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Pompilia is the
central figure among Browning's heroines. In common with Pippa she possesses
the wisdom of the heart in its purest form. She is illiterate, and by
heredity and environment the victim of every mischance. Her only defense
against the world is the primitive faith, which finds expression in natural
goodness and a boundless capacity for love. No other character in the poem
has anything like her insights. The girl's imagination operates through
symbols, the significance of which is never explicit to her, although she
feels and acts under their emotional drive. For example, the memory of the
church where she was married brings to her mind the marble lion in the
street outside:
“With half his body rushing from the
wall,
Eating the figure of a prostrate man.”
Pompilia is the only character in The Ring and the
Book whose actions are never calculated in advance. Even the Pope and
Caponsacchi pause to estimate the probable consequences of their conduct.
Guido, of course, is all materialized body. He is the darkness to Pompilia’s
light, the hate to her love, and the craft to her guiltlessness.
Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the Pope share a lonely
eminence, environed on every side by the outraged forces of social
prejudice. Of the ten books, four (Caponsacchi, Pompilia, The Pope, and
Guido) are most helpful in illuminating the truth. The other books call in
for purposes of contrast a variety of conventionalized views of the affair.
Since the persons who give their versions are, in fact, representatives of
standard societal attitudes, the crime is made to take on far-reaching
implications. Ultimately the problem expands to include the nature of the
individual’s responsibilities to the institutions on which any social order
is based.
The three introductory monologues present the gossip
about Guido’s crime in Roman society. The speaker in Half-Rome is a jealous
husband who has reason to suspect a rival. He naturally takes Guido’s side,
and so distorts the facts to reflect his own spiritual meanness. The Other
Half-Rome comes to Pompilia’s defense in a no less biased way. Here the
narrator is a sentimentalist of the kind to be cheered up by a crime. Taking
for granted an adulterous passion between Pompilia and Caponsacchi, he
endows their intrigue with all the elements of an old-fashioned romance.
Tertium Quid adds cynical commentary from the mouth of a total worldling.
The speaker is wholly detached, interested only in displaying his wit to a
fashionable audience.
The books devoted to the arguments of the lawyers
broaden Browning's social satire to include the institution of law. Here the
anti-social implications are still more prominent, for the two attorneys
make a travesty of legal procedure. Guido’s lawyer resolves in his defense
to uphold his client’s conduct on the score of wounded honor. The trial is
merely an opportunity to exercise his talent for debating. While he prepares
his brief, the concerns really uppermost in his mind are his small son, the
purity of his Latin, malice against his rival, and the joys of the table.
His counterpart, the state prosecutor, only exhibits his skills on
rhetoricians. In these two books, then, it is Browning’s intent to show that
the machinery of social justice is as prejudiced as public opinion, and no
more capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.
At the summit of the social hierarchy stand church and
state. It is through the characters of Guido and the Pope that Browning most
fully develops the anti-social implications of his theme in The Ring and
the Book. Although poles apart in other respects, the two are alike in
three ways: both are thinkers rather than doers; both seek a rational basis
for intuitive perceptions; and both are intellectually emancipated from
social conventions. In his first monologue, Guido cleverly exploits every
vulgar prejudice that has found voice in the three preceding books. The
inference is inescapable: if Guido’s actions are to be judged by worldly
standards, then he is innocent. It is only in his second monologue that he
declares himself in his true colors and lets it be seen that he is in his
way as little conformable to traditional codes of behavior as Pompilia.
The first and last books of The Ring and the Book
discuss the circumstances under which the poem came to be written and the
manner of its writing. Here Browning reveals with unusual explicitness his
aesthetic theories. He suggests that the true theme of The Ring and the
Book is—
“This lesson, that our human speech is
naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind.”
The dramatic monologues here could be seen as a series
of “soul-pictures”, in which the poet attempted to explore a wide variety of
attitudes to life and reveal characters and society as in the novels of his
day. This form of telling a story “from the inside” in poetry greatly
influenced the twentieth century poetic creation and the skill of dramatic
monologue was brought to its most sophisticated form by T. S. Eliot in his
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Browning boldly exposed the darkness
of the society as well as his attitude in his works. Though some lines in
his poems are obscure, yet his contribution to English poetry, especially
the invention of dramatic monologue, cannot be neglected in the development
of English literature
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