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looks exclusively to the erratic course of the eccentric hero, but finds force in the multitude, and law in the uniform flow of average society, obtains in journalism its proper literary expression. When it is commonly recognised that the hero and statesman is no original creator, no imposer of his own private dreams upon mankind, but one who represents their average opinions, and enforces them with extraordinary ability, the hero of literature must become not the eccentric but the sample man. The vagaries of sensationalism seem to herald its dissolution. A moriA moribund school, whether of theology or philosophy or art, is always most rabid in its anathemas, most uncompromising in its logic, most extravagant in its one-sided consistency. There is an autumnal and painted gorgeousness, which is the precursor not of life but of death. Sensationalism may be the last fitful glare of the novel of exceptional character and situation, and journalism the first twilight and the model of a school about to arise. Mr. Browning's poem is cousin-german to a series of newspaper articles. His "horrid murder " is not led up to, hidden, and discovered as in a novel, but bursts upon us like an announcement in a journal. Its interest lies not in its sensational atrocity or pathos, but in its ambiguous character, the various interpretations which may be given to the acts and motives of the murderer, his wife, her parents, and her friend. And these are just the qualities which would make it fit material for the journalist. A cruel murder, stupidly conceived and clumsily executed, where justice has no trouble in tracing the evidence, and where the motives are apparent and the provocation imaginary, does not become a celebrated cause. It is only when it involves terrible uncertainties of inferential evidence, or when the motives urged in justification are capable of various explanations, that the case becomes meat and drink for journalists. Then society is moved. Then all classes contribute their comments, and improve the occasion to enforce their various social theories, their belief in the corruption of the aristocracy, their distrust of trial by jury, their contempt for the English law of evidence, their conviction of the connection between the increase of crime and the advance of democracy. It is just such a series of comments which three out of twelve of Mr. Brown

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tion administered by a weekly journal reviewing the perturbations of the world from a region of sweetness, and light. These cantos resemble leading articles done into verse, in that they are the lyrical expressions of a chorus of public opinion, exercising itself on the deeds which move its interest, delivering its judgments on their evidence and motives, and recording its sentiments about them. They do not dramatize public opinion; to do so, it would be necessary to ex hibit a common wish and will using its own instruments, performing its own functions, and controlling events, with multitudes instead of persons as actors. Here the aggre gates of men simply record their sentiments through the mouth of an average member.

Although Mr. Browning makes use of these expositors of opinion, he does not cease to accompany their utterances with a running commentary of his own, sometimes expressed, sometimes understood, forming a perpetual gloss on the text, and ever making us alive to the relationship in which the sentiments dramatically expressed stand to those of the poet himself. He writes with a didactic purpose. He claims to have a mission; and the most direct way of accomplishing it would be to look his brethren in the face, and tell them that they have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, and that what they count faith is foolishness. But besides the peril of making one's-self a common enemy by calling all things by their right names, such a way of delivering his message would be obnoxious to the common charge against all human testimony and human speech. He must therefore deliver his message in the way of art, which "nowise speaks to men, only to mankind," which tells truth oblique. ly by painting the picture that shall breed the thought, and thus both satisfy the imagination and save the soul. It is not to be forgotten, in considering the complex form of Mr. Browning's poem, that it is in some sense a sermon.

With regard to the materials of the poem, the first thing that strikes one is that it is, both in the plot and in the characters, a renewal of old productions.

"For out of the old fieldes, as men sayth,

Cometh all this newe corn from year to year,

And out of olde bookis, in good fayth, Cometh all this new science that men lere."

ing's cantos furnish. "Half Rome" might be a summary of the articles and correspondence of the daily Liberal journal on the sub- A comparison of it with the poet's earlier ject, the other half Rome a similar digest writings will show that it stands to them in of the opinions of the Tory paper, while the that relation of finished picture to previous "Tertium quid" would be the acrid and im- studies on which Bottini enlarges in the bepartial distribution of universal condemna-ginning of his monologue. Up to the publi

the additions of his own fancy, using it as a mould for recasting all his favourite characters, in the composition of whose metal almost his whole life had been spent. While he designed moulds for himself, he had generally remained perilously near the edge of the impossible or the grotesque.

"Amphora cœpit

Institui; currente rotâ cur urceus exit?"

Now he has found a mould, or rather a collection of moulds, which admits of a variegated display of his potter's craft, and requires a large collection of vessels, some to honour, some to dishonour. All that he could not do he found ready to hand; all that he could do best, he saw room for. His characters were ready; he had only to adapt them, and make them act over again in poetry a drama which had once been really acted by persons more or less resembling his masks.

The story had perhaps another attraction for Mr. Browning in its being Italian. Dutch as he is in his realism, in his distance from the abstract ideal, and in a complexity which buries a fire under the abundance of fuel, he yet shares the Dutch artist's love for the "Woman country, never wed,

cation of the poem, it was generally thought | connected with it, brooded over it for four that "The Flight of the Duchess was Mr. years, and told its story over again, with Browning's most considerable work. But as the individual characters of that piece are mostly only developments of previous isolated studies-studies of neglected wives and of heartless husbands-so the whole complex play of characters, their mutual action and reaction, in The Ring and the Book, is very much a reproduction and improved version of the play of moral forces exhibited in "The Flight of the Duchess." In both there is the child-wife, great in moral nature and in possibilities of development, but ignorant, innocent, and unformed; in both the icy, formal, heartless husband; in both the "gaunt grey nightmare" of the motherin-law; in both a deliverer whose presence is like a flash of light to the pining wife, transfiguring her to a daring heroine. In one poem this character is borne by the gipsy, in the other by the canon Caponsacchi. In both there is a censor who relates the story, and delivers his judgment upon the motives and acts of the persons. In one, this office is borne by the old huntsman; in the other it is divided between the three representative speakers who utter the opinions of Roman society, and the Pope who sums up the case, and makes the final award. Certain types have long dwelt in the poet's mind; on them he has persistently brought to bear his powers of analysis and construction; he has often exhibited them singly and in different combinations, in studies of various degrees of extent and intensiveness. In his more extensive studies, where the reaction of the characters on each other had to be exhibited, he has always shown a deficiency in the power of inventing plots. The greatest masters of characterization have often confessed a sheer inability to devise personages or incidents. Even Shakespeare, by his practice of using ready-made plots, indirectly owns to the difficulty or irksomeness of the labour. It is therefore no violent detraction from Mr. Browning's merits to say that his plots are often ridiculous, his incidents absurd, and his personages bizarre. Nothing can well exceed the unreal, unnatural effect of the introduction of the gipsy in "The Flight of the Duchess." If the writer in the exercise of his self-criticism ever felt this weakness, the discovery of his Florentine book, with an interesting story ready made, supplying not merely a likely but a true plot, furnished with the best possible machinery and incidents for a new display of his favourite types of character, must have appeared even whimsically providential. He seized on his treasure, gloated over it, talked of it, investigated the records

Loved all the more by earth's male lands." But if he goes to Italy and studies there, he paints Italian subjects in the Dutch manner, and is most attracted by the deposits of the Teuton admixture in the strata of the Italian mind. He may decorously display on his table the masterpieces of Latin art, but under them we find the open volumes of Rabelais, Montaigne, Annibale Caro, Pie tro Aretino, or the burlesques of Ariosto and Tassoni. To adduce but one example, the grotesque onomatopoeia of the Italians exercises quite a magnetic attraction over him. A nation which delights in giving its most renowned families such names as Head-ina-bag, Beggar-my-neighbour, Wish-you-well, and Rags, has a certain underground fibre of sympathy with a poet who delights in inventing such noises as Blougram, Gigadibs, or Bluphocks. Uncouth, unkissed," says Chaucer; but an uncouth name has so great an attraction for Mr. Browning that he not only kisses it, but absolutely chews it, and licks it into shape with the affection of a she-bear for her cubs. The fatted calf, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, who in one of the cantos is exhibited alternating between the pains of composing a defence of the murderer, and the pathos of intercalary benedictions of his little boy Hyacinth, whose birthday it is, ransacks the whole armoury

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looks exclusively to the erratic course of the eccentric hero, but finds force in the multitude, and law in the uniform flow of average society, obtains in journalism its proper literary expression. When it is commonly recognised that the hero and statesman is no original creator, no imposer of his own private dreams upon mankind, but one who represents their average opinions, and enforces them with extraordinary ability, the hero of literature must become not the eccentric but the sample man. The vagaries of sensationalism seem to herald its dissolution. A moribund school, whether of theology or philosophy or art, is always most rabid in its anathemas, most uncompromising in its logic, most extravagant in its one-sided consistency. There is an autumnal and painted gorgeousness, which is the precursor not of life but of death. Sensationalism may be the last fitful glare of the novel of exceptional character and situatiou, and journalism the first twilight and the model of a school about to arise. Mr. Browning's poem is cousin-german to a series of newspaper articles. His "horrid murder" is not led up to, hidden, and discovered as in a novel, but bursts upon us like an announcement in a journal. Its interest lies not in its sensational atrocity or pathos, but in its ambiguous character, the various interpretations which may be given to the acts and motives of the murderer, his wife, her parents, and her friend. And these are just the qualities which would make it fit material for the journalist. A cruel murder, stupidly conceived and clumsily executed, where justice has no trouble in tracing the evidence, and where the motives are apparent and the provocation imaginary, does not become a celebrated cause. It is only when it involves terrible uncertainties of inferential evidence, or when the motives urged in justification are capable of various explanations, that the case becomes meat and drink for journalists. Then society is moved. Then all classes contribute their comments, and improve the occasion to enforce their various social theories, their belief in the corruption of the aristocracy, their distrust of trial by jury, their contempt for the English law of evidence, their conviction of the connection between the increase of crime and the advance of demo. cracy. It is just such a series of comments which three out of twelve of Mr. Browning's cantos furnish. "Half Rome" might be a summary of the articles and correspondence of the daily Liberal journal on the subject, the other half Rome a similar digest of the opinions of the Tory paper, while the "Tertium quid" would be the acrid and impartial distribution of universal condemna

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tion administered by a weekly journal reviewing the perturbations of the world from a region of sweetness, and light. These cantos resemble leading articles done into verse, in that they are the lyrical expressions of chorus of public opinion, exercising itself on the deeds which move its interest, delivering its judgments on their evidence and motives, and recording its sentiments about them. They do not dramatize public opinion; to do so, it would be necessary to ex hibit a common wish and will using its own instruments, performing its own functions, and controlling events, with multitudes instead of persons as actors. Here the aggre gates of men simply record their sentiments through the mouth of an average member.

Although Mr. Browning makes use of these expositors of opinion, he does not cease to accompany their utterances with a running commentary of his own, sometimes expressed, sometimes understood, forming a perpetual gloss on the text, and ever making us alive to the relationship in which the sentiments dramatically expressed stand to those of the poet himself. He writes with a didactic purpose. He claims to have a mission; and the most direct way of accomplishing it would be to look his brethren in the face, and tell them that they have eyes and see not, ears and hear not, and that what they count faith is foolishness. But besides the peril of making one's-self a common enemy by calling all things by their right names, such a way of delivering his message would be obnoxious to the common charge against all human testimony and human speech. He must therefore deliver his message in the way of art, which "nowise speaks to men, only to mankind," which tells truth obliquely by painting the picture that shall breed the thought, and thus both satisfy the imagination and save the soul. It is not to be forgotten, in considering the complex form of Mr. Browning's poem, that it is in some sense a sermon.

With regard to the materials of the poem, the first thing that strikes one is that it is, both in the plot and in the characters, a renewal of old productions.

"For out of the old fieldes, as men sayth,

Cometh all this newe corn from year to

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แ Amphora cœpit Institui; currente rotâ cur urceus exit?"

Now he has found a mould, or rather a collection of moulds, which admits of a variegated display of his potter's craft, and requires a large collection of vessels, some to honour, some to dishonour. All that he could not do he found ready to hand; all that he could do best, he saw room for. His characters were ready; he had only to adapt them, and make them act over again in poetry a drama which had once been really acted by persons more or less resembling his masks.

The story had perhaps another attraction for Mr. Browning in its being Italian. Dutch as he is in his realism, in his distance from the abstract ideal, and in a complexity which buries a fire under the abundance of fuel, he yet shares the Dutch artist's love for the "Woman country, never wed,

cation of the poem, it was generally thought | connected with it, brooded over it for four that "The Flight of the Duchess was Mr. years, and told its story over again, with Browning's most considerable work. But the additions of his own fancy, using it as a as the individual characters of that piece are mould for recasting all his favourite characmostly only developments of previous iso- ters, in the composition of whose metal allated studies-studies of neglected wives and most his whole life had been spent. While of heartless husbands-so the whole com- be designed moulds for himself, he had genplex play of characters, their mutual action erally remained perilously near the edge of and reaction, in The Ring and the Book, is the impossible or the grotesque. very much a reproduction and improved version of the play of moral forces exhibited in "The Flight of the Duchess." In both there is the child-wife, great in moral nature and in possibilities of development, but ignorant, innocent, and unformed; in both the icy, formal, heartless husband; in both the "gaunt grey nightmare" of the motherin-law; in both a deliverer whose presence is like a flash of light to the pining wife, transfiguring her to a daring heroine. In one poem this character is borne by the gipsy, in the other by the canon Caponsacchi. In both there is a censor who relates the story, and delivers his judgment upon the motives and acts of the persons. In one, this office is borne by the old huntsman; in the other it is divided between the three representative speakers who utter the opinions of Roman society, and the Pope who sums up the case, and makes the final award. Certain types have long dwelt in the poet's mind; on them he has persistently brought to bear his powers of analysis and construction; he has often exhibited them singly and in different combinations, in studies of various degrees of extent and intensiveness. In his more extensive studies, where the reaction of the characters on each other had to be exhibited, he has always shown a deficiency in the power of inventing plots. The greatest masters of characterization have often confessed a sheer inability to devise personages or incidents. Even Shakespeare, by his practice of using ready-made plots, indirectly owns to the difficulty or irksomeness of the labour. It is therefore no violent detraction from Mr. Browning's merits to say that his plots are often ridiculous, his incidents absurd, and his personages bizarre. Nothing can well exceed the unreal, unnatural effect of the introduction of the gipsy in "The Flight of the Duchess." If the writer in the exercise of his self-criticism ever felt this weakness, the discovery of his Florentine book, with an interesting story ready made, supplying not merely a likely but a true plot, furnished with the best possible machinery and incidents for a new display of his favourite types of character, must have appeared even whimsically providential. He seized on his treasure, gloated over it, talked of it, investigated the records

Loved all the more by earth's male lands." But if he goes to Italy and studies there, he paints Italian subjects in the Dutch manner, and is most attracted by the deposits of the Teuton admixture in the strata of the Italian mind. He may decorously display on his table the masterpieces of Latin art, but under them we find the open volumes of Rabelais, Montaigne, Annibale Caro, Pietro Aretino, or the burlesques of Ariosto and Tassoni. To adduce but one example, the grotesque onomatopoeia of the Italians exercises quite a magnetic attraction over him. A nation which delights in giving its most renowned families such names as Head-ina-bag, Beggar-my-neighbour, Wish-you-well, and Rags, has a certain underground fibre of sympathy with a poet who delights in inventing such noises as Blougram, Gigadibs, or Bluphocks. Uncouth, unkissed," says Chaucer; but an uncouth name has so great an attraction for Mr. Browning that he not only kisses it, but absolutely chews it, and licks it into shape with the affection of a she-bear for her cubs. The fatted calf, Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, who in one of the cantos is exhibited alternating between the pains of composing a defence of the murderer, and the pathos of intercalary benedictions of his little boy Hyacinth, whose birthday it is, ransacks the whole armoury

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of Italian increments for variations on the child's name-Giacinto, Giacintino, Cinino, Ciniccino, Cincicello, Cinone, Cinoncino, Cinoncello, Cinotto, Cinozzo, Cinuzzo, Cinarello, Cinuccio, Cinucciatolo, Cineruggiolo, -where affection prompts a homeliness of sound analogous to the homeliness of meaning in the mother who calls a child by the endearing terms of pig or duck. There is a great deal of expression in names, whether articulate or only musical in their utterance. We see strong character in Shakespeare's Sir Toby and in his Goodman Puff, in many of the names of Ben Jonson's plays and epigrams, and in those prefixed to Robert Herrick's criminosi iambi, where the words are generally as expressive in meaning as in sound. It requires, perhaps, a greater refinement of musical ear to comprehend a meaning in the insignificant sounds of a name, and with Victor Hugo to sum up the saintly qualities of a prelate in such a sound as Myriel. Mr. Browning's ear is keenly apprehensive of these latent affinities; but his taste leads him rather to the farcical than the beautiful. He does not attempt to make up for other wants by the queerness of his nomenclature, as Old Shandy would have compensated for his son's loss of nose by christening him Trismegistus; but he gladly lays hold of its accessory aid. It must have delighted him to find that the story would fill his lines with Pompilia and Caponsacchi, and would give him occasion to lug into his verse such agglomerations of syllables as Panciatichi and Acciaiuoli.

bringing out of their treasures things new and old.

The chief value of the story of Mr. Browning's poem is to form the framework for the display of the characters. These are, first, Count Guido Franceschini, the murderer, a poor nobleman who, having fished all his life in the antechambers of a cardinal at Rome, and caught nothing, in the wane of his years baits his hook with his nobility and catches the wife, and through her the supposed daughter, of a wealthy Roman burgess. Guido is Mr. Browning's Iago; in him we have his ideal of wickedness. Guido is not a man of strong passions urged by his nature to vice. He is, on the contrary, an artificial man, one whose hinges turn not on the pivot of passion but on that of reason. He is a walking example of Rousseau's aphorism, "L'homme qui raisonne est un animal dépravé." His master passion is a made-up one, the love of money, which, in common with mediæval moralists, Mr. Browning considers the least human and most diabolical of all, because it is sim ply artificial. Whoever stands in the way of this passion is simply vermin to Guidofirst to be provoked to suicide, and in default of that to be led into some crime which may excuse deadly vengeance, and in default of that to be poisoned or stabbed. Add to him pride, not the natural pride of his farreaching intelligence, or any other natural gift, but the pride of station, another arti ficial passion, and we have a reason for the cruel vengeance, the "lust and letch of hate " which he exhibits. After his cold

Italians would probably condemn Mr. Browning's Latinizing as a corrupt follow-blooded indifference to his wife and her pa ing of his apostles, and repeat their old proverb, Inglese italianizzato diavolo incarnato. If the intricate and rapid rhymes, of which he has heretofore shown such management, have an Italian example in Leporeo, Leporco is but a corrupt follower of the rhyming Latin of the medieval monks. Mr. Browning is Saxon, and not Latin, when he hunts the letter with clash and clatter like Holophernes, and ambles along with the artificial aid of alliteration. If he affects crabbed

and club-fisted words like Marston, it was just for this that the more classical taste of Ben Jonson made him so indignant with that poet. But all these things are probably connected with the retrospective attitude of the poet. As he draws his story and characters from old books, so he draws up whatever he can find in the well of old English, and transfers to his own pages whatever he finds most characteristic. This proceeding has been common to our poets, of all ages and of all calibres. They have all been news-gleaners from old archives, wise scribes

rents has provoked them to confess that she is not their child, and therefore not entitled to their fortune, she becomes the object of all his schemes of vengeance, which he conducts in so astute a manner as to throw the greatest doubt on his own guilt and her innocence. Like Lago, he is a man of logical and powerful mind, knowing the world, wary in observation, prophetic in political fore cast, looking quite through the deeds of men. This cold, satanic intellect, with the artificial heat organized out of gold and rank, Mr. Browning incarnates in a body almost like a tragic Hudibras-short, thickshouldered, hook-nosed, dark, with a bushy red beard, capable of enduring pain like a brute, but deficient in physical courage. The man is one whose language has a relation to his own interests, but not the slightest relation to truth, except at the last moment, when the terror of death compels him to invoke his murdered wife as a saint, and who, again like Iago, permits himself on all occasions the utmost license in talk. In

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