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“The Luck That Lies Beyond a Man”: Guido's Salvation in The Ring and the Book

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard D. McGhee
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Extract

Robert Langbaum has recently offered another affirmative answer to the question whether Guido is saved in the end of his second monologue in The Ring and the Book. Langbaum reviews the previous answers which have been given to this question:

Such early critics as Henry Jones, Charles W. Hodell, and Arthur Symons saw promise of deliverance in Guido's final utterance. But in 1920, A. K. Cook, in his influential Commentary upon The Ring and the Book, saw Guido as like Iago beyond redemption, and he was followed in this view by W. C. De-Vane in his even more influential Browning Handbook. Among recent critics, Park Honan sees Guido as saved; while Richard Altick and James F. Loucks, in their book-length study of the poem, think him irredeemable because the devil incarnate. Our stand does depend on whether we see Guido as human and therefore capable of development, or whether we see him as belonging to another order of existence, as an Iago or devil figure, (p. 290)

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 5 , Spring 1977 , pp. 87 - 104
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1977

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References

NOTES

1. “Is Guido Saved? The Meaning of Browning's Conclusion to The Ring and the Book,” Victorian Poetry, 10 (1972), 289–305Google Scholar. Boyd Litzinger has published a more recent, and negative, answer to the question: “The New Vision of Judgment: The Case of St. Guido,” Tennessee Studies in Literature, 20 (1975), 69–75Google Scholar. Litzinger takes issue with Langbaum, particularly on the point whether Guido comes “for the first time to a true understanding of his essential nature” in Book XI. Litzinger's essay is far too short to be able to attend to the complexities of Guido's two monologues as those complexities have been explicated by Langbaum. Guido not only “changes,” but he undergoes false as well as true changes, discovering through his despair that his only salvation is Pompilia.

2. King, Roma, The Focusing Artifice: The Poetry of Robert Browning (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 137–46Google Scholar; Gridley, Roy, “Browning's Two Guidos,” University of Toronto Quarterly, 37 (1967), 51–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. Garratt, Robert F., “Browning's Dramatic Monologue: the Strategy of the Double Mask,” Victorian Poetry, 11 (1973), 115–25.Google Scholar

4. Michael G. Yetman's point about “the villain as artist” is relevant. Yetman says that the second monologue is Browning's way of repudiating the specious theory of art as deception utilized by Guido in his first monologue. (“‘Count Guido Franceschini’: The Villain as Artist in The Ring and The Book,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 87 [1972], 1093–1102.) Using the terms I propose, Guido is a false artist as ethicist in his first monologue and a true artist as aesthete in the second.Google Scholar

5. The Convex Glass: The Mind of Robert Browning (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1968), Chapter 5.Google Scholar

6. “Uproar in the Echo: The Existential Aesthetic of Browning's The Ring and The Book,” Literary Monographs (Univ. of Wisconsin), 3 (1970), 125–221; the quotation is from p. 131.Google Scholar

7. The Dialectical Temper: The Rhetorical Art of Robert Browning (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), 57–233.Google Scholar

8. The major works in which Kierkegaard elaborates his terms are Either/Or, (1843), Repetition (1843), Fear and Trembling (1843), and summarized in Stages on Life's Way (1845). I have relied upon two studies of Kierkegaard for much of my discussion: The Mind of Kierkegaard, by Collins, James (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1953)Google Scholar, and The Narrow Pass: A Study of Kierkegaard's Concept of Man, by George Price (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).Google Scholar

9. My references to the text of Browning's poems will be from the ten-volume Centenary Edition, the Works of Robert Browning, edited by Kenyon, F. G. (London: Smith, Elder, 1912). Line numbers will be cited in parentheses in the text.Google Scholar

10. “It is strange that the word duty can suggest an outward relation, inasmuch as the very derivation of the word (Plight) indicates an inward relation…” (Either/Or, trans. Walter Lowrie, II [New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1959; originally 1944], 259).

11. Park Honan emphasizes this same point in his detailed analysis of the style of 11. 434–54 of Guido's monologue (Browning's Characters: A Study in Poetry Technique [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961], pp. 306–12). He remarks that “for all his villainy, Guido still has the power to confess” (p. 306).Google Scholar