3. Art as an Intermediate Agency of Personality.



If Browning's idea of the quickening, the regeneration,
the rectification of personality, through a higher personality,
be fully comprehended, his idea of the great function of Art,
as an intermediate agency of personality, will become plain.
To emphasize the latter idea may be said to be the ultimate purpose
of his masterpiece, `The Ring and the Book'.

The complexity of the circumstances involved in the Roman murder case,
adapts it admirably to the poet's purpose -- namely, to exhibit
the swervings of human judgment in spite of itself, and the conditions
upon which the rectification of that judgment depends.

This must be taken, however, as only the articulation,
the framework, of the great poem. It is richer in materials,
of the most varied character, than any other long poem in existence.
To notice one feature of the numberless features of the poem,
which might be noticed, Browning's deep and subtle insight
into the genius of the Romish Church is shown in it more fully
than in any other of his poems, -- though special phases of that genius
are distinctly exhibited in numerous poems: a remarkable one being
`The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church'.
It is questionable whether any work of any kind has ever exhibited
that genius more fully and distinctly than `The Ring and the Book'
exhibits it. The reader breathes throughout the ecclesiastical
atmosphere of the Eternal City.