None of these things are to be
found in _The Ring and the Book_ The action of Caponsacchi, though noble
and disinterested, is hardly heroic in the highest dramatic sense, for
it is not much more than the lofty defiance of a conventionality, the
contemplated penalty being only small; not, for example, as if life or
ascertained happiness had been the fixed or even probable price of his
magnanimous enterprise. There was no marching to the stake, no
deliberate encountering of the mightier risks, no voluntary submission
to a lifelong endurance. True, this came in the end, but it was an end
unforeseen, and one, therefore, not to be associated with the first
conception of the original act. Besides, Guido is so saturated with
hateful and ignoble motive as to fill the surrounding air with
influences that preclude heroic association. It has been said of the
great men to whom the Byzantine Empire once or twice gave birth, that
even their fame has a curiously tarnished air, as if that too had been
touched by the evil breath of the times. And in like manner we may say
of Guido Franceschini that even to have touched him in the way of
resistance detracts from pure heroism. Perhaps the same consideration
explains the comparative disappointment which most people seem to have
felt with _Pompilia_ in the third volume. Again, there is nothing which
can be rightly called majesty of character visible in one personage or
another. There is high devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and free
sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an
incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it
sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness
of an unworthy oppressor. Lastly, there is nothing in _The Ring and the
Book_ of that "certain incommensurableness" which Goethe found in his
own _Faust_. The poem is kept closely concrete and strictly
commensurable by the very framework of its story:--

"pure crude fact,
Secreted from man's life when hearts beat hard,
And brains, high-blooded, ticked two centuries since."

It moves from none of the supernatural agencies which give the impulse
to our interest in _Faust_, nor from the sublimer passions and
yearning after things unspeakable alike in _Faust_ and in _Hamlet._

Yet, notwithstanding its lack of the accustomed elements of grandeur,
there is a profound impressiveness about _The Ring and the Book_
which must arise from the