We cannot read the emotional passages of 'The Ring and the Book'
without hearing in them a voice which is not Mr.Browning's own:an echo,not of his past,but from it.The remembrance of that past must have accompanied him through every stage of the great work.
Its subject had come to him in the last days of his greatest happiness.
It had lived with him,though in the background of consciousness,through those of his keenest sorrow.It was his refuge in that aftertime,in which a subsiding grief often leaves a deeper sense of isolation.
He knew the joy with which his wife would have witnessed the diligent performance of this his self-imposed task.
The beautiful dedication contained in the first and last books was only a matter of course.But Mrs.Browning's spiritual presence on this occasion was more than a presiding memory of the heart.
I am convinced that it entered largely into the conception of 'Pompilia',and,so far as this depended on it,the character of the whole work.
In the outward course of her history,Mr.Browning proceeded strictly on the ground of fact.His dramatic conscience would not have allowed it otherwise.He had read the record of the case,as he has been heard to say,fully eight times over before converting it into the substance of his poem;and the form in which he finally cast it,was that which recommended itself to him as true --which,within certain limits,WAS true.The testimony of those who watched by Pompilia's death-bed is almost conclusive as to the absence of any criminal motive to her flight,or criminal circumstance connected with it.Its time proved itself to have been that of her impending,perhaps newly expected motherhood,and may have had some reference to this fact.But the real Pompilia was a simple child,who lived in bodily terror of her husband,and had made repeated efforts to escape from him.Unless my memory much deceives me,her physical condition plays no part in the historical defence of her flight.
If it appeared there at all,it was as a merely practical incentive to her striving to place herself in safety.The sudden rapturous sense of maternity which,in the poetic rendering of the case,becomes her impulse to self-protection,was beyond her age and her culture;it was not suggested by the facts;and,what is more striking,it was not a natural development of Mr.Browning's imagination concerning them.
The parental instinct was among the weakest in his nature --a fact which renders the more conspicuous his devotion to his own son;it finds little or no expression in his work.The apotheosis of motherhood which he puts forth through the aged priest in 'Ivan Ivanovitch'
was due to the poetic necessity of lifting a ghastly human punishment into the sphere of Divine retribution.Even in the advancing years which soften the father into the grandfather,the essential quality of early childhood was not that which appealed to him.He would admire its flower-like beauty,but not linger over it.He had no special emotion for its helplessness.When he was attracted by a child it was through the evidence of something not only distinct from,but opposed to this.'It is the soul'(I see)'in that speck of a body,'
he said,not many years ago,of a tiny boy --now too big for it to be desirable that I should mention his name,but whose mother,if she reads this,will know to whom I allude --who had delighted him by an act of intelligent grace which seemed beyond his years.
The ingenuously unbounded maternal pride,the almost luscious maternal sentiment,of Pompilia's dying moments can only associate themselves in our mind with Mrs.Browning's personal utterances,and some notable passages in 'Casa Guidi Windows'and 'Aurora Leigh'.
Even the exalted fervour of the invocation to Caponsacchi,its blending of spiritual ecstasy with half-realized earthly emotion,has,I think,no parallel in her husband's work.
'Pompilia'bears,still,unmistakably,the stamp of her author's genius.
Only he could have imagined her peculiar form of consciousness;her childlike,wondering,yet subtle,perception of the anomalies of life.
He has raised the woman in her from the typical to the individual by this distinguishing touch of his supreme originality;and thus infused into her character a haunting pathos which renders it to many readers the most exquisite in the whole range of his creations.
For others at the same time,it fails in the impressiveness because it lacks the reality which habitually marks them.
So much,however,is certain:Mr.Browning would never have accepted this 'murder story'as the subject of a poem,if he could not in some sense have made it poetical.It was only in an idealized Pompilia that the material for such a process could be found.We owe it,therefore,to the one departure from his usual mode of dramatic conception,that the Poet's masterpiece has been produced.I know no other instance of what can be even mistaken for reflected inspiration in the whole range of his work,the given passages in 'Pauline'excepted.
The post of a letter to Frederic Leighton written so far back as October 17,1864,is interesting in its connection with the preliminary stages of this great undertaking.
'A favour,if you have time for it.Go into the church St.Lorenzo in Lucina in the Corso --and look attentively at it --so as to describe it to me on your return.The general arrangement of the building,if with a nave --pillars or not --the number of altars,and any particularity there may be --over the High Altar is a famous Crucifixion by Guido.
It will be of great use to me.I don't care about the OUTSIDE.'
