ABSTRACT
That seems to us highly expressive even of the intellectual fashion in which Mr. Browning treats his subjects, tossing them in the air to catch them again, twirling them about by their crumpled outside surfaces, and generally displaying his sense of mastery, and the enjoyment which belongs to it, by acts not unfrequently something resembling caprice. Thus, the random, boyish, and almost freakish account of what Mr. Browning did with his intellectual prize when he had got it, seems to us as remarkable a piece of exuberance of intellectual spirits as ever an imaginative writer of the first order indulged in:—
[Quotes Book I, 11. 423-56.] Characteristic of Mr. Browning though they be, these extremely bad puns1 on
Manning’s, Newman’s, and Wiseman’s names do not seem to us fit elements for a prologue which is to introduce us to so great a theme, although boldly, freely, and buoyantly treated, as is usual with Mr. Browning. When overlooking the irregularities of style, the wilful caprices of the poet’s immense and inexhaustible intellectual animation, we come to speak of the power with which the subject is treated, it is almost impossible to speak too highly. Always remembering that Mr. Browning’s modes of thought never change as he passes from one point of sight
succession,—it is impossible to speak too highly of the power with which he paints one ‘facet’ after another of the tragedy he has taken for his theme. His own argument of what he is going to give us is itself, barring the puns and such oddities, as brilliant a picture in miniature of the social and moral conditions affecting the public view of such a crime as Count Guido Franceschini’s in 1698, as was ever drawn of the past. The sketch of the view taken by that half of Rome favourable to Count Guido’s pardon begins perhaps in a strain of thought somewhat too plebeian for the admirably intellectual characterizations in which the supposed speaker afterwards indulges. It seems to us, for instance, scarcely the same critic who was so eloquent about the fine effect presented by the bodies of the poor old murdered pair when laid out in the Church of San Lorenzo with a profusion of wax-lights all round them, and who afterwards gives us this description of the Canon Caponsacchi,—but whether it be or not, the description is not the less vivid:
[Quotes Book 11, 11. 780-95.] Or take the description in the same division of the poem of how Count
Guido’s passion was excited on hearing of the birth of an heir whom he had supposed (or rather is by the speaker supposed to have supposed) to be illegitimate, —how
[Quotes Book 11, 11. 1389-91.] Still more powerful is, we think, the third division of the poem, which gives the
popular form of the view favourable to the victims and against the murderer. It is again, of course, Mr. Browning who speaks behind the mask; but the mask is good, and the voice behind tells as carefully what the supposed speaker might have felt, as if it did not give it in Mr. Browning’s idiom. How fine is the sarcasm here:
Though really it does seem as if she here, Pompilia, living so and dying thus, Has had undue experience how much crime A heart can hatch. Why was she made to learn —Not you, not I, not even Molinos’ selfWhat Guido Franceschini’s heart could hold? Thus saintship is effected probably; No sparing saints the process!—which the more Tends to the reconciling us, no saints,
her household bars’, to destruction by chasing her ‘about the coop of daily life’; how grand and touching the picture of the battered mind of the old confessor who was so sure of Pompilia’s innocence!—
Even that poor old bit of battered brass Beaten out of all shape by the world’s sins, Common utensil of the lazar-houseConfessor Celestino groans,’ ‘Tis truth, All truth, and only truth: there’s something else, Some presence in the room beside us all, Something that every lie expires before: No question she was pure from first to last.’
