It was from a fiend who would compass her ruin, as a means of wringing the last pang to satiate his vengeance on her parents, and securing the dowry ere rid of the wife whom shame would prevent reclaiming it. The money and trinkets taken were her own. His cavalier dress was donned against roadside suspicion that a priestly guise might excite. The letters were all forged, and some of them hidden in the room of the inn where Pompilia was found, when backs were turned. The murder not only served the spite of a bafded tyrant, but would, if approved by law, bring an heir and solid gains to bolster up Guido’s decayed fortunes. As for kisses during the flight, the coachman, it was shown, had for such testimony got out of prison at the hands of Guido’s friend, the Governor, who had once ignored Pompilia’s appeal for help.
On these statements, we have first the theories of one Half-Rome.
“ First, the world’s outcry
Around the rush and ripple of any fact
Fallen stonewise, plumb on the smooth face of things;
The world’s guess, as it crowds the bank o’ the pool,
At what were figure and substance by their splash t
Then, by vibrations in the general mind,
At depth of deed already out of reach.”
Next comes the theory of the other HalfRome, inclining this to Pompilia’s as the former to Guido’s side. Next Tertium Quid.
“ Rome’s first commotion in subsidence gives
'The curd o’ the cream, the flower o’ the wheat, as it were,
And finer sense o’ the city.”
Amid all these the reader finds himself tossed more helplessly than he may perhaps imagine to be possible, before he has got fairly into the hands of the poet What an orator some cause or party lost when Robert Browning took to poetry ! Those very lyrics with which he first gained the world’s car—the cavalier songs for God and King Charles —were, indeed, so vivid, that the poet, as hearty a liberal as England holds, had to admonish the world how purely they were works of art. But as in this new poem he speaks now for one HalfRome his argument seems final, until he comes to speak for the other Half-Rome ; but again just after we feel the bottom of it all, Tertium Quid inspires him to show us how far the cavern stretches beyond either finality. But when the last tribunal is sitting, and first the count, after him the priest, tell their respective stories, we are led to say what a lawyer the bar lost when Robert Browning gave his intellect to the Muse ! If, in the future volume, he shall as a judge sum up, and as a pope examine and affirm, with the same power he has here displayed as orator and special pleader, then Court and Church will have as much reason to envy poetry the most versatile genius of our time. Yet at every step in this work, in which every kind of ability is manifested, there is supremely felt the presence of the poet, — of one who has been sent into the world to write poetry, can do nothing less than that, however he may put forth special talents to work up here and there the raw material for his master art. From its very nature this great poem must be continuous ; the strain of interest admits no episodes or idling in lyric by-ways ; but every necessary point is Jewelled with beauty, every sweep of column describes the curve of grace, every weapon-flash darts many-hued light. It would be difficult to match in dramatic poetry Caponsaechi’s description of the scene when Pompilia was overtaken by her husband on the flight to Rome ; and the close of the priest’s address to the judges, with which also the second volume closes, is in the purest vein of thought and feeling.
Mr. Browning stands, with few rivals in the past and none in the present, at the head of what, in fault of a better phrase, may be called intellectual poetry. There are poets who rank him in imaginative lustre, there are more musical minstrels, there are — though these are few — warmer and more delicate colorists ; but for clear, vigorous thinking, perfect sculpture of forms embodying thoughts (sculptures too tinted with the flush of life, with veins of blue and red), for the utterance of the right physiognomical word and phrase, he has no superior since Shakespeare. Yet intellectual as it is even to a Greek severity, — beyond even Landor here, — It would by no means express the charm of his writings to style them philosophical. No theory can quote him, nor is he at all ethical. His religions fervor shows in points of white fire on everv page, and yet no work aims at a moral lesson or object, He writes neither fable nor allegory. The world of men and women, with their actual passions, hopes, and loves, and the vast arenas for their play opened by these as rivers cut their channels, —these are enough for him. His worship is for man ; his faith must find its joy in a divine Man. The world of forms, the city of bodies, represents to him the scattered rays of this mysterious humanity ; and his art is not to change them into any moral monotony, but to cultivate and guard them in their various vitality and meaning, and report their dramatic interplay. To philosophy and science all is unit ; the poet is a creator of variety out of this unity which shows Faraday but one element, Tyndall one force, Hegel one idea, underlying all actual or conceivable combinations. How grandly he has created his forms may be best learned by considering the fertility of his invention as displayed in all of his volumes. No poet of this generation has approached Robert Browning in the richness and originality of his plots. While around him the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome have been masquerading in contemporary costumes, — while critics have been often limited for a generation at a time to the question whether Smith’s Venus or Cupid is finer than Jones’s, — while every Oriental or Scandinavian or Italian legend has been made to do duty like the professional models whose faces and forms, now bright, now brown, reappear at every academy exhibition,— this poet has evolved a series of the most beautiful frames as well as portraits, in attestation of which we need only, for the reader of Browning, mention Pippa Passes, Paracelsus, The Flight of the Duchess, and The Blot on the Scutcheon.
In the work now before us there is no work of Browning’s later life whose charm and power are not represented. To the singularly original and powerful plot of the story there is added a fulness of dramatic treatment, and a play of intense expression, like the fatal, silent swerve of globe-lightning, of which it were hopeless to attempt any critical analysis. A poet’s felicities belong to the sacred inner tabernacle of his genius, where he has mastered the secrets of his art. Were profane eyes to enter there where the worker is making his tapestry, they could only see a mass of thread-ends and tangles ; hut what skill is behind there let the cartoon of the outside prove ! And we have no fear but those who have eyes to see great forms — even though they have not a perspective reaching back to the time of Dante or Shakespeare to compel recognition of their grandeur,— will find them in the living tableau, which represents and justifies the recent silent years of Robert Browning.