at a
wonderful fellow you are, Browning: you have written a whole series of
'books' about what could be summed up in a newspaper paragraph!" Here,
Carlyle was at once right and wrong. The theme, looked at
dispassionately, is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombed for
eternity. But the poet looked upon the central incident as the inventive
mechanician regards the tiny pivot remote amid the intricate maze of his
machinery. Here, as elsewhere, Browning's real subject is too often
confounded with the accidents of the subject. His triumph is not that he
has created so huge a literary monument, but rather that,
notwithstanding its bulk, he has made it shapely and impressive. Stress
has frequently been laid on the greatness of the achievement in the
writing of twelve long poems in the exposition of one theme. Again, in
point of art, what significance has this? None. There is no reason why
it should not have been in nine or eleven parts; no reason why, having
been demonstrated in twelve, it should not have been expanded through
fifteen or twenty. Poetry ever looks askance at that gipsy-cousin of
hers, "Tour-de-force."

Of the twelve parts--occupying in all about twenty-one thousand
lines--the most notable as poetry are those which deal with the plea of
the implicated priest, Caponsacchi, with the meditation of the Pope, and
with the pathetic utterance of Pompilia. It is not a dramatic poem in
the sense that "Pippa Passes" is, for its ten Books (the first and
twelfth are respectively introductory and appendical) are monologues.
"The Ring and the Book," in a word, consists, besides the two
extraneous parts, of ten monodramas, which are as ten huge facets to a
poetic Koh-i-Noor.

The square little Italian volume, in its yellow parchment and with its
heavy type, which has now found a haven in Oxford, was picked up by
Browning for a _lira_ (about eightpence), on a second-hand bookstall
in the Piazza San Lorenzo at Florence, one June day, 1865. Therein is set
forth, in full detail, all the particulars of the murder of his wife
Pompilia, for her supposed adultery, by a certain Count Guido
Franceschini; and of that noble's trial, sentence, and doom. It is much
the same subject matter as underlies the dramas of Webster, Ford, and
other Elizabethan poets, but subtlety of insight rather than intensity
of emotion and situation distinguishes the Victorian dramatist from his
predecessors. The story fascinated Browning, who, havin