A hitch and a sharp crook in every sentence bring you up with a shock.
But what a shock it is! Did you ever see a picture of a lasso,
in the act of being flung? In a thousand coils and turns,
inextricably crooked and involved and whirled, yet, if you mark the noose
at the end, you see that it is directly in front of the bison's head, there,
and is bound to catch him! That is the way Robert Browning catches you.
The first sixty or seventy pages of `The Ring and the Book'
are altogether the most doleful reading, in point either of idea or of music,
in the English language; and yet the monologue of Giuseppe Caponsacchi,
that of Pompilia Comparini, and the two of Guido Franceschini,
are unapproachable, in their kind, by any living or dead poet, `me judice'.
Here Browning's jerkiness comes in with inevitable effect.
You get lightning glimpses -- and, as one naturally expects from lightning,
zigzag glimpses -- into the intense night of the passion of these souls.
It is entirely wonderful and without precedent. The fitful play
of Guido's lust, and scorn, and hate, and cowardice, closes with
a master stroke: --
"Christ! Maria! God! . . .
POMPILIA, WILL YOU LET THEM MURDER ME?
"Pompilia, mark you, is dead, by Guido's own hand; deliberately stabbed,
because he hated her purity, which all along he has reviled and mocked
with the Devil's own malignant ingenuity of sarcasm."*
--
* `Letters', p. 206; letter to Hayne, April 13, 1870.
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