"... Sordello, wake! God has conceded two sights to a man— One, of men's whole work, time's completed plan, The other, of the minute's work, man's first Step to the plan's completeness: what's dispersed Save hope of that supreme step which, descried Earliest, was meant still to remain untried Only to give you heart to take your own Step, and there stay—leaving the rest alone?" (vol. i. p. 217.)

The facts restate themselves, but from an opposite point of view. No man can give more than his single touch. The whole could not dispense with one of them. The work is infinite, but it is continuous. The later poet weaves into his own song the echoes of the first. "The last of each series of workmen sums up in himself all predecessors," whether he be the type of strength like Charlemagne, or of knowledge like Hildebrand. Strength comes first in the scheme of life; it is the joyousness of childhood. Step by step Strength works Knowledge with its groans and tears. And then, in its turn, Knowledge works Strength, Knowledge controls Strength, Knowledge supersedes Strength. It is Knowledge which must prevail now. May it not be he who at this moment resumes its whole inheritance—its accumulated opportunities, in himself? He could stand still and dream while he fancied he stood alone; but he knows now that he is part of humanity, and it of him. Goito is left behind; Ferrara is reached; he must do the one thing that is within his grasp.

He must influence Salinguerra. He must interest him in the cause of knowledge; which is the people's cause. With this determination, he proceeds once more to the appointed presence. His minstrelsy is at first a failure. He is, as usual, outside his song. He is trying to guide it; it is not carrying him away. He is paralysed by the very consciousness that he is urging the head of the Ghibellines to become a Guelph. Salinguerra's habitual tact and good-nature cannot conceal his own sense of the absurdity of the proposal. Sordello sees in

"a flash of bitter truth: So fantasies could break and fritter youth That he had long ago lost earnestness, Lost will to work, lost power to even express The need of working!" (vol. i. p. 228.)

But he will not be beaten. He tries once more. We see the blood leap to his brain, the heart into his purpose, as he challenges Salinguerra to bow before the royalty of song. He owns himself its unworthy representative: for he has frittered away his powers. He has identified himself with existing forms of being, instead of proving his kingship by a new spiritual birth—by a supreme, as yet unknown revelation of the power of human will. He has resigned his function. He is a self-deposed king. He acknowledges the man before him as fitter to help the world than he is. But this is shame enough. He will not see its now elected champion scorn the post he renounces on his behalf. And his art is still royal though he is not. It is the utterance of the spiritual life: of the informing thought—which was in the world before deeds began—which brought order out of chaos—which guided deeds in their due gradation till itself emerged as SONG: to react in deed; but to need no help of it; to be (so we complete the meaning) as the knowledge which controls strength, which supersedes strength.[20]

The walls of the presence-chamber have fallen away. Imaginary faces are crowding around him. He turns to these. He shows them human life as the poet's mirror reflects it: in its varied masquerade, in its mingled good and evil, in its steady advance; in the rainbow brightness of its obstructed lights; the deceptive gloom of its merely repeated shadows. He enforces in every tone that continuity of the plan of creation to which the poet alone holds the clue. Finally, in the name of the unlimited truth, the limited opportunity, the one duty which confronts him now, the People whose support, in his performance of it, he may claim for the first time, he forbids the Emperor's coming, and invokes Salinguerra's protection for the Guelph cause.

Salinguerra is moved at last, though not in the intended way. He does not yield to Sordello's enthusiasm, but he sees that it is worth employing. There is no question of his becoming a Guelph, but why should not Sordello turn Ghibelline? The cause requires a youth to "stalk, and bustle, and attitudinize;" and he clearly thinks this is all the youth before him wants to do, whether conscious of the fact or not. He thinks the thought aloud. "Palma loves her minstrel; it is written in her eyes; let her marry him. Were she Romano's son instead of his daughter, she could wear the Emperor's badge. Himself fate has doomed to a secondary position. To contend against it is useless." Before he knows what he has done, without really meaning to do it, he has thrown the badge across Sordello's neck, and thus created him Eccelino's successor.

It was a prophetic act. At the moment of its performance

"... each looked on each: Up in the midst a truth grew, without speech." (vol. i. p. 243.)

Palma's moment is come, and she relates the story, as she received it from Adelaide, of Sordello's birth. With blanched lips, and sweat-drops on his face, the old soldier takes the hand of his poet-son, and lays its consecrating touch on his own face and brow. Then, recovering himself, with his mailed arms on Sordello's shoulders, he launches forth in an eager survey of the situation as it may shape itself for both. Palma at last draws him away, and Sordello, exhausted and speechless, is left alone. The two are in a small stone chamber, below the one they have left. Half-drunk with his new emotions, Salinguerra paces the narrow floor. His eyes burn; his tread strikes sparks from the stone. The future glows before him. He and Sordello combined will break up Hildebrand. They will rebuild Charlemagne; not in the brute force of earlier days; but as strength adorned with knowledge, as empire imposing law. Palma listens in satisfied repose; her task is done.

A stamp is heard overhead.

BOOK THE SIXTH.

Sordello is alone—face to face with his memory, with his conscience, and, as we presently find out, with the greatest temptation he has ever known. The moon is slowly rising; and just so the light of truth is overflowing his past life, and laying bare its every recess. He sees no fault in this past, except the want of a uniform purpose in which its various moods could have coalesced, the all-embracing sense of existence been translated into fact; but he unconsciously confesses its selfishness, in deciding that this purpose should have been outside him—a remote and uplifting, though sympathetic influence, such as the moon is to the sea. Smaller lives than his have attained a higher completeness, because they have worked for an ideal: because they have had their moon.

"Where then is his moon? What the love, the fear, the motive, in short, that could match the strength, could sway the full tide, of a nature like his?" He doubts its existence. And if, after all, he has been destined to be a law to himself, must he not in some sense apply this relative standard to the rest of life; and may not the outward motive be at all times the embodiment of an inner want or law, which only the stronger nature can realize as such? He has found his purpose. That purpose is the people. "But the people is himself. The desire to help it comes from within. Will he fulfil this the better for regarding its suffering part as an outward motive, as something alien to himself, and for which Self must be forsaken?" In plain words: would he not serve it as well by serving his own interests as by forsaking them?

This sophistry is so patent that it startles even him; but it is only silenced to reassert itself in another form. "The Guelph rule would doubtless be the best. But what can he do to promote it? Attest his belief by refusing the Emperor's badge? That would be something in the end. But meanwhile, how many sympathies to be broken, how many aversions defied, before the one ideal can be made to prevail. Is not the proceeding too arbitrary? Would it be justified by the result? The question is only one of ideas. If the men who supported each opposite cause were wholly good or bad, his course would be clear. But such divisions do not exist. All men are composite. All nature is a blending of good and evil, in which the one is often but a different form of the other. Evil is in fact indispensable; for it is not only the ground of sympathy, but the active principle of life. Joy means the triumph over obstruction. The suspended effort is death, so far as it goes. Obstruction and effort must begin again and again. The sphere grows larger. It can never be more complete (more satisfying to those who are imprisoned within it). The only gain of existence is to be extracted from its hindrances, by each individual and for himself." The last plea for self-sacrifice is thus removed.

These arguments are often just, even profound; they might also have been sincere in this special case; for there was something to be said in favour of accepting the opportunities which offered themselves, and of guiding the course of events, instead of engaging in a probably fruitless opposition to it. But they are not sincere. Sordello is at best deceiving himself, and Mr. Browning intends us to to see this. He is struggling, if unconsciously, to evade the very trials which he thinks so good for other men. His true object soon stands revealed in a first and last effort at compromise. "The people's good is in the future. His is in the present. Can he not speed the one, and yet enjoy the other?" ... The present rises up, in its new-found richness, in its undisguised temptation. The joys which lure him become gigantic; the price of renunciation shrinks to nothing; and at last, the pent up passion breaks forth—that passion for life, for sheer life, which inspired his imagination as a boy, which nerved his ambition as a man; to which his late-found humanities have given voice and shape; which now gathers itself to a supreme utterance in the grasp of death. "The earthly existence now: the transcendent hereafter, if Fate will. A man's opportunities—a man's powers—a man's self-consciousness of joy and conflict—these things he craves while he may yet possess them."

Then a sudden revulsion. "He would drink the very dregs of life! How many have sacrificed it whilst its cup was full, because a better still seemed behind it."

"... the death I fly, revealed So oft a better life this life concealed, And which sage, champion, martyr, through each path Have hunted fearlessly—...." (vol. i. p. 272.)

"But they had a belief which he has not. They knew what 'masters life.' For him the paramount fact is that of his own being...."

This is the last protest of the flesh within him. Sordello is dying, and probably feels that he is so; and he lapses into a calm contemplation, which reveals to him the last secret of his mistaken career. He already knew that he had ignored the bodily to the detriment of his spiritual existence. He now feels that he has destroyed his body by forcing on it the exigencies of the spirit. He has striven to obtain infinite consciousness, infinite enjoyment, from finite powers. He has broken the law of life. He has missed (so we interpret Mr. Browning's conclusion) the ideal of that divine and human Love which would have given the freest range to his spirit and yet accepted that law. Eglamor began with love. Will Sordello find it, meeting that gentle spirit on his course?

We know at least that the soul in him has conquered. His stamp upon the floor has brought Palma and Salinguerra to him in anxious haste. They find him dead:

"Under his foot the badge: still, Palma said, A triumph lingering in the wide eyes, Wider than some spent swimmer's if he spies Help from above in his extreme despair,...." (vol. i. p. 279.)

Sordello is buried at Goito Castle, in an old font-tomb in which his mother lies, and beside whose sculptured female forms the child-poet had dreamed his earliest dreams of life and of love. Salinguerra makes peace with the Guelphs, marries a daughter of Eccelino the monk, and effaces himself once for all in the Romano house, leaving its sons Eccelino and Alberic to plague the world at their pleasure, and meet the fate they have deserved. He himself, after varied fortunes, dwindles into a "showy, turbulent soldier," less "astute" than people profess to think: whose qualities even foes admire; and whose aggressions they punish, but do not much resent. We see him for the last time at the age of eighty, a nominal prisoner in Venice.

The drama is played out. Its actors have vanished from the stage. One only lives on in Mr. Browning's fancy, in the pathos of his modest hopes, and acknowledged, yet scarcely comprehended failure—more human, and therefore more undying than Naddo himself: the poet Eglamor. Sordello he recalls only to dismiss him with less sympathy than we should expect: as ending the ambition for what he could not become, by the well-meant renunciation of what he was born to be; made a hero of by legends which credited him with doing what his conscience had forbidden him to do; leaving the world to suffer by his self-sacrifice; a type of failure more rare and more brilliant than that of Eglamor, yet more full of the irony of life.

In one sense, however, he had lived for a better thing, and we are bidden look back, through the feverish years, on a bare-footed rosy child running "higher and higher" up a wintry hillside still crisp with the morning frost,

"... singing all the while Some unintelligible words to beat The lark, God's poet, swooning at his feet, So worsted is he...." (vol. i. p. 288-9)

The poet in him had failed with the man, but less completely.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 8: The quoted passage is from the works of Cornelius Agrippa, a well-known professor of occult philosophy, and is indeed introductory to a treatise upon it. The writer is quite aware that his work may be scandalizing, hurtful, and even poisonous to narrow minds, but is sure that readers of a superior understanding will get no little good, and plenty of pleasure from it; and he concludes by claiming indulgence on the score of his youth, in case he should have given even the better judges any cause for offence. For those who read this preface with any previous knowledge of Mr. Browning's life and character, there will be an obvious inference to his own youthfulness in the exaggerated estimate thus implied of his imaginative sins; for the tendency of "Pauline" is both religious and moral; and no man has been more innocent than its author, from boyhood up, of tampering with any belief in the black art. His hatred for that "spiritualism," which is its modern equivalent, is indeed matter of history. But the trick he has here played himself may confuse the mind of those who only know him from his works, and for whom his vivid belief in the supernatural may point to a different kind of mysticism.]

[Footnote 9: Vol. i. of the new uniform edition of 1888-89. This will be the one always referred to.]

[Footnote 10: The "Andromeda," described as "with" the speaker at pages 29 and 30, is that of Polidoro di Caravaggio, of which Mr. Browning possesses an engraving, which was always before his eyes as he wrote his earlier poems. The original was painted on the wall of a garden attached to the Palazzo Bufalo—or del Bufalo—in Rome. The wall has been pulled down since Mr. Browning was last there.]

[Footnote 11: Aristotle.]

[Footnote 12: He rose to meet him from the place at which he stood, saying, "Oh Mantuan, I am Sordello of thy land!" and they embraced each other.]

[Footnote 13: The name of Naddo occurs in this book, and will often reappear in the course of the story. This personage is the typical Philistine—the Italian Brown, Jones, or Robinson—and will represent genuine common-sense, or mere popular judgment, as the case may be.]

[Footnote 14: Elys, the subject of this song, is any woman of the then prevailing type of Italian beauty: having fair hair, and a "pear-shaped" face.]

[Footnote 15: Bocafoli and Plara, mannerists: one of the sensuous school, the other of the pompously pure; imaginary personages, but to whom we may give real names.]

[Footnote 16: The belief in personal experience is very strong here.]

[Footnote 17: The third of these, vol. i. p. 168, is very characteristic of the state of Sordello's, and therefore, at that moment, of his author's mind. The poet who makes others see is he who deals with abstractions: who makes the mood do duty for the man.]

[Footnote 18: Walter Savage Landor.]

[Footnote 19: The word "Eyebright" at page 170 stands for Euphrasia its Greek equivalent, and refers to one of Mr. Browning's oldest friends.]

[Footnote 20: Here, as elsewhere, I give the spirit rather than the letter, or even the exact order of Sordello's words. The necessary condensation requires this.]



II.

NON-CLASSIFIED POEMS.

DRAMAS.

Our attention is next attracted to Mr. Browning's dramas; for his first tragedy, "Strafford," was published before "Sordello," having been written in an interval of its composition, and his first drama, "Pippa Passes," immediately afterwards. They were published, with the exception of "Strafford," and "In a Balcony," in the "Bells and Pomegranates" series, 1841-1846, together with the "Dramatic Lyrics," and "Dramatic Romances," which will be found distributed under various headings in the course of this volume.

The dramas are:—

"Strafford." 1837. "Pippa Passes." 1841. "King Victor and King Charles." 1842. "The Return of the Druses." 1843. "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon." 1843. "Colombe's Birthday." 1844. "A Soul's Tragedy." 1846. "Luria." 1846. "In a Balcony." (A Fragment.) 1853.

The five-act tragedy of "STRAFFORD" turns on the impeachment and condemnation of the man whose name it bears. Its keynote is Strafford's devotion to the King, which Mr. Browning has represented as the constant motive of his life, and also the cause of his death. When the action opens, England is without a Parliament. The question of ship-money is "burning." The Scotch Parliament has just been dissolved, and Charles is determined to subdue the Scots by force. Wentworth has been summoned from Ireland to assist in doing so. He is worn and weary, but the King needs him, and he comes.

He accepts the Scotch war against his better judgment: and next finds himself entrapped by the King's duplicity and selfishness, not only into the command of the expedition to Scotland, but into the appearance of having advised it. Pym has vainly tried to win him back to the popular cause. Lady Carlisle vainly warns him of his danger in subserving the King's designs. No danger can shake his allegiance. He leads the army to the north; is beaten; discovers that the popular party is in league with the Scotch; returns home to impeach it, and finds himself impeached. A Bill of Attainder is passed against him; and Charles, who might prove by one word his innocence of the charges conveyed in it, promises to do so, evades his promise, and finally signs the warrant for Strafford's death. Pym, who loved him best, who trusted him longest, is he who demands the signature.

Lady Carlisle forms a plan for Strafford's escape from the Tower; but it fails at the last moment, and we see him led away to execution. True to the end, he has no thought but for the master who has betrayed him—whose terrible weakness must betray himself—whose fate he sees foreshadowed in his own. He kneels to Pym for the King's life; and, seeing him inexorable, thanks God that he dies first. Pym's last speech is a tender farewell to the friend whom he has sacrificed to his country's cause, but whom he trusts soon to meet in the better land, where they will walk together as of old, all sin and all error purged away.

We are told in the preface to the first edition of Strafford that the portraits are, so the author thinks, faithful: his "Carlisle," only, being imaginary; and we may add that he regards his conception of her as, in the main, confirmed by a very recent historian of the reign of Charles I. The tragedy was performed in 1837, at Covent Garden Theatre, under the direction of Macready, by whose desire it had been written, and who sustained the principal part.

The appearance of "Strafford" coincides so closely with at least the conception of "Sordello" as to afford a strong proof of the variety of the author's genius. The evidence is still stronger in "Pippa Passes," in which he leaps directly from his most abstract mode of conception to his most picturesque; and, from the prolonged strain of a single inward experience, to a quick succession of pictures, in which life is given from a general and external point of view. The humour which found little place in the earlier work has abundant scope here; and the descriptive power which was so vividly apparent in all of them, here shows itself for the first time in those touches of local colour which paint without describing. Mr. Browning is now fully developed, on the artistic and on the practical side of his genius.

Mr. Browning was walking alone, in a wood near Dulwich, when the image flashed upon him of some one walking thus alone through life; one apparently too obscure to leave a trace of his or her passage, yet exercising a lasting though unconscious influence at every step of it; and the image shaped itself into the little silk-winder of Asolo, Felippa, or Pippa.

"PIPPA PASSES" represents the course of one day—Pippa's yearly holiday; and is divided into what is virtually four acts, being the occurrences of "Morning," "Noon," "Evening," and "Night." Pippa rises with the sun, determined to make the best of the bright hours before her; and she spends them in wandering through the town, singing as she goes, and all the while thinking of its happiest men and women, and fancying herself they. These happy ones are four, each the object of a different love. Ottima, whose aged husband is the owner of the silk mills, has a lover in Sebald. Phene, betrothed to the French sculptor Jules, will be led this morning to her husband's home. Luigi (a conspiring patriot) meets his mother at eve in the turret. The Bishop, blessed by God, will sleep at Asolo to-night. Which love would she choose? The lover's? It gives cause for scandal. The husband's? It may not last. The parent's? it alone will guard us to the end of life. God's love? That is best of all. It is Monsignore she decides to be.

Ottima and her lover have murdered her husband at his villa on the hillside. She is the more reckless of the two, and she is striving by the exercise of her attractions to silence Sebald's remorse. She has succeeded for the moment, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song strikes his conscience like a thunderbolt, and its reviving force awakens Ottima's also. Both are spiritually saved.

Jules has brought home his bride, and is discovering that some students who owed him a grudge have practised a cruel cheat upon him; and that the refined woman by whom he fancied himself loved is but an ignorant girl of the lowest class, of whom also his enemies have made a tool. Her remorse at seeing what man she has deceived disarms his anger, and marks the dawning of a moral sense in her; and he is dismissing her gently, with all the money he can spare, when Pippa passes—singing.[21] Something in her song awakens his truer manhood. Why should he dismiss his wife? Why cast away a soul which needs him, and which he himself has called into existence? He does not cast Phene away. Her salvation and his happiness are secured.

Luigi and his mother are in the turret on the hillside above Asolo. He believes it his mission to kill the Austrian Emperor. She entreats him to desist; and has nearly conquered his resolution by the mention of the girl he loves, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song revives his flagging patriotism. He rushes from the tower, thus escaping the police, who were on his track; and the virtuous, though mistaken motive, secures his liberty, and perhaps his life.

Monsignore and his "Intendant" are conferring in the palace by the Duomo; and the irony of the situation is now at its height. Pippa's fancy has been aspiring to three separate existences, which would each in its own way have been wrecked without her. The divinely-guarded one which she especially covets is at this moment bent on her destruction. For she is the child of the brother at whose death the Bishop has connived, and whose wealth he is enjoying. She is still in his way, and he is listening to a plan for removing her also, when Pippa passes—singing. Something in her song stings his conscience or his humanity to life. He starts up, summons his attendants, has his former accomplice bound hand and foot, and the sequel may be guessed.

The scene is varied by groups of students, of poor girls, and of Austrian policemen, all joking and chatting in characteristic fashion, and all playing their part in the story; and also by the appearance of Bluphocks, an English adventurer and spy, who is in league with the police for the detection of Luigi, and with the Intendant for Pippa's ruin; and the saving effect of Pippa's songs is the more dramatic that it becomes on one occasion the means of betraying herself. She goes home at sunset, unconscious of all she has effected and escaped, and wondering how near she may ever come to touching for good or evil the lives with which her fancy has been identifying her. "So far, perhaps," she says to herself, "that the silk she will wind to-morrow may some day serve to border Ottima's cloak. And if it be only this!"

"All service ranks the same with God— With God, whose puppets, best and worst, Are we: there is no last nor first." (vol. iii. p. 79.)

These are her last words as she lies down to sleep.

Pippa's songs are not impressive in themselves. They are made so in every case by the condition of her hearer's mind; and the idea of the story is obvious, besides being partly stated in the heroine's own words. No man is "great" or "small" in the sight of God—each life being in its own way the centre of creation. Nothing should be "great" or "small" in the sight of man; since it depends on personal feeling, or individual circumstance, whether a given thing will prove one or the other.

"KING VICTOR AND KING CHARLES" is an historical tragedy in two divisions and four parts, of which the time is 1730 and 31, and the place the castle of Rivoli near Turin. The episode which it records may be read in any chronicle of the period; and Mr. Browning adds a preface, in which he justifies his own view of the characters and motives involved in it. King Victor II. (first King of Sardinia) was sixty-four years old, and had been nominally a ruler from the age of ten, when suddenly (1730) he abdicated in favour of his son Charles. The Queen was dead, and he had privately married a lady of the Court, to whom he had been long attached; and the desire to acknowledge this union, combined with what seems to have been a premature old age, might sufficiently have explained the abdication; but Mr. Browning adopts the idea, which for a time found favour, that it had a deeper cause: that the King's intriguing ambition had involved him in many difficulties, and he had devised this plan for eluding them.

Charles has become his father's heir through the death of an older and better loved son. He has been thrust into the shade by the favourite, now Victor's wife, and by the Minister d'Ormea; his sensitive nature crushed into weakness, his loftiness of purpose never called into play. He seems precisely the person of whom to make at once a screen and a tool. But he has scarcely been crowned when it is evident that he will be neither. He assumes the character of king at the same time as the function; and by his honesty, courage, and humanity, restores the prosperity of his country, and the honour of his house. He secures even the devotion, interested though it be, of the unscrupulous d'Ormea himself.

Victor, however, is restless in his obscurity; and by the end of the year is scheming for the recovery of his crown. He presents himself before his son, and demands that it be restored to him; denouncing what he considers the weakness of King Charles' rule. Charles refuses, gently but firmly, to abandon what has become for him the post of duty; and King Victor departs, to conspire openly against him. D'Ormea is active in detecting the conspiracy and unveiling it; and Victor is brought back to the palace, this time a prisoner.

But Charles does not receive him as such. His filial piety is outraged by the unnatural conflict; and his wife Polixena has vainly tried to convince him that there is a higher because less obvious virtue in resisting than in giving way. He once more acknowledges his father as King. And both he and his wife are soon aware that in doing so, he is only humouring the caprice of a dying man. "I have no friend in the wide world is the old King's cry. Give me what I have no power to take from you."

"So few years give it quietly, My son! It will drop from me. See you not? A crown's unlike a sword to give away— That, let a strong hand to a weak hand give! But crowns should slip from palsied brows to heads Young as this head:...." (vol. iii. p. 162-3.)

Charles places the crown on his father's head. A strange conflict of gratified ambition, of remorseful tenderness, of dreamy regret, stirs the failing spirit. But command and defiance flash out in the old King's last words.

This death on the stage is the only point on which Mr. Browning diverges from historical truth. King Victor lived a year longer, in a modified captivity to which his son had most unwillingly consigned him; and he is made to suggest this story in the half-insanity of his last moments as one which may be told to the world; and will give his son the appearance of reigning, while he remains, in secret, King.

"THE RETURN OF THE DRUSES" is a tragedy in five acts, fictitious in plot, but historical in character. The Druses of Lebanon are a compound of several warlike Eastern tribes, owing their religious system to a caliph of Egypt, Hakeem Biamr Allah; and probably their name to his confessor Darazi, who first attempted to promulgate his doctrine among them; some also impute to the Druse nation a dash of the blood of the Crusaders. One of their chief religious doctrines was that of divine incarnations. It seems to have originated in the pretension of Hakeem to be himself one; and as organized by the Persian mystic Hamzi, his Vizier and disciple, it included ten manifestations of this kind, of which Hakeem must have formed the last. Mr. Browning has assumed that in any great national emergency, the miracle would be expected to recur; and he has here conceived an emergency sufficiently great to call it forth.

The Druses, according to him, have colonized a small island belonging to the Knights of Rhodes, and become subject to a Prefect appointed by the Order. This Prefect has almost extirpated the Druse sheikhs, and made the remainder of the tribe victims of his cruelty and lust. The cry for rescue and retribution, if not loud, is deep. It finds a passionate response in the soul of Djabal, a son of the last Emir, who escaped as a child from the massacre of his family, and took refuge in Europe; and who now returns, with a matured purpose of patriotic and personal revenge. He has secured an ally in the young Lois de Dreux—an intended Knight of the Order, and son of a Breton Count, whose hospitality he has enjoyed—and induced him to accompany him to the islet, and pass his probation there. This, he considers, will facilitate the murder of the Prefect, which is an essential part of his plan; and he has obtained the promise of the Venetians, who are hostile to the Knights, to lend their ships for his countrymen's escape as soon as the death of the tyrant shall have set them free.

So far his course is straight. But he has scarcely returned home, when he falls in love with Anael, a Druse girl, whose devotion to her tribe is a religion, and who is determined to marry none but the man who will deliver it; and he is then seized by an impulse to heighten the act of deliverance by a semblance of more than human power. He declares himself Hakeem, the Divine founder of the sect, again present in human form, and who will again be transformed, or "exalted," so soon as by the slaughter of their tyrant he has set the Druses free. His bride will be exalted with him. The imposture succeeds only too well. "Mystic" as well as "schemer," Djabal, for a moment, deceives even himself; and when the crisis is at hand, and reason and conscience reassert themselves, the enthusiasm which he has kindled still forces him on. His only refuge is in flight; and even this proves impossible. He nerves himself, before escaping, to the Prefect's murder; and is confronted on the threshold of the Prefect's chamber, by his promised wife, who has herself done the deed.

Anael has loved Djabal, believing him Divine, with what seemed to her too human a love. She felt unworthy to share his exaltation. She has done that which her humanity disclaimed that she might no longer be so. A few moments more, and they both know that the crime has been superfluous. Lois, who also loves Anael, and hopes to win her, has procured from the Chapter of his Order the removal of the tyrant, and been appointed by it in his place; the day of Druse oppression was already over. But Djabal and Anael are inseparably united. The scorn with which she received his now inevitable confession was intense but momentary. The woman's heart in her revels in its new freedom to cherish and to protect; and she embraces her lover's shame with a far greater joy than their common triumph could have aroused in her. She is brought forward as the Prefect's murderer in presence of all the personages of the drama; and falls dead with a cry of "Hakeem" on her lips. Djabal stabs himself on her body, thus "exalting" himself to her. But he has first committed his Druses to the care of Lois, to be led back to their mountain home. He remains Hakeem for them, though branded as an impostor by the rest of the world. Directly, or indirectly, he has done the work of the deliverer.

"A BLOT IN THE 'SCUTCHEON" is a tragedy in three acts, less intricate as well as shorter than those which precede it; and historical only in the simple motive, the uncompromising action, and the mediaeval code of honour, which in some degree fix its date. Mr. Browning places this somewhere in the eighteenth century.

Lord Henry Mertoun has fallen in love with Mildred Tresham. His estates adjoin those of Earl Tresham, her brother and guardian. He inherits a noble name, and an unsullied reputation; and need only offer himself to be accepted. But the youthful reverence which he entertains for Lord Tresham makes him shrink from preferring his suit; and he allows himself and Mildred to drift into a secret intimacy, which begins in all innocence, but does not end so. Then his shyness vanishes. He seeks an interview with the Earl, and obtains his joyful consent to the union. All seems to be going well. But Mildred's awakened womanhood takes the form of an overpowering remorse and shame; and these become the indirect cause of the catastrophe.

Gerard, an old retainer of the family, has witnessed Lord Mertoun's nightly visits to the castle; and, amidst a bitter conflict of feeling, he tells the Earl what he has seen. Tresham summons his sister. He is writhing under the sense of outraged family honour; but a still stronger fraternal affection commends the culprit to his mercy. He assists her confession with touching delicacy and tenderness; shows himself prepared to share her shame, to help her to live it through—to marry her to the man she loves. He insists only upon this, that Mertoun shall not be deceived: and that she shall cancel the promise of an interview which she has given him for the following day.

Mildred tacitly owns her guilt, and invokes any punishment her brother may adjudge to it; but she will not betray her lover by confessing his name, and she will not forbid Mertoun to come. The Earl's mind does not connect the two. No extenuating circumstance suggests itself. He has loved his young sister with a chivalrous admiration and trust; and he is one of those men to whom a blot in the 'scutcheon is only less terrible than the knowledge that such trust has been misplaced. He is stung to madness by what seems this crowning proof of his sister's depravity; and by the thought of him who has thus corrupted her. He surprises Mertoun on the way to the last stolen visit to his love; and, before there has been time for an explanation, challenges and kills him.

The reaction of feeling begins when he perceives that Mertoun has allowed himself to be killed. Remorse and sorrow deepen into despair as the dying youth gasps out the story of his constant love, of his boyish error—of his manly desire of reparation; above all, as he reminds his hearer of the sister whose happiness he has slain; and asks if he has done right to set his "thoughtless foot" upon them both, and say as they perish—

"... Had I thought, 'All had gone otherwise'...." (vol iv. p. 59.)

Mildred is waiting for her lover. The usual signal has been made: the lighted purple pane of a painted window sends forth its beckoning gleam. But Mertoun does not appear; and as the moments pass, a despairing apathy steals over her, which is only the completed certainty of her doom. She has never believed in the promised happiness. In a strange process of self-consciousness she has realized at once the moral and the natural consequences of her transgression; the lost peace of conscience, the lost morning of her love. Her paramount desire has been for expiation and rest. In one more pang they are coming. Lord Tresham breaks in on her solitude. His empty scabbard shows what he has done. But she soon sees that reproach is unnecessary, and that Mertoun's death is avenged. It is best so. The cloud has lifted. The friend and the brother are one in heart again. She dies because her own heart is broken, but forgiving her brother, and blessing him. He has taken poison, and survives her by a few minutes only.

Mildred has a firm friend in her cousin Gwendolen: a quick-witted, true-hearted woman, the betrothed of Austin Tresham, who is next heir to the earldom. She alone has guessed the true state of the case, and, with the help of Austin, would have averted the tragedy, if Lord Tresham's precipitate passion had not rendered this impossible. These two are in no need of their dying kinsman's warning, to remember, if a blot should again come in the 'scutcheon, that "vengeance is God's, not man's."

This tragedy was performed in 1843, at Drury Lane Theatre, during the ownership of Macready; in 1848, at "Sadlers Wells," under the direction of Mr. Phelps, who had played the part of Lord Tresham in the Drury Lane performance.

COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY is a play in five acts, of which the scene is the palace at Juliers, the time 16—. Colombe of Ravestein is ostensibly Duchess of Juliers and Cleves; but her title is neutralized by the Salic law under which the Duchy is held; and though the Duke, her late father, has wished to evade it in her behalf, those about her are aware that he had no power to do so, and that the legal claimant, her cousin, may at any moment assert his rights. This happens on the first anniversary of her accession, which is also her birthday.

Prince Berthold is to arrive in a few hours. He has sent a letter before him from which Colombe will learn her fate; and the handful of courtiers who have stayed to see the drama out are disputing as to who shall deliver it. Valence, an advocate of Cleves, arrives at this juncture, with a petition from his townspeople who are starving; and is allowed to place it in the Duchess's hands, on condition of presenting the Prince's letter at the same time. He does this in ignorance of its contents; he is very indignant when he knows them; and the incident naturally constitutes him Colombe's adviser and friend; while the reverence with which he owns himself her subject, also determines her if possible to remain his sovereign.

Prince Berthold arrives unprepared for any show of resistance; and is a little startled to find that Colombe defies him, and that one of her courtiers (not choosing to be outdone by Valence) has the courage to tell him so; but he treats the Duchess and her adviser with all the courtesy of a man whose right is secure; and Valence, to whom he entrusts his credentials, is soon convinced that it is so. But he has a far-sighted ambition which keeps him alive to all possible risks: and it occurs to him as wiser to secure the little sovereignty by marrying its heiress than by dispossessing her. He desires Valence to convey to the young Duchess the offer of his hand. The offer is worth considering, since as he asserts, it may mean the Empire: to which the Duchy is, in his case, but a necessary stepping-stone; and Valence, who has loved Colombe since his first glimpse of her at Cleves, a year ago; who has begun to hope that his affection is returned; and who knows that the Prince's message is not only a test of her higher nature, but a snare to it, feels nevertheless bound to leave her choice free. This choice lies clearly between love and power; for Berthold parades a cynicism half affected, half real; and on being questioned as to his feeling for the lady, has dismissed the question as irrelevant.

Valence is, throughout the play, an advocate in the best sense of the word. As he has pleaded the wrongs of an oppressed people, he sets forth the happiness of a successful prince—the happiness which the young Duchess is invited to share; and he departs from all the conventionalities of fiction, by showing her the true poetry, not the artificial splendours, of worldly success. Colombe is almost as grateful as the young Prince could desire, for she assumes that he has fallen in love with her, whether he says so or not; and here, too, Valence must speak the truth. "The Prince does not love her." "How does he know this?" "He knows it by the insight of one who does love." Astonished, vaguely pained, Colombe questions him as to the object of his attachment, and, in probably real ignorance of who it can be, draws him on to a confession. For a moment she is disenchanted. "So much unselfish devotion to turn out merely love! She will at all events see Valence's rival."

In the last act she discusses the Prince's proposal with himself. He frankly rests it on its advantages for both. He has much to say in favour of such an understanding, and reminds his listener as she questions and temporizes, that if he gives no heart he also asks none. The courtiers now see their opportunity. They inform the Prince that by her late father's will the Duchess forfeits her rights in the event of marrying a subject. They point to such a marriage as a natural result of the loving service which Valence has this day rendered to her, and the love which is its only fitting reward. And Colombe, listening to the just if treacherous praises of this man, feels no longer "sure" that she does "not love him." Valence is summoned; requested to assert his claim or to deny it; given to understand that the lady's interests demand the latter course. The manly dignity and exalted tenderness with which he resigns her convert, as it seems, the doubt into certainty; and Colombe takes him on this her birthday at the sacrifice of "Juliers and the world."

Berthold has a confidant, Melchior, a learned and thoughtful man, who is affectionately attached to the young prince, and who views with regret the easy worldly successes which neutralize his higher gifts. Melchior has also appreciated the genuineness of Colombe's nature, and conducted the last interview with Valence as one who desired that loyalty should be attested and love triumph. He now turns to Berthold with what seems an appeal to his generosity. But Berthold cannot afford to be generous. As he reminds the happy bride before him he wants her duchy much more than she does. He is, however, the sadder, and perhaps the wiser, for having found this out.

"Colombe's Birthday" was performed in 1853, at the Haymarket Theatre; in 1853 or '54, in the United States, at Boston. The part of Colombe was taken, as had been those of Mildred Tresham and Lady Carlisle, by Miss Helen Faucit, now Lady Martin.

"A SOUL'S TRAGEDY" brings us near to the period of the "Men and Women;" and displays, for the first time in Mr. Browning's work, a situation quite dramatic in itself, but which is nevertheless made by the characters, and imagined for them. It is a story of moral retrogression; but, setting aside its very humorous treatment, it is no "tragedy" for the reader, because he has never believed in that particular "soul," though its proprietor and his friends are justly supposed to do so. The drama is divided into two acts, of which the first represents the "poetry," the second the prose, of a certain Chiappino's life. The scene is Faenza; the time 15—.

Chiappino is best understood by comparison with Luitolfo, his fellow-townsman and friend. Luitolfo has a gentle, genial nature; Chiappino, if we may judge him by his mood at the time of the action, an ill-conditioned one. Luitolfo's gentleness is allied to physical timidity, but his moral courage is always equal to the occasion. Chiappino is a man more of words than of deeds, and wants both the courage and the rectitude which ill-conditioned people often possess. Faenza is governed by a provost from Ravenna. The present provost is a tyrant; and Chiappino has been agitating in a somewhat purposeless manner against him. He has been fined for this several times, and is now sentenced to exile, and confiscation of all his goods.

Luitolfo has helped him until now by paying his fines; but this is an additional grievance to him, for he is in love with Eulalia, the woman whom his friend is going to marry, and declares that he has only refrained from urging his own suit, because he was bound by this pecuniary obligation not to do so. He is not too delicate, however, to depreciate Luitolfo's generosity, and generally run him down with the woman who is to be his wife; and this is what he is doing in the first scene, under cover of taking leave of her, and while her intended husband is interceding with the provost in his behalf. A hurried knock, which they recognise as Luitolfo's, gives a fresh impulse to his spite; and he begins sneering at the milk-and-watery manner in which Luitolfo has probably been pleading his cause, and the awful fright in which he has run home, on seeing that the provost "shrugged his shoulders" at the intercession.

Luitolfo is frightened, for his friendship for Chiappino has been carrying him away; and on finding that entreaties were of no use, he has struck at the provost, and, as he thinks, killed him. A crowd which he imagines to be composed of the Provost's attendants has followed him from the palace. Torture stares him in the face; and his physical sensitiveness has the upper hand again. For a moment Chiappino becomes a hero; he is shamed into nobleness. He flings his own cloak over Luitolfo, gives him his passport, hurries him from the house, assumes his friend's blood-stained garment, and claims his deed. But he has scarcely done so when he perceives their mistake. Luitolfo's fears have distorted a friendly crowd into a hostile one; and the throng which Chiappino has nerved himself to defy is the populace of Faenza applauding him as its saviour. He postpones the duty of undeceiving it under pretence of the danger being not yet over. The next step will be to refuse to do so. His moral collapse, the "tragedy" of his "soul," has begun.

In the second act, a month later, this is complete. The papal legate, Ogniben, has ridden on his mule in to Faenza to find out what was wanted. "He has not come to punish; there is no harm done: for the provost was not killed after all. He has known twenty-three leaders of revolts," and therefore, so we understand, is not disposed to take such persons too seriously. He has made friends with Chiappino, accepting him in this character, and lured him on with the hope of becoming provost himself; and Chiappino again rising—or falling—to the situation, has discovered patriotic reasons for accepting the post. He has outgrown his love, as well as modified his ideas of civic duty; and he disposes of the obligations of friendship, by declaring (to Eulalia) that the blow imputed to him was virtually his, because Luitolfo would fain have avoided striking it, while he would have struck it if he could. The legate draws him out in a humorous dialogue; satirizes his flimsy sophistries under cover of endorsing them, and leads him up to a final self-exposure.

This occurs when he reminds Chiappino in the hearing of the crowd of the private agreement they have come to: that he is to have the title and privileges of Provost on the one hand, and pay implicit obedience to Rome, in the person of her legate, on the other; but with the now added condition, that if the actual assailant of the late provost is discovered, he shall be dealt with as he deserves. At which new view of the situation Chiappino is silent; and Luitolfo, who had missed all the reward of his deed, characteristically comes forward to receive its punishment. The legate orders him to his own house; advises Chiappino, with a little more joking at his expense, to leave the town for a short time; takes possession of the key of the provost's palace, to which he does not intend to give a new inmate; bids a cheery goodbye to every one, and rides away as he came. He has

"known four and twenty leaders of revolts." (vol. iii. p. 302.)

The tragedy of "LURIA" is supposed to be enacted at some period of the fifteenth century; being an episode in the historical struggle between Florence and Pisa. It occupies one day; and the five acts correspond respectively to its "Morning," "Noon," "Afternoon," "Evening," and "Night." The day is that of a long-expected encounter which is to end the war. The Florentine troops are commanded by the Moorish mercenary Luria. He is encamped between the two cities; and with, or near him, are his Moorish friend and confidant Husain; Puccio—the officer whom he has superseded; Braccio—Commissary of the Republic; his secretary Jacopo, or Lapo; and a noble Florentine lady, Domizia.

Luria is a consummate general, a brave fighter, and a humane man. Every soldier of the army is devoted to him, and the triumph of the Republic seems secured. But the men who trust him to win the victory cannot trust him not to misuse it. They are afraid that his strength will be turned against themselves so soon as it has disposed of their foreign foe: and Braccio is on the spot, in order to watch his movements, to register every deed that can give the slightest hold for an accusation—in short, to supply the Signoria with the materials for a trial, which is proceeding step by step with Luria's successful campaign, and is to crush him the moment this is completed. Everyone but Husain is more or less his enemy. For Lapo is almost blindly devoted to his chief. Puccio is jealous of the stranger for whom he has been set aside. Domizia is making him an instrument of revenge. Her brothers have been faithful as he is, and condemned as he is to be. They accepted their sentence because it was the mother-city who passed it. She encourages Luria to encounter the same ingratitude, because she believes he will resist and punish it.

He is not unwarned of his danger. The Pisan general, Tiburzio, has discovered the conspiracy against him, and brings him, shortly before the battle, an intercepted letter from Braccio to the Signoria, in which he is convinced that he may read his fate. He urges him to open it; to desert the perfidious city, and to adopt Pisa's cause. But Luria's loyalty is unshaken. He tears up the letter in the presence of Braccio, Puccio, and Domizia: and only when the battle has been fought and won demands the secret of its contents. At the word "trial" he is carried away by a momentary indignation; but this subsides into a tender regret that "his Florentines" should have so misjudged him; that he should have given them cause to do it. He has laboured for their city, not only with the obedience of a son, but with the devotion of a lover. His Eastern fancy has been enslaved by her art, her intellect: by the life of educated thought which so far removed her from the blind unrest, and the animal strength of his savage world; Domizia's attractions have added to the spell. He has never guarded his love for Florence against doubt, for he never dreamed that it could be doubted. He cannot find it in his heart to chastise her now.

Temptation besets him on every side; for the armies of both Florence and Pisa are at his command. Husain and Domizia urge him on to revenge. Tiburzio entreats him to give to Pisa the head with which Florence will only decorate a gateway. Him he thanks and dismisses. To the others he prepares his answer. Alone for the last time; with eyes fixed on the setting sun—his "own orb" so much nearer to him in his Eastern home, and which will shine for him there no more—he drains a phial of poison: the one thing he has brought from his own land to help him in the possible adversity. Death was to be his refuge in defeat. He will die on his triumph-day instead.

They all gather round him once more: Puccio grateful and devoted; for he has seen that though discredited by Florence, Luria was still working for her success—Tiburzio, who returns from Florence, where he has tendered his submission to Luria's arms, and borne his heartfelt testimony to Luria's honour—Domizia, who has learned from Luria that there are nobler things than retaliation: and now entreats him to forego his vengeance against her city, as she foregoes her own—Braccio, repentant for the wrong done, and beseeching that Luria will not "punish Florence." But they cannot avert the one punishment which that gentle spirit could inflict. He lies dead before them.

"IN A BALCONY" is a dramatic fragment, equivalent to the third or fourth act, of what might prove a tragedy or a drama, as the author designed. The personages are "Norbert" and "Constance," a young man and woman; and the "Queen," a woman of a certain age. Constance is a relation and protegee of the Queen—as we imagine, a poor one. She is loved by Norbert; and he has entered the Queen's service, for the opportunity of wooing and winning her. His diplomatic exertions have been strenuous. They have secured to his royal mistress the possession of a double crown. The "Balcony" echoes with the sound of festivities which are intended to mark the event.

Constance returns Norbert's affection. He thinks the moment come for pleading his and her cause with their sovereign. But Constance entreats him to temporize: either to defer the proposal for her hand, or to make it in so indirect a manner, that the Queen may only see in it a tribute to herself. He has allowed her to think that he served her for her own sake; she must not be undeceived too roughly. Her heart has starved amidst the show of devotion: its hunger must not be roused by the touch of a living love in which she has no part. A shock of this kind would be painful to her—dangerous to themselves.

Norbert is an honest man, possessed of all the courage of his love: and he finds it hard to believe that the straightforward course would not be the best; but he yields to the dictates of feminine wisdom; and having consented to play a part, plays it with fatal success. The Queen is a more unselfish woman than her young cousin suspects. She has guessed Norbert's love for Constance, and is prepared to sanction it; but her own nature is still only too capable of responding to the faintest touch of affection: and at the seeming declaration that that love is her's, her joy carries all before it. She is married; but as she declares she will dissolve her marriage, merely formal as it has always been; she will cast convention to the winds, and become Norbert's wife. She opens her heart to Constance; tells her how she has yearned for love, and how she will repay it. Constance knows, as she never knew, what a mystery of pain and passion has been that outwardly frozen life; and in a sudden impulse of pity and compunction, she determines that if possible its new happiness shall be permanent—its delusions converted into truth.

She meets Norbert again; makes him talk of his future; discovers that he only dreams of it as bound up with the political career he has already entered upon; and though she sees that every vision of this future begins and ends in her, she sees, as justly, that its making or marring is in the Queen's hands. Here is a second motive for self-sacrifice. Norbert has no suspicion of what he has done. The Queen appears before Constance has had time to inform him of it; and the latter has now no choice but to let him learn it from the Queen's own lips. She draws her on, accordingly, under plea of Norbert's diffidence, to speak of what she believes him to have asked of her, and what she knows to be already granted. She tries to prompt his reply.

But Norbert will not be prompted. He is slow to understand what is expected of him, very indignant when he does so; and in terror lest he should still be misunderstood—in unconsciousness of the torture he is inflicting—he asserts and re-asserts his respect for the one woman, his absorbing passion for the other. The Queen goes out. Her looks and silence have been ominous. The shadow of a great dread falls upon the scene. The dance-music stops. Heavy footsteps are heard approaching. Norbert and Constance stand awaiting their doom. But they are united as they have never yet been, and they can defy it; for her love has shown itself as capable of all sacrifice—his as above temptation.

Various theories have been formed as to the kind of woman Mr. Browning meant Constance to be; but a careful and unbiassed reading of the poem can leave no doubt on the subject. He has given her, not the courage of an exclusively moral nature, but all the self-denial of a devoted one, growing with the demands which are made upon it. How single-hearted is her attempt to sacrifice Norbert's love, is sufficiently shown by one sentence, addressed to him after his interview with the Queen:

"You were mine. Now I give myself to you." (vol. vii. p. 28.)

"THE RING AND THE BOOK." 1868-69.

From the dramas, we pass naturally to the dramatic monologues; poems embodying a lengthened argument or soliloquy, and to which there is already an approach in the tragedies themselves. The dramatic monologue repeats itself in the finest poems of the "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Personae;" and Mr. Browning's constructive power thus remains, as it were, diffused, till it culminates again in "The Ring and the Book:" at once his greatest constructive achievement, and the triumph of the monologue form. From this time onwards, the monologue will be his prevailing mode of expression, but each will often form an independent work. "The Ring and the Book" is thus our next object of interest.

Mr. Browning was strolling one day through a square in Florence, the Piazza San Lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish of one of the stalls. It was the record of a murder which had taken place in Rome, and bore inside it an inscription which Mr. Browning thus transcribes:—

"... A Roman murder-case: Position of the entire criminal cause Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman, With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay, Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death By heading or hanging as befitted ranks, At Rome on February Twenty-Two, Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety-Eight: Wherein it is disputed if, and when, Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape The customary forfeit." (vol. viii. p. 6.)

The book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days: pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer; and the "instrument of the Definitive Sentence" which established the perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having been collected and bound together by some person interested in the trial, possibly the very Cencini, friend of the Franceschini family, to whom the manuscript letters are addressed. Mr. Browning bought the whole for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what appeared four years later as "The Ring and the Book."

This name is explained as follows:—The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It was too hard. It was "pure crude fact," secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or—as he also calls it—of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.

All this was not effected at once. The separate scenes of the Franceschini tragedy sprang to life in Mr. Browning's imagination within a few hours of his reading the book. He saw them re-enacted from his terrace at Casa Guidi on a sultry summer night—every place and person projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky—but his mind did not yet weave them into a whole. The drama lay by him and in him till the unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in London, he felt what he thus describes:—

"A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb, And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair, Letting me have my will again with these...." (vol. viii. p. 32.)

and "The Ring and the Book" was born. All this is told in an introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here also Mr. Browning reviews those broad facts of the Franceschini case which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the crude metal of his ring. He has worked into this almost every incident which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement. But the fragmentary view of its contents, which I am reduced to giving, can only be held together by a previous outline of the story.

There lived in Rome in 1679 Pietro and Violante Comparini, an elderly couple of the middle class, fond of show and good living, and who in spite of a fair income had run considerably into debt. They were, indeed at the period in question, in receipt of a papal bounty, employed in the relief of the needy who did not like to beg. Creditors were pressing, and only one expedient suggested itself: they must have a child; and thus enable themselves to draw on their capital, now tied up for the benefit of an unknown heir-at-law. The wife conceived this plan, and also carried it out, without taking her husband into her confidence. She secured beforehand the infant of a poor and not very reputable woman, announced her expectation, half miraculous at her past fifty years, and became, to all appearance, the mother of a girl, the Francesca Pompilia of the story.

When Pompilia had reached the age of thirteen, there was also in Rome Count Guido Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman of Arezzo, and the elder of three brothers, of whom the second, Abate Paolo, and the third, Canon Girolamo also play some part in the story. Count Guido himself belonged to the minor ranks of the priesthood, and had spent his best years in seeking preferment in it. Preferment had not come, and the only means of building up the family fortunes in his own person, was now a moneyed wife. He was poor, fifty years old, and personally unattractive. A contemporary chronicle describes him as short, thin, and pale, and with a projecting nose. He had nothing to offer but his rank; but in the case of a very obscure heiress, this might suffice, and such a one seemed to present herself in Pompilia Comparini. He heard of her at the local centre of gossip, the barber's shop; received an exaggerated estimate of her dowry; and made proposals for her hand; being supported in his suit by the Abate Paul. They did not, on their side, understate the advantages of the connection. They are, indeed, said to have given as their yearly income, a sum exceeding their capital, and Violante was soon dazzled into consenting to it. Old Pietro was more wary. He made inquiries as to the state of the Count's fortune, and declined, under plea of his daughter's extreme youth, to think of him as a son-in-law.

Violante pretended submission, secretly led Pompilia to a church, the very church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, where four years later the murdered bodies of all three were to be displayed, and brought her back as Count Guido's wife. Pietro could only accept the accomplished fact; and he so far resigned himself to it, that he paid down an instalment of his daughter's dowry, and made up the deficiency by transferring to the newly-married couple all that he actually possessed. This left him no choice but to live under their roof, and the four removed together to the Franceschini abode at Arezzo. The arrangement proved disastrous; and at the end of a few months Pietro and Violante were glad to return to Rome, though with empty pockets, and on money lent them for the journey by their son-in-law.

We have conflicting testimony as to the cause of this rupture. The Governor of Arezzo, writing to the Abate Paul in Rome, lays all the blame of it on the Comparini, whom he taxes with vulgar and aggressive behaviour; and Mr. Browning readily admits that at the beginning there may have been faults on their side. But popular judgment, as well as the balance of evidence, were in favour of the opposite view; and curious details are given by Pompilia and by a servant of the family, a sworn witness on Pompilia's trial, of the petty cruelties and privations to which both parents and child were subjected.

So much, at all events, was clear; Violante's sin had overtaken her; and it now occurred to her, apparently for the first time, to cast off its burden by confession. The moment was propitious, for the Pope had proclaimed a jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution was to be had for the asking. But the Church in this case made conditions. Absolution must be preceded by atonement. Violante must restore to her legal heirs that of which her pretended motherhood had defrauded them. The first step towards this was to reveal the fraud to her husband; and Pietro lost no time in making use of the revelation. He repudiated Pompilia, and with her all claims on her husband's part. The case was carried into court. The Court decreed a compromise. Pietro appealed from the decree, and the question remained unsettled.

The chief sufferer by these proceedings was Pompilia herself. She already had reason to dread her husband as a tyrant—he to dislike her as a victim; and his discovery of her base birth, with the threatened loss of the greater part of her dowry, could only result, with such a man, in increased aversion towards her. From this moment his one aim seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but in such a manner as not to forfeit any pecuniary advantage he might still derive from their union. This could only be done by convicting her of infielity; and he attacked her so furiously, and so persistently, on the subject of a certain Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi, whom she barely knew, but whose attentions he declared her to have challenged, that at last she fled from Arezzo, with this very man.

She had appealed for protection against her husband's violence to the Archbishop and to the Governor. She had striven to enlist the aid of his brother-in-law, Conti. She had implored a priest in confession to write for her to her parents, and induce them to fetch her away. But the whole town was in the interest of the Franceschini, or in dread of them. Her prayers were useless, and Caponsacchi, whom she had heard of as a "resolute man," appeared her last resource. He was, as she knew, contemplating a journey to Rome; an opportunity presented itself for speaking to him from her window, or her balcony; and she persuaded him, though not without difficulty, to assist her escape, and conduct her to her old home. On a given night she slipped away from her husband's side, and joined the Canon where he awaited her with a carriage. They travelled day and night till they reached Castelnuovo, a village within four hours of the journey's end. There they were compelled to rest, and there also the husband overtook them. They were not together at the moment; but the fact of the elopement was patent; and if Franceschini had killed his wife there, in the supposed excitement of the discovery, the law might have dealt leniently with him. But it suited him best for the time being to let her live. He procured the arrest of the fugitives, and after a short confinement on the spot, they were conveyed to the New Prisons in Rome (Carceri Nuove) and tried on the charge of adultery.

It is impossible not to believe that Count Guido had been working towards this end. Pompilia's verbal communications with Caponsacchi had been supplemented by letters, now brought to him in her name, now thrown or let down from her window as he passed the house. They were written, as he said, on the subject of the flight, and as he also said, he burned them as soon as read, not doubting their authenticity. But Pompilia declared, on examination, that she could neither write nor read; and setting aside all presumption of her veracity, this was more than probable. The writer of the letters must therefore, have been the Count, or some one employed by him for the purpose. He now completed the intrigue by producing eighteen or twenty more of a very incriminating character, which he declared to have been left by the prisoners at Castelnuovo; and these were not only disclaimed with every appearance of sincerity by both the persons accused, but bore the marks of forgery within themselves.

Pompilia and Caponsacchi answered all the questions addressed to them simply and firmly; and though their statements did not always coincide, these were calculated on the whole to create a moral conviction of their innocence; the facts on which they disagreed being of little weight. But moral conviction was not legal proof; the question of false testimony does not seem to have been even raised; and the Court found itself in a dilemma, which it acknowledged in the following way: it was decreed that for his complicity in "the flight and deviation of Francesca Comparini," and too great intimacy with her, Caponsacchi should be banished for three years to Civita Vecchia; and that Pompilia, on her side, should be relegated, for the time being, to a convent. That is to say: the prisoners were pronounced guilty; and a merely nominal punishment was inflicted upon them.

The records of this trial contain almost everything of biographical or even dramatic interest in the original book. They are, so far as they go, the complete history of the case; and the result of the trial, ambiguous as it was, supplied the only argument on which an even formal defence of the subsequent murder could be based. The substance of these records appears in full in Mr. Browning's work; and his readers can judge for themselves whether the letters which were intended to substantiate Pompilia's guilt, could, even if she had possessed the power of writing, have been written by a woman so young and so uncultured as herself. They will also see that the Count's plot against his wife was still more deeply laid than the above-mentioned circumstances attest.

Count Guido was of course not satisfied. He wanted a divorce; and he continued to sue for it by means of his brother, the Abate Paul, then residing in Rome; but before long he received news which was destined to change his plans. Pompilia was about to become a mother; and in consideration of her state, she had been removed from the convent to her paternal home, where she was still to be ostensibly a prisoner. The Comparini then occupied a small villa outside one of the city gates. A few months later, in this secluded spot, the Countess Franceschini gave birth to a son, whom her parents lost no time in conveying to a place of concealment and safety. The murder took place a fortnight after this event. I give the rest of the story in an almost literal translation from a contemporary narrative, which was published, immediately after the Count's execution, in the form of a pamphlet[22]—the then current substitute for a newspaper.

"Being oppressed by various feelings, and stimulated to revenge, now by honour, now by self-interest, yielding to his wicked thoughts, he (Count Guido) devised a plan for killing his wife and her nominal parents; and having enlisted in his enterprise four other ruffians,"—labourers on his property, "started with them from Arezzo, and on Christmas-eve arrived in Rome, and took up his abode at Ponte Milvio, where there was a villa belonging to his brother, and where he concealed himself with his followers till the fitting moment for the execution of his design had arrived. Having therefore watched from thence all the movements of the Comparini family, he proceeded on Thursday, the 2nd of January, at one o'clock of the night,[23] with his companions to the Comparini's house; and having left Biagio Agostinelli and Domenico Gambasini at the gate, he instructed one of the others to knock at the house-door, which was opened to him on his declaring that he brought a letter from Canon Caponsacchi at Civita Vecchia. The wicked Franceschini, supported by two other of his assassins, instantly threw himself on Violante Comparini, who had opened the door, and flung her dead upon the ground. Pompilia, in this extremity, extinguished the light, thinking thus to elude her assassins, and made for the door of a neighbouring blacksmith, crying for help. Seeing Franceschini provided with a lantern, she ran and hid herself under the bed, but being dragged from under it, the unhappy woman was barbarously put to death by twenty-two wounds from the hand of her husband, who, not content with this, dragged her to the feet of Comparini, who, being similarly wounded by another of the assassins, was crying, 'confession.'"

"At the noise of this horrible massacre people rushed to the spot; but the villains succeeded in flying, leaving behind, however, in their haste, one his cloak, and Franceschini his cap, which was the means of betraying them. The unfortunate Francesca Pompilia, in spite of all the wounds with which she had been mangled, having implored of the Holy Virgin the grace of being allowed to confess, obtained it, since she was able to survive for a short time and describe the horrible attack. She also related that after the deed, her husband asked the assassin who had helped him to murder her if she were really dead; and being assured that she was, quickly rejoined, let us lose no time, but return to the vineyard;[24] and so they escaped. Meanwhile the police (Forza) having been called, it arrived with its chief officer (Bargello), and a confessor was soon procured, together with a surgeon, who devoted himself to the treatment of the unfortunate girl."

"Monsignore, the Governor, being informed of the event, immediately despatched Captain Patrizj to arrest the culprits; but on reaching the vineyard the police officers discovered that they were no longer there, but had gone towards the high road an hour before. Patrizj pursued his journey without rest, and having arrived at the inn, was told by the landlord that Franceschini had insisted upon obtaining horses, which were refused to him because he was not supplied with the necessary order; and had proceeded therefore on foot with his companions towards Baccano. Continuing his march, and taking the necessary precautions, he arrived at the Merluzza inn, and there discovered the assassins, who were speedily arrested; their knives still stained with blood, a hundred and fifty scudi in coin being also found on Franceschini's person. The arrest, however, cost Patrizj his life, for he had heated himself too much, and having received a slight wound, died in a few days."

"The knife of Franceschini was on the Genoese pattern, and triangular; and was notched at the edge, so that it could not be withdrawn from the wounded flesh without lacerating it in such a manner as to render the wound incurable."

"The criminals being taken to Ponte Milvio, they went through a first examination at the inn there at the hands of the notaries and judges sent thither for the purpose, and the chief points of a confession were obtained from them."

"When the capture of the delinquents was known in Rome, a multitude of the people hastened to see them as they were conveyed bound on horses into the city. It is related that Franceschini having asked one of the police officers in the course of the journey how ever the crime had been discovered, and being told that it had been revealed by his wife, whom they had found still living, was almost stupefied by the intelligence. Towards twenty-three o'clock (the last hour before sunset) they arrived at the prisons. A certain Francesco Pasquini, of Citta di Castello, and Allessandro Baldeschi, of the same town, both twenty-two years of age, were the assistants of Guido Franceschini in the murder of the Comparini; and Gambasini and Agostinelli were those who stood on guard at the gate."

"Meanwhile the corpses of the assassinated Comparini were exposed at San Lorenzo, in Lucina, but so disfigured, and especially Franceschini's wife, by their wounds in the face, that they were no longer recognizable. The unhappy Francesca, after taking the sacrament, forgiving her murderers, under seventeen years of age, and after having made her will, died on the sixth day of the month, which was that of the Epiphany; and was able to clear herself of all the calumnies which her husband had brought against her. The surprise of the people in seeing these corpses was great, from the atrocity of the deed, which made one really shudder, seeing two septuagenarians and a girl of seventeen so miserably put to death."

"The trial proceeding meanwhile, many papers were drawn up on the subject, bringing forward all the most incriminating circumstances of this horrible massacre; and others also were written for the defence with much erudition, especially by the advocate of the poor, a certain Monsignor Spreti, which had the effect of postponing the sentence; also because Baldeschi persisted in denial, though he was tortured with the rope, and twice fainted under it. At last he confessed, and so did the others, who also revealed the fact that they had intended in due time to murder Franceschini himself, and take his money, because he had not kept his promise of paying them the moment they should have left Rome."

"On the twenty-second of February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At eight o'clock Franceschini and his companions were summoned to their death, and having been placed in the Consorteria, and there assisted by the Abate Panciatici and the Cardinal Acciajuoli, forthwith disposed themselves to die well. At twenty o'clock the Company of Death and the Misericordia reached the dungeons, and the condemned were let down, placed on separate carts, and conveyed to the place of execution."

It is farther stated that Franceschini showed the most intrepidity and cold blood of them all, and that he died with the name of Jesus on his lips. He wore the same clothes in which he had committed the crime: a close-fitting garment (juste-au-corps) of grey cloth, a loose black shirt (camiciuola), a goat's hair cloak, a white hat, and a cotton cap.

The attempt made by him to defraud his accomplices, poor and helpless as they were, has been accepted by Mr. Browning as an indication of character which forbade any lenient interpretation of his previous acts. Pompilia, on the other hand, is absolved, by all the circumstances of her protracted death, from any doubt of her innocence which previous evidence might have raised. Ten different persons attest, not only her denial of any offence against her husband, but, what is of far more value, her Christian gentleness, and absolute maiden modesty, under the sufferings of her last days, and the medical treatment to which they subjected her. Among the witnesses are a doctor of theology (Abate Liberate Barberito), the apothecary and his assistant, and a number of monks or priests; the first and most circumstantial deposition being that of an Augustine, Fra Celestino Angelo di Sant' Anna, and concluding with these words: "I do not say more, for fear of being taxed with partiality. I know well that God alone can examine the heart. But I know also that from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and that my great St. Augustine says: 'As the life was, so is its end.'"

It needed all the evidence in Pompilia's favour to secure the full punishment of her murderer, strengthened, as he was, by social and ecclesiastical position, and by the acknowledged rights of marital jealousy. We find curious proof of the sympathies which might have prejudiced his wife's cause, in the marginal notes appended to her depositions, and which repeatedly introduce them as lies.

"F. Lie concerning the arrival at Castelnuovo."

"H. New lies to the effect that she did not receive the lover's letters, and does not know how to write," &c., &c.[25]

The significant question, "Whether and when a husband may kill his unfaithful wife," was in the present case not thought to be finally answered, till an appeal had been made from the ecclesiastical tribunal to the Pope himself. It was Innocent XII. who virtually sentenced Count Franceschini and his four accomplices to death.

When Mr. Browning wrote "The Ring and the Book," his mind was made up on the merits of the Franceschini case; and the unity of purpose which has impressed itself upon his work contributes largely to its power. But he also knew that contemporary opinion would be divided upon it; and he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. He reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter with a tribute to that mystery of human motive and character which so often renders more conclusive judgments impossible.

"Action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought: Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top, Out of the magic fire that lurks inside, Shows one tint at a time to take the eye Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep, Shifted a hair's-breadth shoots you dark for bright, Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so Your sentence absolute for shine or shade." (vol. viii. p. 55.)

The three forms of opinion here indicated appear in the three following chapters as the respective utterance of "HALF-ROME," "THE OTHER HALF-ROME," and "TERTIUM QUID."

HALF-ROME has an instinctive sympathy with the husband who has been made ridiculous, and the nobleman who is threatened with an ignominious death; and is disposed throughout to regard him as more sinned against than sinning. "Count Guido has been unfortunate in everything. He is one of those proud and sensitive men who make few friends, and who meet reverses half-way. He has waited thirty years for advancement in the church, is sick of hope deferred, and is on the point of returning home to end his days, as he thinks, in frugality and peace, when a pretty girl is thrown in his way. Visions of domestic cheerfulness and comfort rise up before him. He is entrapped into marriage before he has had time to consider what he is doing, and discovers when it is too late that the parents reputed wealthy have little left but debts; and that in exchange for their daughter's dowry, present and prospective, he must virtually maintain them as well as her."

"He is far from rich, but he makes the best of a bad bargain—takes the three with him to Arezzo, and lodges them with his mother and his youngest brother, in the old family house. He is repaid with howls of disappointment. Pietro and Violante want splendour and good-living. They haven't married their daughter to a nobleman and gone to live in his palace, to be duller than they were at home, and have less to eat and drink. They abuse the mother, who won't give up her place in the household, and try to sneer the young brother-priest out of his respect for old-fashioned ways. They go back to Rome, trumpeting their wrongs: and, once there, spring a mine upon the luckless Count. They refuse to pay the remainder of Pompilia's dowry, on the ground that she is not their child. Violante Comparini has cheated her husband into accepting a base-born girl as his own, and a well-born gentleman into marrying her, but was ready to have qualms of conscience as soon as it should be convenient to tell the truth; and now the moment has come."