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:—­