Robert Browning - The Complete Works of Robert Browning - Poems, Plays, Letters & Biographies in One Edition

The late summer of that year was devoted to traveling from Cannes about the coast, and they finally decided on Audierne for a sojourn. “Sarianna and I have just returned from a four hours’ walk,” he writes to a friend from this place; but here, as everywhere, he was haunted by Florentine memories, and by intense longings for his vanished paradise. To Isa Blagden he wrote:

“I feel as if I should immensely like to glide along for a summer day through the streets and between the old stone walls, unseen come and unheard go,—perhaps by some miracle I shall do so ... Oh, me! to find myself some late sunshiny afternoon with my face turned toward Florence....”

While at Audierne, Browning put the final touches to the new six-volume edition of his works that was about to appear from the house of Smith, Elder, and Company, on the title-page of which he signs himself as M.A., Honorary Fellow of Balliol College. Mr. Nettleship’s volume of essays on Browning’s poems was published that season, indicating a strong interest in the poet; and another very gratifying experience to him was the interest in his work manifested by the undergraduates of both Oxford and Cambridge. Undoubtedly the pleasant glow of this appreciation stimulated his energy in the great poem on which he was now definitely at work, “The Ring and the Book.” Publishers were making him offers for its publication, “the R. B. who for six months once did not sell a single copy of his poems,” he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, to whom he announced that he should “ask two hundred pounds for the sheets to America, and get it!” with an evident conviction that this was a high price for his work. The increasing recognition of the poet was further indicated by a request from Tauchnitz for the volumes of selections which Browning dedicated to the Laureate in these graceful words: “To Alfred Tennyson. In Poetry—illustrious and consummate; In Friendship—noble and sincere.”

The publication of “The Ring and the Book” was the great literary event of 1869. Two numbers had appeared in the previous autumn, but when offered in its completeness the poem was found to embody the most remarkable interpretation of transfigured human life to be found in all the literature of poetry. The fame of the poet rose to splendor. This work was the inauguration of an epoch, of a period from which his work was to be read, studied, discussed, to a degree that would have been incredible to him, had any Cassandra of previous years lifted the veil of the future. The great reviews united in a very choral pean of praise; the Fortnightly , the Quarterly , the Edinburgh Review , the Revue des Deux Mondes , and others were practically unanimous in their recognition of a work which was at once felt to be the very epitome of the art and life of Robert Browning. The poem is, indeed, a vast treasure into which the poet poured all his searching, relentless analysis of character, and grasp of motive; all his compassion, his sensitive susceptibility to human emotion; all his gift of brilliant movement; all his heroic enthusiasms, and his power of luminous perception. But all this wealth of feeling and thought had been passed through the crucible of his critical creation; it had been fused and recast by the alchemy of genius. He transmuted fact into truth.

“Do you see this Ring?

’T is Rome-work made to match

(By Castellani’s imitative craft)

Etrurian circlets....

······

I fused my live soul and that inert stuff,

Before attempting smithcraft....”

The “square old yellow book” which Browning had chanced upon in the market-place of San Lorenzo, in that June of 1860, was not a volume, but a “lawyer’s file of documents and pamphlets.” In relating how he found the book Browning says, in the poem:

“... I found this book,

Gave a lira for it, eightpence English just, (Mark the predestination!) when a Hand, Always above my shoulder, pushed me once, ······ Across a Square in Florence, crammed with booths.”

He stepped out on the narrow terrace, built

“Over the street and opposite the church,

······

Whence came the clear voice of the cloistered ones

Chanting a chant made for midsummer nights—”

and making his own the story.

The Palazzo Riccardi, Florence.

erected by Michelozzo about 1435.

“ ....Riccardi where they lived His race........ ”

The Ring and the Book.

In 1908 Dr. Charles W. Hodell was enabled by the courtesy of Balliol College, to whom Browning left the “Old Yellow Book,” to make a photographic reproduction of the original documents, to which Dr. Hodell added a complete and masterly translation, and a noble essay entitled “On the Making of a Great Poem,” the most marvelous analysis and commentary on “The Ring and the Book” that has ever been produced. The photographed pages of the original documents, the translation, and this essay were published by the Carnegie Institution, in a large volume entitled “The Old Yellow Book.” In his preface Professor Hodell records that he was drawn to the special study of this poem by Professor Hiram Corson, Litt.D., LL.D., to whom he reverently refers as “my Master.” Of “The Ring and the Book” Dr. Hodell says:

“In the wide range of the work of Robert Browning no single poem can rival ‘The Ring and the Book,’ in scope and manifold power. The subject had fallen to his hands at the very fulness of his maturity, by ‘predestination,’ as it seemed to him. In the poem, as he planned his treatment, there was opportunity for every phase of his peculiar genius.... so that the completed masterpiece becomes the macrocosm of his work.... Without doubt it may be held to be the greatest poetic work, in a long poem, of the nineteenth century. It is a drama of profound spiritual realities.

‘So write a book shall mean beyond the facts,

Suffice the eye, and save the soul beside.’

Browning was the only important poet of the Victorian age who did not draw upon the Morte d’Arthur legends; and the rich mythology of the Greeks tempted him as little. The motive that always appealed to him most was that of the activity of the human spirit, its power to dominate all material barriers to transcend every temporary limit, by the very power of its own energy.”

In his historic researches Professor Hodell found reason to believe that the Pope, in “The Ring and the Book,” was Stephen VI, and not VII; and writing to Robert Barrett Browning to inquire regarding this point, he received from the poet’s son the following interesting letter, which, by Dr. Hodell’s generous courtesy, is permitted to appear in this book.

La Torre all’ Antella, Florence, Jan. 6, 1904.

My Dear Sir,—I wish I were able to give you the information you ask me for, but my father’s books are in Venice, and I have not any here touching on the matter to refer to.

If Pope Stephen was, as you say, the Sixth and not the Seventh, of course the mistake is obvious and perhaps attributable to an unconscious slip of the memory, which with my father was not at its best in dates and figures. It is not likely that such an error should have appeared in any old work, such as he would have consulted; and certainly it was not caused by carelessness, for he was painstaking to a degree, and had a proper horror of blundering, which is the word he would have used. I can only account for such a mistake as this—which he would have been the first to pronounce unpardonable—by his absent-mindedness, his attention being at the moment absorbed by something else. Absent-mindedness was one of his characteristics, over instances of which he used to laugh most heartily. My father’s intention, I know, was to be scrupulously accurate about the facts in this poem. I may tell you as an instance that, wishing to be sure that there was moonlight on a particular night, he got a distinguished mathematician to make the necessary calculation. The description of the finding of the book is without doubt true in every detail. Indeed, to this day the market at San Lorenzo is very much what it was then and as I can remember it. Not long ago, I myself bought an old volume there off a barrow.