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Robert Browning's “The Other Half-Rome”: A “Fancy-fit” or Not?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

C. Stephen Finley
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Extract

The poet – speaker of Book 1 of The Ring and the Book believed that the first two monologues of his grand poem balanced one another. In his preview of the monologues, he writes that Half-Rome and Other Half-Rome are equally unsuccessful in their efforts to find the truth of the murder story. The speakers possess an “opposite feel” for the truth, but each achieves a “like swerve, like unsuccess” (I.883–84). Although Other Half-Rome succeeds in being on the right side of the issue, Browning as poet-speaker considers his defense of Pompilia to be the result only of luck or a “fancy-fit.” This “fancy-fit” is a mood which inclines the speaker to choose Pompilia as it might incline him to choose between two runners in a race according to the colors of their scarves (1.885–92). Browning sets this speech by a Bernini fountain, one where Triton blows water through a conch: “Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust” (1.900). The poet may have intended this setting to suggest the way in which he views the language and imagery that Other Half-Rome uses to tell his story. The speaker's mixture of Christian and classical mythology and his concern for the painterly qualities of Pompilia's deathbed scene do suggest an aesthetic temperament. The poet may have considered the speech of such a man to be “diamond dust” signifying nothing. In any case, the poet-speaker of Book 1 concludes his description of Other Half-Rome by saying, with apparent sarcasm, that to this speaker Pompilia “seemed a saint and martyr both” (1.909). This assessment of Other Half-Rome has been the subject of disagreement among commentators on the poem.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 11 , Spring 1983 , pp. 127 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

1. All citations from The Ring and the Book, unless otherwise noted are from the text of the first edition reprinted in both the Everyman's Library (London, 1911) and in Altick, Richard D., ed., The Ring and the Book (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. See Altick's Introduction to this edition, regarding choice of text and the problematic nature of Browning's later revisions, pp. 11–15, esp. pp. 13–14. and see also the “Bibliographical Note” in Altick, Richard D. and Loucks, James F. II, Browning's Roman Murder Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 363.Google Scholar

2. To the best of my knowledge, this essay is the first to consider “The Other Half-Rome” by defining the opposing critical positions in the commentary the poem has received.

3. King, Roma A. Jr, The Focusing Artifice (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1968), p. 136Google Scholar; Honan, Park, Browning's Characters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 182.Google Scholar

4. See DeVane, William Clyde, A Browning Handbook (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), p. 331Google Scholar; Hair, Donald S., Browning's Experiments with Genre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), pp. 132–36Google Scholar: “such sentimentality blinds the speaker to the deeper moral implications of the affair” (p. 136); Harrold, William E., The Variance and the Unity: A Study of the Complementary Poems of Robert Browning (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1973), pp. 138, 141, 155, 170Google Scholar: “his interest in Pompilia is sentimental as compared to the sensational curiosity of Half-Rome” (p. 170); Johnson, E. D. H., “Robert Browning's Pluralistic Universe: A Reading of The Ring and the Book,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 31 (10 1961), p. 24CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “Other Half-Rome, a sentimental bachelor”; MrsOrr, Sutherland, A Handbook to the Works of Robert Browning (London: George Bell and Sons, 1896), pp. 92–93Google Scholar; Shaw, W. David, The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 247–49Google Scholar; Langbaum, Robert, The Poetry of Experience (New York: Norton, 1957), pp. 115–17.Google Scholar

5. Smith, C. Willard, Browning's Star Imagery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 201.Google Scholar

6. Cook, A. K., A Commentary Upon Browning's The Ring and the Book (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), p. 54.Google Scholar

7. Altick, and Loucks, , Roman Murder Story, p. 42Google Scholar. See also Sullivan, Mary Rose, Browning's Voices in The Ring and the Book (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 56Google Scholar: “Other Half-Rome's speech reveals that the ‘swerve’ is due less to a ‘fancy-fit’ as the poet had claimed than to a characteristic intuitive reaching after the right answer by a sensitive and imaginative nature.”

8. Langbaum, , p. 116.Google Scholar

9. DeVane, , pp. 285, 291Google Scholar; Altick, and Loucks, , pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

10. Sullivan, Mary Rose, “The Function of Book 1 in The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry, 6 (Autumn-Winter, 1968), pp. 234–35Google Scholar. See also Peckham, Morse, “Historiography and The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry, 6 (Autumn-Winter, 1968), pp. 243, 246Google Scholar; and Thompson, Gordon W., “Authorial Detachment and Imagery in The Ring and the Book,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 10 (Autumn, 1970), pp. 672–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Langbaum, , p. 120.Google Scholar

12. Sullivan, , Browning's Voices, p. 41Google Scholar; Altick, and Loucks, , p. 42.Google Scholar

13. Cook, , p. 320Google Scholar, says that there are some 110 differences in “Other Half-Rome” between the (A text) first edition and the (C text) Poetical Works of 1888–89. Of these 110, some 65 are in wording. Browning made the majority of his revisions between the second edition of 1872 (B text) and the final edition. See Altick's edition, “Introduction,” for Altick's sense that “Browning's revising eye and ear were by no means sure.… ‘Revision’ in the case of this poem therefore was by no means necessarily synonymous with ‘improvement’” (pp. 13–14).Google Scholar

14. Browning, Robert, The Poetical Works (London: Smith, Elder, and Company, 1888), VIII, 150, lines 754–55.Google Scholar

15. Sullivan, , Browning's Voices, p. 41Google Scholar. See Altick's, edition, “Notes,” p. 655.Google Scholar

16. Cook, , p. 62Google Scholar. It is interesting to note that Cook ducks the whole thorny problem of the closing lines by ending his commentary at line 1676.

17. Altick, and Loucks, , p. 43.Google Scholar

18. In addition to clearly identifying the “Sir” and “co-heir” as the auditor to whom he speaks, Other Half-Rome also addresses Count Guido, in the closing lines as the “Count.” He does so to answer a quotation by Guido (111.1644–49) that he has included in his speech. Other Half-Rome does not confuse the “Count” with the “Sir”; indeed, he distinguishes between them consistently, as when he tells his auditor to anticipate what the Count has said in self-justification: “You hardly need ask what Count Guido says…” (III.1643).

19. Honan, , p. 270.Google Scholar

20. See Sullivan, , Browning's Voices, p. 57Google Scholar, where she suggests such an interpretation of Other Half-Rome's purpose: “He scornfully dismisses the defendant's claim of injured honour, using his own situation as an example of its insufficiency.…”

21. Friedman, Barton R., “To Tell the Sun from the Druid Fire: Imagery of Good and Evil in The Ring and the Book,” Studies in English Literature, 6 (Autumn, 1966), 704.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22. Thompson, , p. 681Google Scholar, is concerned to connect imagery with the unifying presence of the poet throughout the poem. He records his debt to both Friedman and DeVane.

23. DeVane, William Clyde, “The Virgin and the Dragon,” in Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Drew, Phillip (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), p. 106Google Scholar. See also Raymond, William O., “‘The Jewelled Bow’: A Study in Browning's Imagery and Humanism,” in The finite Moment (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), pp. 193–213.Google Scholar

24. Shaw, , p. 248.Google Scholar

25. Sullivan, , Browning's Voices, pp. 44–45Google Scholar; see 111.226–27, 792–95, 868–71, 923–24, 1641.

26. Thompson, , p. 681.Google Scholar

27. Disease plays a very minor role. Leprosy is only mentioned once, and that in regard to the court (III.1383).

28. Altick, and Loucks, , p. 268.Google Scholar

29. Honan, , p. 182Google Scholar, attempts to deduce from Other Half-Rome's animal imagery that the speaker's world is “absurdly simple”; he sees “indistinctly through an emotional curtain that simplifies all matters.” One may ask how Other Half-Rome's employment of the Pompilialamb/Guido-wolf figure differs from any of the pro-Pompilia speakers, including the poet, and, finally, even Guido himself?

30. Altick, and Loucks, , pp. 274–75Google Scholar, present an excellent roster of the repeated figures that Browning uses to bind and contrast the monologues of Half-Rome and Other Half-Rome. The reader is referred there for a valuable discussion of a matter peripheral to the present study. See also their encyclopedic chapters on allusive and figurative language, “The Drama of Allusion” (pp. 184–225)Google Scholar and “The Drama of Metaphor” (pp. 226–80).Google Scholar

31. Shaw, , p. 247.Google Scholar

32. Cook, , Commentary, p. 57Google Scholar. That the tree is animate with eyes and tongues is probably due to a common representation of the Tree of Knowledge throughout the Middle Ages. Cook refers to an “allegorical wood cut of the early sixteenth century.” Altick, in his edition, “Notes,” p. 652, only cites Cook.Google Scholar

33. I relate the legend here from its form in The Quest of the Holy Grail, trans. Matarasso, P. M. (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 222–24.Google Scholar

34. Landow, George P., “Bruising the Serpent's Head: Typological Symbol in Victorian Poetry,” Victorian Newsletter, 55 (Spring, 1979), 13Google Scholar; see also Landow's, “Moses Striking the Rock: Typological Symbolism in Victorian Poetry,” in Litererary Uses of Typology, ed. Miner, Earl (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 321–22.Google Scholar

35. Langbaum, , p. 117.Google Scholar

36. Browning, revising for meter, changes this telling passage to read: “On soul and body of his wife, she cried…” (Poetical Works, 1888–1889, VIII, 158, lines 967).Google Scholar

37. It is also of interest to compare the final responses to Guido of Other Half-Rome and the Pope. The Pope sees his judgment of Guido as a solemn duty, an act of Christian knighthood; by condemning Guido he smites with his “whole strength once more” the evil of the mortal world, and, as if it were his last act, he sends Guido on to God before him. Other Half-Rome also closes his monologue with a final and comprehensive condemnation of Guido, but it is the human community which he believes he serves, for Guido has become the “enemy” of humanity and must be, thereby, cast out from human nature. “Out with you,” Other Half-Rome concludes, “From the common light and air and life of man!” (x.1958; III.1693–94).