The Ring and the Book” (1868–69)
[Previously on this blog: ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church. Rome 15 — ’ (1845), ‘Cleon’ (1855) ‘A Grammarian’s Funeral’ (1855); ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855) and ‘Caliban Upon Setebos’ (1864)]
So, I re-read Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69). I did my PhD on Browning, back in the late 1980s, and obviously I read it back then, and indeed wrote about it (though it wasn’t central to my thesis). But I hadn’t read it in a while, and decided, recently, to give it another go.
It is Browning’s masterpiece, and was once by far his most popular work, though it’s little read now. It’s also a historical novel, one of the greatest of its era — and I’m particularly interested in this mode, have recently read or re-read the whole run of Scott’s Waverley novels. I am thinking about the nineteenth century historical fiction more broadly, and thinking about how this work fits into that tradition.
The story of how Browning came to write this enormous (21,000 lines of blank verse! twice the length of Paradise Lost!) epic is itself a part of the poem, elaborated in its first book. Browning, living in Florence, was wandering through the marketplace one sunny day in 1860 when he came across the ‘Old Yellow Book’. This was (is: we still have it) a compilation of legal documents and testimony pertaining to a real-life 1698 trial — a trial for murder. The story starts when an Arezzo nobleman, Count Guido Franceschini, marries a young girl called Pompilia. Guido, though an aristocrat, was not well-off, and the marriage was transactional: Pompilia’s family (her two elderly parents, Pietro and Violante Comparini) got Guido’s eminent family name; he got money, and a compliant young girl — only 12 years old, when the marriage took place — to provide him with an heir. But Pietro and Violante weren’t as wealthy as they pretended, and in fact Pompilia wasn’t even their daughter: Violante, barren, had obtained her as a baby from a prostitute. Discovering these facts, Guido was outraged, and petitioned the law-courts for a divorce, but was told that this was out of the question. Whatever Pompilia’s provenance, he had to stay married to her. She in turn was miserable with her much-older, choleric husband in his decaying country estate.
Then come the core events of the poem: a young priest, Giuseppe Caponsacchi, takes pity on Pompilia — or, if you believe Guido’s version of events, begins an adulterous affair with her. With Caponsacchi’s help Pompilia escapes Guido’s house, and returns to Rome. Guido claims that the pair drugged him and stole his wealth before fleeing, although this is disputed in the trial. Another datum: Pompilia is pregnant, and gives birth in Rome — Guido is certain this is the priest’s bastard rather than his own child, and is angry that it will, cuckoo-like, claim his inheritance and family name. Guido attempts once again to gain restitution through law, but his prosecution languishes in the courts and eventually an, as he sees it, utterly inadequate verdict is delivered: Pompilia is moved to a convent, though only temporarily, and Caponsacchi must leave the city. That’s not nearly enough for the enraged Guido. He hires four young thugs, goes to Rome, knocks on the door of Pietro and Violante (where Pompilia is at that point living), calling through that he is the priest, Caponsacchi. In his testimony, Guido presents this as the clincher: if his wife and her parents had been innocent, if there had been no affair, they would have refused to open the door to such a name. But they do open the door. Guido and his four men burst in, stab Pietro and Violante to death and repeatedly stab Pompilia too. She does not die immediately, although her wounds eventually prove fatal.
This was the kernel of the case. Guido does not deny that he and his men killed these three people, but he claims he had the right to defend his honour, as a husband and a nobleman: that Pompilia had betrayed him, and that it was right that she should die. Pompilia (on her deathbed) and Caponsacchi both deny that there was any sexual affair. Guido points to a batch of love letters written between his wife and the priest. These are claimed by the prosecution to be forgeries.
The trial lasted through January and into February 1698. Eventually Guido was condemned to death. He appealed — he held a minor position in the church, and in effect tried to claim benefit of clergy. The pope of the day, Innocent XII, denied the legality of this, and Guido was executed 22 February 1698.
Browning saw the dramatic potential in this, but did not initially believe he should be the person to write it up (he tried to persuade Tennyson to take it on; and when Trollope visited he suggested he could write it up as a novel). But eventually he decided to give it a go. In August 1864, holidaying in France, near Biarritz, he saw how he could write it: ‘I was staying at Bayonne and walked out to a mountain-gorge traditionally said to have been cut or kicked out by Roland, and there laid out the full plan of twelve cantos, accurately carried out in the execution.’ Those twelve books:
1. The Ring and the Book
2. Half-Rome
3. The Other Half-Rome
4. Tertium Quid
5. Count Guido Franceschini
6. Giuseppe Caponsacchi
7. Pompilia
8. Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis
9. Juris Doctor Johannes Baptista Bottinius
10. Pope Innocent XII
11. Guido
12. The Book and the Ring
The first book relates Browning’s discovery of the ‘Old Yellow Book’, and sketches the main events of the crime. Books 2 to 5 give us three unnamed Roman citizens, each of whom gives us his version of events: ‘Half-Rome’ speaks for those who think Guido was right to do what he did; ‘Other Half-Rome’ takes Pompilia’s side, ‘Tertium Quid’ (‘a third thing’) views the case to some extent from both sides: according to him Pompilia was lucky not to grow up the daughter of a ‘common trull’; but Guido, ‘lord of the prey, as lion is’, was certainly cruel to her. In trying for balance, Tertiuim Quid ends up unsympathetically disengaged from justice altogether: ‘each party wants too much, claims sympathy/For its object of compassion, more than just.’
The next three books are dramatic monologues put into the mouths of the three main agents in the drama. First Guido, who has been tortured (a process called the ‘vigil’) in order to ensure the veracity of his testimony — he complains to the court about his dislocated hip and shoulder. Then Pompilia, speaking from her death-bed in ‘the long white lazar-house’ of Saint Anna’s — the tranquillity of her last hours disturbed only by the chink of the bell, the turn of the hinge, as doctors, priest and lawyers are admitted. Then Caponsacchi.
After that the next three books are all legal or judicial engagements: two court-appointed lawyers, one arguing Guido’s innocence, the other his guilt, and finally the Pope himself, ultimate arbiter, who reviews the whole case and condemns Guido to death. Finally Browning returns us to Guido, now in the condemned cell, his last night alive — like Fagin at the end of Oliver Twist, though much angrier. The first of Guido’s two monologues is styled as a deferential address to the court, his obsequious pleadings only occasionally interrupted by flares of temper. In the second that mask has fallen away and we see the fury, the bitterness and outrage, Guido spitting venom, glorying in his crime— at least, until the book’s end, when the officers come to take him away for execution, and he breaks down. From unrepentant glorying in the crime he committed …
I use up my last strength to strike once more
Old Pietro in the wine-house-gossip-face,
To trample underfoot the whine and wile
Of that Violante, — and I grow one gorge
To loathingly reject Pompilia’s pale
Poison my hasty hunger took for food.
How else lived that Athenian who died so,
Drinking hot bull’s-blood, fit for men like me?
I lived and died a man, and take man’s chance,
Honest and bold: right will be done to such. [11:2402–11]
… he flips in a moment, trying to claim that this savage words were just madness, and begging a succession of figures to save him, finally invoking the wife he killed.
Who are these you have let descend my stair?
Ha, their accursed psalm! Lights at the sill!
Is it “Open” they dare bid you? Treachery!
Sirs, have I spoken one word all this while
Out of the world of words I had to say?
Not one word! All was folly — I laughed and mocked!
Sirs, my first true word all truth and no lie,
Is — save me notwithstanding! Life is all!
I was just stark mad, — let the madman live
Pressed by as many chains as you please pile!
Don’t open! Hold me from them! I am yours,
I am the Granduke’s — no, I am the Pope’s!
Abate, — Cardinal, — Christ, — Maria, — God, …
Pompilia, will you let them murder me? [11:2412–25]
That’s the end of Guido. The last book wraps up the whole, and reveals the ultimate fate of Guido (beheading) and his henchmen (hanging). There is a ‘ring shape’ to this structure, returning at the end; but there is also an actual ring, a gold band engraved with AEI, Greek for ‘forever’, and which had been worn by Browning’s wife, Elizabeth.
Step back: because this relationship, its story, is crucial to Browning’s treatment of the true-crime sourcebook in writing The Ring and the Book.
Browning as a young man lived in London. He started publishing his poetry in the 1830s, but to little acclaim — and indeed, after Sordello (1840), to much ridicule and contumely. In 1845 he met and fell in love with Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, who was at this point a much more famous poet than he. She lived in her father’s house in Wimpole Street, London, and never went out. Something chronic and debilitating kept her there although doctors could not decide, and later commentators have been unable to agree on, what was wrong with her: migraines and painful problems with her spine were the two main symptoms, later augmented by a chronic lung infection, not TB but something prolonged.
Anyway Browning began courting her in 1845, and she reciprocated. They wrote one another lengthy letters, sometimes several a day, for a year and a half. He visited her in her rooms very often. This was all happening behind the back of Elizabeth’s father, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, who disapproved of the relationship and would not permit Elizabeth to marry. The father would go out to work in the morning and Robert, with the cognizance of the house servants, would come to call. Eventually Elizabeth and Robert decided to elope together: with the help of friends they married (again behind the father’s back) and then Browning carried Elizabeth away in a carriage to Dover, thence over the Channel to Calais and on through France, eventually settling in Italy.
Mr. Barrett immediately disinherited Elizabeth, as he did each of his children who married. In the once-popular movie, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934), these events are styled as romantic melodrama: Charles Laughton’s Mr Barrett is a tyrannical, controlling monster, Maureen O’Sullivan’s Elizabeth a sweet innocent girl, Browning a Saint George rescuing her from the dragon. In fact, however controlling the father manifestly was, he seems to have acted out of genuine concern for his sickly daughter, whose poetry he praised and facilitated (he paid for the private publication of her first books) and whom he manifestly loved. Elizabeth was no young innocent either: six years older than Browning, though she did not physically travel about the world she lived a vivid public life via letters and books, and was sharp-witted and engaged. In many ways Robert was the innocent in this whole relationship. Still, print the legend, and all that — not least because this romantic mytheme informs the poem Browning later wrote: ogre old man, locking up an innocent beautiful young girl, who is rescued by a handsome young knight.
Once in Italy Elizabeth’s health and mobility seemed to improve. She enjoyed life in the sunshine, gave birth to a son and published her best work: notably the love Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850 — so named because she thought her husband had something of a Portuguese look about him) and her mighty verse-novel Aurora Leigh (1856). But her health didn’t hold-out long; she weakened and sickened through the later 1850s and died in 1861. When Browning came to write The Ring and the Book, the mytheme of their courtship and elopement overwrote his sense of the historical factuality: the actual Caponsacchi, despite being a priest, had a reputation of being a ladies’ man: a ‘cavaliere servente’ as they say in Italy. But in Browning’s treatment he is pure, his love for Pompilia far above mere physical desire. And she in turn loves him as a ‘soldier-saint’ (7:1786) with a transcendent, righteous, non-adulterous love. The rescue of Pompilia from the ogrish Guido is the poem’s unambiguous narrative.
And this is a problem, or, say rather, that I used to think so. Because the form of the poem, its distribution of story amongst a set of individual perspectives by people who hold differing views regarding it, suggests that Browning is treating his story as a Rashomon-style exercise in relativism. But he’s not. Blake thought Milton, as a ‘true poet’, was ‘of the devil’s party without knowing it’ but Browning is assuredly not of Guido’s party. There’s no version of this poem, or any part of it, that truly thinks Guido might have a point: that he was right, by the mores of his time, to prize his honour, his noble name, his masculinity, and to punish the wife who wickedly wronged those things. Obviously, I don’t think it’s right to murder your wife because she has run away, or even if she has committed adultery. But I’m a 21st-century liberal feminist man. The proper business of a historical novel, we might say, is to enter into whole logic of its time-period: not just the external dress and fixtures and fittings, but also the mental attitudes, the worldview. A modern trial of Guido would convict him, irrespective of what Pompilia did or didn’t do; but the actual 17th century trial dragged on because its verdict depended upon whether Pompilia had been unfaithful her husband. If the court decided she had, then Guido’s actions would have been considered justifiable. But that’s not the world of the poem.
Carlyle praised The Ring and the Book, seeing its greatness as in proportion of the triviality of the source material: ‘it’s a wonderful book, one of the most wonderful poems ever written. I re-read it all through — all made out of an Old Bailey story that might have been told in ten lines, and only wants forgetting!’ He added: ‘of course the girl and the handsome priest were lovers.’ But that’s not what the poem gives us: Caponsacchi and Pompilia both stress their sexual innocence with one another. But it is a version of the story that, as it were, haunts the text we have. Half-Rome and Guido declare it, but in both cases they are compromised by their own intemperance and misogyny — like the Duke in Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842), a kind of proto-text of Ring and the Book. All the other characters in the poem all consistently disavow such a reading, and the pope, positioned as ultimate judge and arbiter, is absolutely certain of Pompilia’s innocence. The Pope’s lengthy monologue is interesting on these grounds actually: Browning, writing during a time when the doctrine of papal infallibility was being debated energetically (it was officially promulgated in the First Vatican Council of 1869, just as Browning’s poem was being published), starts the monologue with a discussion of the grounds on which judgement can be made. Even a pope can’t be absolutely certain, Innocent decides, but nevertheless he must do his best, for judgement is needful. And what he concludes is that Pompilia is a ‘martyr-maid’, perfect in innocence, and now a literal angel in heaven:
First of the first,
Such I pronounce Pompilia, then as now
Perfect in whiteness — stoop thou down, my child,
Give one good moment to the poor old Pope
Heart-sick at having all his world to blame —
Let me look at thee in the flesh as erst,
Let me enjoy the old clean linen garb,
Not the new splendid vesture! Armed and crowned,
Would Michael, yonder, be, nor crowned nor armed,
The less pre-eminent angel? Everywhere
I see in the world the intellect of man,
That sword, the energy his subtle spear,
The knowledge which defends him like a shield —
Everywhere; but they make not up, I think,
The marvel of a soul like thine, earth’s flower
She holds up to the softened gaze of God! [10: 1005–1019]
What ‘really’ happened? Read Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett’s excellent 3-vol Oxford edition of the poem, which includes a good deal of additional research into the historical ground of the poem, and you discover that Caponsacchi, as I mention above, was not a man who remained true to his vow of celibacy, and had indeed a reputation as a rake. How likely do you think it is that this man was motivated by purely disinterested motives when he intervened in Guido’s and Pompilia’s marriage and carried the beautiful young wife away? That he acted out of Platonic love and was not in any way distracted by her physical allure? Is that, in your experience, the way randy young men are?
In this is a functional fragility. What would happen if Browning had written the poem to incorporate Carlyle’s common-sense perspective? What if Pompilia were not angelically ‘perfect in whiteness’, Caponsacchi motivated by sexual desire, Guido genuine in his patriarchal-aristocratic ethos? ‘Why then,’ Browning in effect is saying, ‘the whole thing would fall apart.’ The ethical and sympathetic absolutism of the poem is a strait-jacket.
One way of thinking about this would be to suggest that The Ring and the Book holds two versions of itself in tension. I don’t mean the ‘actual’ events of 1698 and the poem’s morally simplified version of those events. I mean the epic and the novelistic. It was a commonplace of late-19th-century Browning appreciation to consider him a writer of fiction. Henry James’s great essay ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’ praises him on these grounds, and Oscar Wilde’s witticisms (‘Meredith is a prose Browning and so is Browning’) were not designed to deflate his achievement: Browning, Wilde said, will be celebrated, just ‘not as a poet! He will be remembered as a writer of fiction … as one who used poetry as a medium for writing in prose’. And there is much that is novelistic about The Ring and the Book. Its huge length is not a monotonous re-rehearsing of the central story so much as a capacious engagement with all the specificities of life in 1698 Rome, a Zola-esque piling on. The poem manifests what John Bayley calls ‘a Victorian luxuriousness and elaboration of relationship’. He cites ‘the brilliant lawyer Arcangeli, who is defending the villain Guido’ who ‘allows his thoughts to stray to the supper which he hopes to be eating that night.
May Gigia have remembered, nothing stings
Fried liver out of its monotony
Of richness like a root of fennel, chopped
Fine with the parsley.
‘The lawyer’s liver,’ says Bayley, ‘is the kind of fact which enriches narrative and makes for the verisimilitude of a tale’. The Ring and the Book is packed with this kind of thing. Elizabeth Barrett had written a novel-in-verse with Aurora Leigh: a lengthy piece of flowing, sometimes rather slack blank verse that works its narrative linearly: Aurora remembering her past and then, at the poem’s end, facing her future. The Ring and the Book is not like this. Its blank verse is dense, clogged, difficult — unlike Aurora Leigh’s airiness it is dark, grotesque in style as well as subject matter. Walter Bagheot identified the three greatest poets of his age, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning, as in turn: ‘the pure style, the ornate and the grotesque’. The nine books of Aurora Leigh don’t read like an epic, and don’t aspire to; but Browning’s Vergilian or Miltonesque twelve books very much do. The story is a war story, though combat is transferred from Homeric battlefields to a lawcourt in Rome; with visits to the underworld, catalogues of ships, gods (or at least angels) and monsters, Pompilia as a kind of doomed Dido, and Browning traversing the odysseic journey from Rome to London that actualises, as the very last lines of the poem put it, ‘thy rare gold ring of verse (the poet praised) Linking our England to his Italy!’ Thy is Elizabeth, directly addressed. It’s epic because it is, at its heart, a mythic of legendary story — it is Saint George battling the dragon and rescuing the maiden, or Perseus helped Andromeda to escape the monstrous serpent, cathected into Browning’s personal myth by which he was able to free Elizabeth from her imprisonment and bring her away, if only for a short space.
As myth, this element of the poem is not damaged by pedantic objections that Browning has misrepresented the historical record — that he has made errors (as he has, at various places) in understanding the Italian and Latin of the Old Yellow Book, or that he has flattened and idealised the actual characters of Pompilia and Caponsacchi. Myth subsists not upon the sorts of verisimilitude that sustain le naturalisme. The novel, however, does.
Barbara Everett finds fault with Browning’s longer poems, and especially with The Ring and the Book, because of what she sees as an ‘incapacity on Browning’s part to shape and limit his writing in a fashion that observed the more obvious formal laws.’ She does, at least, concede that for some this ‘sprawl’, this gargoylic ornamentation and prolixity, is a feature not a bug, namechecking G.K. Chesterton’s ‘splendidly generous and strongly intelligent study of the poet’ in which ‘he defended Browning as a great master of form, so long as we define the grotesque as a major poetic form.’ One does not condemn a Toby Jug because it is not a porcelain bowl. Nevertheless, says Everett, The Ring and the Book fails, because it is not readable.
Chesterton’s talk of Toby jugs does not really solve the problem. A jug is to be drunk out of, and a poem is to be read. The fact is, that while a Toby jug may be drunk out of, Browning’s longer poems — and they make up a large part of his poetic output — are normally anything but read, and, having just read through them, I do not find this a fault in the modern reader. They are the work of a man of great talent, an interesting and a highly sympathetic man in addition; they have splendid things in them over and over again; and they are still not readable. The fault lies with that aspect of the ordinary philistine Victorian mind that could not help believing that ‘More means better … In no long poem of Browning’s is it easy to know what precisely is going on: so much for his fictive gifts. It seems that verse narrative, like any other verse of length, requires respect for certain kinds of necessity: a reader has to be told what he needs to know before the current of the verse carries him past the point of no return; and this demands of the poet either egoistic intensity of will (to govern both his materials and his audience at once) or deep familiarity with ancient narrative structural formulae, which will do the same work for him. These necessities Browning disregards or does not possess or positively disapproves of, with the result that, to a degree startling in a writer celebrated for his grasp on human psychology, the long poems ignore or even offend reader-psychology.
This is true, to my mind, even of The Ring and the Book. The two books ‘Caponsacchi’ and ‘Pompilia’ are remarkably good, compacting into themselves the heart of the simple story of love unfulfilled but self-transcending: deep and moving and exciting too, they probably constitute the poet’s most solid success. But the retelling of this same story, in its lineaments both bald and cruel, more than ten times over, through the medium of speakers foolish and boring when not actually incapable of truth, is — despite the linguistic and rhetorical brilliances and the neat angles of character that occasionally occur — largely unendurable, the kind of bright ‘idea’ that comes to a civilisation out of touch with the realities of art in practice. One can almost think Guido’s self-description meant to echo defeatedly the structure of the whole: ‘I am one huge and sheer mistake.’ James wrote the perfect review of the poem when, in Notes on Novelists, he circled the work with gloomy, delicate prevarication: ‘We can only take it as tremendously interesting.’ Interesting is what it is, and what really good writing perhaps is not: a bright idea is often a bad idea as far as poetry is concerned. In its lack of correspondence with the actual, The Ring and the Book, for all its genuinely impressive theoretical magnificence, is reminiscent of other and baser Victorian misunderstandings about the nature of the aesthetic, from wax-flowers under glass to models of the Crystal Palace constructed out of matchsticks.
It’s a take-down that used to be famous, or notorious, in Browning studies, this. I don’t agree with it, I must say. It seems to me that mistakes are more dramatically interesting than triumphs; that interestingness is one of the highest callings in art — and a model of the Crystal Palace constructed out of matchsticks would be a splendid thing, not least because the point of the Crystal Palace was its transparency, and matchsticks are opaque. Harold Bloom talked of Browning being interested ‘not in art but in the obstacles to art’, and that seems to me true, and the focus of his greatness as an artist. Indeed, I think the problem with The Ring and the Book is that it doesn’t go far enough in this direction in either of its components — the epic element and the novelistic. The Iliad, that poem (in Simone Weil’s words) ‘of force’, continues in relevance to our own, war-torn violent times, but there is something in its presentation of Achilles, that moves it out of the realm of the humanly comprehensible: his wrath, his violence, is superhuman, beyond or prior to good and evil, hideously transcendent — quite unnovelistic, in that sense. But Browning’s disgust at Guido means his representation never achieves this Miltonic-Satanic or Homeric intensity. Achilles, in all his destructiveness, his existential cul-de-sac, is a hero, and Guido is far too petty and despicable to rise to such epic measure. And on the novelistic side, the poem could have borne more ambiguity alongside its teeming vividness of evocation. Where Everett sees the idealised relationship of Pompilia and Caponsacchi as the one success in The Ring and the Book, I align myself more with Eric Griffiths:
The Victorians may not have invented the idealization of love but it could be said that they brought it to a pitch at which it was defiled and defiling, injuriously divorced from an actuality which it rather occluded than informed. When Geoffrey Hill writes of Imogen that ‘Shakespeare has shaped his play to procure the reality of the woman from the romance of her setting’, the ‘from’ is well judged to mean both ‘out of’ and ‘out of the clutches of’; the achieved life of Imogen is both set off against the context of romance as against a foil and also pitted against that context as in combat. Imogen acts to procure her own reality, to vindicate herself against Iachimo’s fictions and to free herself from the Queen’s plots; Shakespeare and Imogen collaborate with each other. A figure such as Pompilia in The Ring and the Book, though, remains more passive in the setting where her creator has placed her; her excellent qualities are more conferred on her by Browning’s arrangement of matters than by initiatives we imagine as her own. Correspondingly, Browning appears to ‘procure’ her reality for us in a less respectable sense, pandering to the desire of the reader for spiritual gratifications. [Eric Griffiths The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (OUP), 164]
This, I think, is the true weakness of Browning’s lamination of historical-novel and epic poem. The personal mytheme of his rescuing Elizabeth Barrett Barrett and carrying her off to married bliss in Italy informs the legend of the poem. But we cannot say that Robert Browning was motivated by a purely disinterested, non-erotic motivation in so acting. On the contrary, that the two could marry and have a child was precisely the point of the elopement.
Of course, RB and EBB’s sexual connection was neither adulterous — like Pompilia and Caponsacchi’s — nor premised on sexual violence, like Guido and his wife. Yet epic, the form Browning inhabits for this poem, is, classically, about precisely those things. The Trojan cycle begins in rape, as Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ so eloquently notes, and the Iliad is a conflict occasioned by a wife having adulterous sex with a man other than her husband: if Pompilia is Helen and Caponsacchi Paris, the Guido is, or sees himself as, Menelaus, forcing the issue of his husbandly rights even to the point of war and death. The Aeneid opens with its hero relating the violent death of his wife to another woman whom he then abandons, leaving her to death. Paradise Lost is an epic predicated upon the treachery of one woman that then passes itself down, as ruin, to all of us. The Odyssey, it is true, is an epic of sexual fidelity, and the lengths Penelope goes to keep the suitors from her bed until her husband returns (though the husband is not so chaste) — but it ends not only with the joyous reunion of Odysseus and Penelope, but with the maidservants of the house taken outside and hanged, because they had sex with the suitors. Violence against women is, we might say, woven into the very weft of epic. In that sense, the grisly core of Browning’s poem, what Seamus Perry calls its ‘story of appalling domestic betrayal and brutality’, slots exactly into the epic tradition.
One of the things Browning does well — which is to say, with a Victorian tact that nevertheless communicates to the reader the savagery and horror of the circumstances —is portraying what being married to Guido meant to innocent, inexperienced Pompilia. Her monologue addresses this directly: her husband informing her that their marriage is not a meeting of true minds, or souls, but a merely transactional linking of bodies, with all that this entails. ‘There’, Pompilia says, Guido was no hypocrite: there being, well, sex.
There my husband never used deceit.
He never did by speech nor act imply
“Because of our souls’ yearning that we meet
And mix in soul through flesh, which yours and mine
Wear and impress, and make their visible selves,
— All which means, for the love of you and me,
Let us become one flesh, being one soul!”
He only stipulated for the wealth;
Honest so far. But when he spoke as plain —
Dreadfully honest also — “Since our souls
Stand each from each, a whole world’s width between,
Give me the fleshy vesture I can reach
And rend and leave just fit for hell to burn!” — [7:772–84]
‘I did resist’, she adds, but without success. Reach, rend and leave is, as a four-word summary of the sexual act from a male point of view, brutally concise, horribly on point. Pompilia’s other descriptions of her ‘miserable three drear years’ married to Guido convey the rapacious sexual element through descriptions that apply to other things: him seating her at the carnival — ‘ My husband put me where I sat, in front;/Then crouched down, breathed cold through me from behind’ — replicates a chilling doggy-style sexual affront. ‘I looked thence to the ceiling and the walls,’ she recalls: ‘my thoughts went through the roof and out, to Rome.’ She is at the theatre, but we picture her in the unenjoyable marital bed, waiting for the act to end. Mostly, though, Pompilia conveys the sexual violence of her marriage through lacunae: ‘Whereupon … no, I leave my husband out’.
When he thinks himself into Pompilia’s place, Browning draws on a somewhat wispy religiosity, a quiet-voiced ingenuousness. But when he thinks himself into Caponsacchi something more interesting happens, because part of his business in Book 6 — the priest’s dramatic monologue — is to revert upon the very act of thinking yourself into someone else’s place. The bits of Book 6 that are least convincing are Caponsacchi’s assertions of innocency:
I have done with being judged.
I stand here guiltless in thought, word and deed,
To the point that I apprise you, — in contempt
For all misapprehending ignorance
O’ the human heart, much more the mind of Christ, —
That I assuredly did bow, was blessed
By the revelation of Pompilia. [6:1860]
How much better is the final verse-paragraph, which follows a couple of hundred lines after this:
Sirs, I am quiet again. You see, we are
So very pitiable, she and I,
Who had conceivably been otherwise.
Forget distemperature and idle heat!
Apart from truth’s sake, what’s to move so much?
Pompilia will be presently with God;
I am, on earth, as good as out of it,
A relegated priest; when exile ends,
I mean to do my duty and live long.
She and I are mere strangers now: but priests
Should study passion; how else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes?
I do but play with an imagined life
Of who, unfettered by a vow, unblessed
By the higher call, — since you will have it so, —
Leads it companioned by the woman there.
To live, and see her learn, and learn by her,
Out of the low obscure and petty world —
Or only see one purpose and one will
Evolve themselves in the world, change wrong to right:
To have to do with nothing but the true,
The good, the eternal — and these, not alone
In the main current of the general life,
But small experiences of every day,
Concerns of the particular hearth and home:
To learn not only by a comet’s rush
But a rose’s birth, — not by the grandeur, God —
But the comfort, Christ. All this, how far away!
Mere delectation, meet for a minute’s dream! —
Just as a drudging student trims his lamp,
Opens his Plutarch, puts him in the place
Of Roman, Grecian; draws the patched gown close,
Dreams, “Thus should I fight, save or rule the world!” —
Then smilingly, contentedly, awakes
To the old solitary nothingness.
So I, from such communion, pass content …
O great, just, good God! Miserable me! [6: 2069–2105; ellipsis in original]
Plutarch comes, rather, out of nowhere, here. I suppose the point is that his Lives are at once histories and also sauced-up dramatisations of real individuals. We read them, enter into their world, and when we put the book down we return to the old solitary nothingness. This is Caponsacchi imagining what we in SF call an alternate timeline, the sliding-doors branching reality in which he and Pompilia could be together. Actuality has severed that, leaving her forever young in heaven and he growing old alone on Earth. This is close to Tennyson’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, though the love in this case both is and isn’t an actuality. Caponsacchi’s commitment to ‘the small experiences of every day’ are Browning’s concerns too: ‘to learn not only by a comet’s rush/But a rose’s birth, — not by the grandeur, God — But the comfort, Christ.’ Epic and novelistic, in other words. But look what Browning does with alliteration in this passage: good God’s grandeur, close Christ’s comforting communion, the man current of every day ‘mere delectation meet for a minute’s dream’: these ms and ds, these gs and cs, this linkage of sound, this connectivity, doing the work that rhyme would if this weren’t blank verse: as Pompilia and Caponsacchi are, and are not, connected. Look at that last line, o great, just, good God! Miserable me!: six stressed syllables in a row, a triplet of unstressed syllables and a final emphatic self-reference: extraordinary, daring prosody. The syntax from ‘She and I are mere strangers now …’ down to ‘the comfort, Christ’ keeps spooling out the sentence (18 lines of verse before we get to the full stop) with embedded clauses and repeated linkages of semi-colons and colons and dashes, rushing like a comet, blooming like a rose, redeeming the estrangement of its beginning via its imagined alternate-reality in which Caponsacchi, no longer a priest, and Pompilia, not Guido’s, could marry and ‘live’, and learn from one another, and raise one another ‘out of the low obscure and petty world’, ‘evolve … change wrong to right’, to the place where imagined alterity and bitter actuality come together and are redeemed, in Christ. What, the passage says, would you do in this position? To read is to insert ourselves into other possibilities, alternate realities, to test ourselves against other challenges — the counterpoint to what Browning, at the very beginning of The Ring and the Book, calls the ‘pure crude fact’ of the Old Yellow Book. If the book is ‘fact’, the ring, the gold linkage of Robert and Elizabeth, of Italy and England, of past and present, is fiction. Yet, says Browning, the empathetic projection of self into otherhood that fiction enables is only temporary. The book (liber) liberates, the ring, a marriage band, binds; but the ring — the prospect of marriage with Pompilia — represents the hypothetical liberation of Caponsacchi from his misery (‘miserable me!’) that the book, the pure crude fact, negates.
