Chapter 15

"They do help; they are prompt to testify To her pure life and saintly dying days. She dies, and lo, who seemed so poor, proves rich! What does the body that lives through helpfulness To women for Christ's sake? The kiss turns bite, The dove's note changes to the crow's cry: judge! 'Seeing that this our Convent claims of right What goods belong to those we succour, be The same proved women of dishonest life,-- And seeing that this Trial made appear Pompilia was in such predicament,-- The Convent hereupon pretends to said Succession of Pompilia, issues writ, And takes possession by the Fisc's advice.' Such is their attestation to the cause Of Christ, who had one saint at least, they hoped: But, is a title-deed to filch, a corpse To slander, and an infant-heir to cheat? Christ must give up his gains then! They unsay All the fine speeches,--who was saint is whore."

It is not wonderful if his review of all the mean and dolorous circumstance of this cycle of wrong brings the Pope face to face with the unconquerable problem for the Christian believer, the keystone of the grim arch of religious doubt and despair, through which the courageous soul must needs pass to creeds of reason and life. Where is "the gloriously decisive change, the immeasurable metamorphosis" in human worth that should in some sort justify the consummate price that had been paid for man these seventeen hundred years before?

"Had a mere adept of the Rosy Cross Spent his life to consummate the Great Work, Would not we start to see the stuff it touched Yield not a grain more than the vulgar got By the old smelting-process years ago? If this were sad to see in just the sage Who should profess so much, perform no more, What is it when suspected in that Power Who undertook to make and made the world, Devised and did effect man, body and soul, Ordained salvation for them both, and yet ... Well, is the thing we see, salvation?"

It is certain that by whatever other deficiencies it may be marked _The Ring and the Book_ is blameless for the most characteristic of all the shortcomings of contemporary verse, a grievous sterility of thought. And why? Because sterility of thought is the blight struck into the minds of men by timorous and halt-footed scepticism, by a half-hearted dread of what chill thing the truth might prove itself, by unmanly reluctance or moral incapacity to carry the faculty of poetic vision over the whole field; and because Mr. Browning's intelligence, on the other hand, is masculine and courageous, moving cheerfully on the solid earth of an articulate and defined conviction, and careful not to omit realities from the conception of the great drama, merely for being unsightly to the too fastidious eye, or jarring in the ear, or too bitterly perplexing to faith or understanding. It is this resolute feeling after and grip of fact which is at the root of his distinguishing fruitfulness of thought, and it is exuberance of thought, spontaneous, well-marked, and sapid, that keeps him out of poetical preaching, on the one hand, and mere making of music, on the other. Regret as we may the fantastic rudeness and unscrupulous barbarisms into which Mr. Browning's art too often falls, and find what fault we may with his method, let us ever remember how much he has to say, and how effectively he communicates the shock of new thought which was first imparted to him by the vivid conception of a large and far-reaching story. The value of the thought, indeed, is not to be measured by poetic tests; but still the thought has poetic value, too, for it is this which has stirred in the writer that keen yet impersonal interest in the actors of his story and in its situations which is one of the most certain notes of true dramatic feeling, and which therefore gives the most unfailing stimulus to the interest of the appreciative reader.

At first sight _The Ring and the Book_ appears to be absolutely wanting in that grandeur which, in a composition of such enormous length, criticism must pronounce to be a fundamental and indispensable element. In an ordinary way this effect of grandeur is produced either by some heroic action surrounded by circumstances of worthy stateliness, as in the finest of the Greek plays; or as in _Paradise Lost_ by the presence of personages of majestic sublimity of bearing and association; or as in _Faust_ or _Hamlet_ by the stupendous moral abysses which the poet discloses fitfully on this side and that. 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 presence of some other fine compensating or equivalent quality. Perhaps one may say that this equivalent for grandeur is a certain simple touching of our sense of human kinship, of the large identity of the conditions of the human lot, of the piteous fatalities which bring the lives of the great multitude of men to be little more than "grains of sand to be blown by the wind." This old woe, the poet says, now in the fulness of the days again lives,

"_If precious be the soul of man to man_."

This is the deeply implanted sentiment to which his poem makes successful appeal. Nor is it mocked by mere outpouring of scorn on the blind and fortuitous groping of men and societies of men after truth and justice and traces of the watchfulness of "the unlidded eye of God." Rather it is this inability to see beyond the facts of our condition to some diviner, ever-present law, which helps to knit us to our kind, our brethren "whom we have seen."

"Clouds obscure-- But for which obscuration all were bright? Too hastily concluded! Sun-suffused, A cloud may soothe the eye made blind by blaze,-- Better the very clarity of heaven: The soft streaks are the beautiful and dear. What but the weakness in a faith supplies The incentive to humanity, no strength Absolute, irresistible, comports? How can man love but what he yearns to help And that which men think weakness within strength But angels know for strength and stronger get-- What were it else but the first things made new, But repetition of the miracle, The divine instance of self-sacrifice That never ends and aye begins for man?"

MEMORIALS OF A MAN OF LETTERS.

What are the qualities of a good contributor? What makes a good Review? Is the best literature produced by the writer who does nothing else but write, or by the man who tempers literature by affairs? What are the different recommendations of the rival systems of anonymity and signature? What kind of change, if any, has passed over periodical literature since those two great periodicals, the _Edinburgh_ and the _Quarterly_, held sway? These and a number of other questions in the same matter--some of them obviously not to be opened with propriety in these pages--must naturally be often present to the mind of any one who is concerned in the control of a Review, and a volume has just been printed which sets such musings once more astir. Mr. Macvey Napier was the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_ from 1829--when Jeffrey, after a reign of seven-and-twenty years, resigned it into his hands--until his death in 1847. A portion of the correspondence addressed to Mr. Napier during this period is full of personal interest both to the man of letters and to that more singular being, the Editor, the impresario of men of letters, the _entrepreneur_ of the spiritual power.

To manage an opera-house is usually supposed to tax human powers more urgently than any position save that of a general in the very heat and stress of battle. The orchestra, the chorus, the subscribers, the first tenor, a pair of rival prima donnas, the newspapers, the box-agents in Bond Street, the army of hangers-on in the flies--all combine to demand such gifts of tact, resolution, patience, foresight, tenacity, flexibility, as are only expected from the great ruler or the great soldier. The editor of a periodical of public consideration--and the _Edinburgh Review_ in the hands of Mr. Napier was the avowed organ of the ruling Whig powers--is sorely tested in the same way. The rival house may bribe his stars. His popular epigrammatist is sometimes as full of humours as a spoiled soprano. The favourite pyrotechnist is systematically late and procrastinatory, or is piqued because his punctuation or his paragraphs have been meddled with. The contributor whose article would be in excellent time if it did not appear before the close of the century, or never appeared at all, pesters you with warnings that a month's delay is a deadly blow to progress, and stays the great procession of the ages. The contributor who could profitably fill a sheet, insists on sending a treatise. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who had charge of the _Edinburgh_ for a short space, truly described prolixity as the _bête noire_ of an editor. "Every contributor," he said, "has some special reason for wishing to write at length on his own subject."

_Ah, que de choses dans un menuet!_ cried Marcel, the great dancing-master, and ah, what things in the type and [Greek: idea] of an article, cries an editor with the enthusiasm of his calling; such proportion, measure, comprehension, variety of topics, pithiness of treatment, all within a space appointed with Procrustean rigour. This is what the soul of the volunteer contributor is dull to. Of the minor vexations who can tell? There is one single tribulation dire enough to poison life--even if there were no other--and this is disorderly manuscript. Empson, Mr. Napier's well-known contributor, was one of the worst offenders; he would never even take the trouble to mark his paragraphs. It is my misfortune to have a manuscript before me at this moment that would fill thirty of these pages, and yet from beginning to end there is no indication that it is not to be read at a single breath. The paragraph ought to be, and in all good writers it is, as real and as sensible a division as the sentence. It is an organic member in prose composition, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as a stanza is an organic and definite member in the composition of an ode, "I fear my manuscript is rather disorderly," says another, "but I will correct carefully in print." Just so. Because he is too heedless to do his work in a workmanlike way, he first inflicts fatigue and vexation on the editor whom he expects to read his paper; second, he inflicts considerable and quite needless expense on the publisher; and thirdly, he inflicts a great deal of tedious and thankless labour on the printers, who are for the most part far more meritorious persons than fifth-rate authors. It is true that Burke returned such disordered proofs that the printer usually found it least troublesome to set the whole afresh, and Miss Martineau tells a story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid Carlyle's manuscript, and to his horror was presently confronted with a piece of the too familiar copy which made him cry, "Lord, have mercy! Have _you_ got that man to print for!" But most editors will cheerfully forgive such transgressions to all contributors who will guarantee that they write as well as Burke or Carlyle. Alas! it is usually the case that those who have least excuse are the worst offenders. The slovenliest manuscripts come from persons to whom the difference between an hour and a minute is of the very smallest importance. This, however, is a digression, only to be excused partly by the natural desire to say a word against one's persecutors, and partly by a hope that some persons of sensitive conscience may be led to ponder whether there may not be after all some moral obligations even towards editors and printers.

Mr. Napier had one famous contributor, who stands out alone in the history of editors. Lord Brougham's traditional connection with the Review,--he had begun to write either in its first or third number, and had written in it ever since--his encyclopaedic ignorance, his power, his great fame in the country, and the prestige which his connection reflected on the Review, all made him a personage with whom it would have been most imprudent to quarrel. Yet the position in which Mr. Napier was placed after Brougham's breach with the Whigs, was one of the most difficult in which the conductor of a great organ could possibly be placed. The Review was the representative, the champion, and the mouthpiece of the Whig party, and of the Whigs who were in office. Before William IV. dismissed the Whigs in 1834 as arbitrarily as his father had dismissed the Whigs in 1784, Brougham had covered himself with disrepute among his party by a thousand pranks, and after the dismissal he disgusted them by asking the new Chancellor to make him Chief Baron of the Exchequer. When Lord Melbourne returned to power in the following year, this and other escapades were remembered against him. "If left out," said Lord Melbourne, "he would indeed be dangerous; but if taken in, he would simply be destructive." So Brougham was left out, Pepys was made Chancellor, and the Premier compared himself to a man who has broken with a termagant mistress and married the best of cooks. Mr. Napier was not so happy. The termagant was left on his hands. He had to keep terms with a contributor who hated with deadly hatred the very government that the Review existed to support. No editor ever had such a contributor as Brougham in the long history of editorial torment since the world began. He scolds, he storms, he hectors, he lectures; he is for ever threatening desertion and prophesying ruin; he exhausts the vocabulary of opprobrium against his correspondent's best friends; they are silly slaves, base traitors, a vile clique "whose treatment of me has been the very _ne plus ultra_ of ingratitude, baseness, and treachery." He got the Review and its editor into a scrape which shook the world at the time (1834), by betraying Cabinet secrets to spite Lord Durham. His cries against his adversaries are as violent as the threats of Ajax in his tent, and as loud as the bellowings of Philoctetes at the mouth of his cave. Here is one instance out of a hundred:--

"That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg of you to pluck up a little courage, and not be alarmed every time any of the little knot of threateners annoy you. _They want to break off all kind of connection between me and the Edinburgh Review_. I have long seen it. Their fury against the article in the last number knows no bounds, and they will never cease till they worry you out of your connection with me, and get the whole control of the Review into their own hands, by forcing you to resign it yourself. A _party and a personal_ engine is all they want to make it. What possible right can any of these silly slaves have to object to my opinion being--what it truly is--against the Holland House theory of Lord Chatham's madness? I _know_ that Lord Grenville treated it with contempt. I know others now living who did so too, and I know that so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and he knew Lord Chatham personally. I had every ground to believe that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch, though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the Holland House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man in character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland existed not, even in those days of job and mediocrity. Why, then, was I bound to take a false view because Lord Holland's family have inherited his hatred of a great rival?"

Another instance is as follows:--

"I solicit your best attention to the fate which seems hastening upon the _Edinburgh Review_. The having always been free from the least control of booksellers is one of its principal distinctions, and long was peculiarly so--perhaps it still has it _nearly_ to itself. But if it shall become a _Treasury_ journal, I hardly see any great advantage in one kind of independence without the rest. Nay, I doubt if its _literary_ freedom, any more than its political, will long survive. Books will be treated according as the Treasury, or their under-strappers, regard the authors.... But, is it after all possible that the Review should be suffered to sink into such a state of subserviency that it dares not insert any discussion upon a general question of politics because it might give umbrage to the Government of the day? I pass over the undeniable fact that it is _underlings_ only whom you are scared by, and that the Ministers themselves have no such inordinate pretension as to dream of interfering. I say nothing of those underlings generally, except this, that I well know the race, and a more despicable, above all, in point of judgment, exists not. Never mind their threats, they _can_ do no harm. Even if any of them are contributors, be assured they never will withdraw because you choose to keep your course free and independent."

Mr. Napier, who seems to have been one of the most considerate and high-minded of men, was moved to energetic remonstrance on this occasion. Lord Brougham explained his strong language away, but he was incapable of really controlling himself, and the strain was never lessened until 1843, when the correspondence ceases, and we learn that there had been a quarrel between him and his too long-suffering correspondent. Yet John Allen,--that able scholar and conspicuous figure in the annals of Holland House--wrote of Brougham to Mr. Napier:--"He is not a malignant or bad-hearted man, but he is an unscrupulous one, and where his passions are concerned or his vanity irritated, there is no excess of which he is not capable." Of Brougham's strong and manly sense, when passion or vanity did not cloud it, and even of a sort of careful justice, these letters give more than one instance. The _Quarterly Review_, for instance, had an article on Romilly's Memoirs, which to Romilly's friends seemed to do him less than justice. Brougham took a more sensible view.

"Surely we had no right whatever to expect that they whom Romilly had all his life so stoutly opposed, and who were treated by him with great harshness, should treat him as his friends would do, and at the very moment when a most injudicious act of his family was bringing out all his secret thoughts against them. Only place yourself in the same position, and suppose that Canning's private journals had been published,--the journals he may have kept while the bitterest enemy of the Whigs, and in every page of which there must have been some passage offensive to the feelings of the living and of the friends of the dead. Would any mercy have been shown to Canning's character and memory by any of the Whig party, either in society or in Reviews? Would the line have been drawn of only attacking Canning's executors, who published the papers, and leaving Canning himself untouched? Clearly and certainly not, and yet I am putting a very much weaker case, for we had joined Canning, and all political enmity was at an end: whereas the Tories and Romilly never had for an hour laid aside their mutual hostility."

And if he was capable of equity, Brougham was also capable of hearty admiration, even of an old friend who had on later occasions gone into a line which he intensely disliked. It is a relief in the pages of blusterous anger and raging censure to come upon what he says of Jeffrey.

"I can truly say that there never in all my life crossed my mind one single unkind feeling respecting him, or indeed any feeling but that of the warmest affection and the most unmingled admiration of his character, believing and knowing him to be as excellent and amiable as he is great in the ordinary, and, as I think, the far less important sense of the word."