ABSTRACT
The first thought which the Ring and the Book arouses, we do not say in the reader of it, but in any one who surveys only the outside of the four volumes in which it is contained, will be that it is one of the longest of poems. And after reading, on deliberate reflection, few can avoid the conclusion that it is decidedly too long. It is a weariness to the flesh to read so many arguments pro and conso many varying shades of the same argument-on a critical case with so many ignoble elements in it, so little that is indisputably noble, as is that of Count Guido Franceschini. The subject is too slight for the mass of ability and thought that Mr. Browning has put into it; while this ability and thought have not in themselves been subjected long enough to the crucible; the pure golden ore is presented in crude entanglement with earth and common pebbles. The poem might have been a fifth part of the length, and have been improved by the omissions. Yet we are far from wishing to undervalue it. Like all that Mr. Browning writes, it bears the stamp of a rare sincerity; nothing in it is put forward to take the popular ear, nothing without the manifest search after truth, and the conviction that the sentiments put forward are needful to be known and weighed. A distinct moral purpose runs through the poem; not a moral, not an obtrusive excrescence, not anything that can be expressed in a few neatly compacted sentences at the end; but a course of deep meditation on human action and the problems of life. Few poets have been so able to deliver arguments and judgments without being didactic. And with all Mr. Browning’s carelessness of popularity, he feels deeply with the men of his own generation. A resolute keeping to the reality which he knows, a resolute abandonment of all the customary fictitious ornaments and appendages of poetry, everywhere mark his verse.
