Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/487

 "THE RING AND THE BOOK" 47 1 complete plan, copious in details, of the structure he is about to erect. He has already told us the story ? Well, he simply purposes to tell it over again no fewer than ten times, from as many different points of view, by as many different types or persons less one — for Guido speaks twice, in hope before the appeal, in reckless desperation on the night before his execution. A work immeasurably difficult, yet most triumphantly achieved. The interest is to be purely psychological, but of psychology living, not dead ; as with Balzac, the analysis by its unrelenting intensity and subtlety, sustained and impelled by an imagination no less intense, develops into vital synthesis ; in each of the ten following sections Browning, having penetrated to the inmost soul of his creature, from that centre commands both soul and body to his service in complete self-revelation; so that we have ten monodramas, to use Mr. Swin- burne's term, all on the same subject, but varying infinitely by the variance in the characters and cir- cumstances of the speakers. In the dedication of "Sordello," written twenty- five years after the poem itself. Browning says : " The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires ; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul ; little else is worth study." And at the end of this Ring and Book he writes : — " So did this old woe fade from memory, Till after, in the fulness of the days, I needs must find an ember yet unquenched, And, breathing, blow the spark to flame. It lives, If precious be the soul of man to man."