Browning's Glass Ball

Have I for the first time deciphered this key image in Browning's "The Ring and the Book"? Or have I lost my marbles?

This is, I have to say, a lengthy and pretty inside-baseball kind of substack—and by baseball, I mean the poetry of Robert Browning. I did my PhD on Browning’s poetry, lo these many years ago, and as part of that I, of course, read his masterpiece, the 12-book epic The Ring and the Book (1868-9). Recently I re-read it, and recorded my thoughts in another place. What follows, though, is a more specifically focused piece, on an (I argue) unsolved crux in the poem, a complicated image that ends Book 1. This opening book explains how the poem came to be written, dedicates the whole to Browning’s wife Elizabeth Barrett Browning (dead, now), lays out the ins-and-outs of the 17th-century Italian murder story that forms the narrative of the whole and finishes by explaining Browning’s approach to his topic. This glass ball image caps that final discussion. But what is it? What does it mean?

The first book of The Ring and the Book (1868–9) summarises the main story of the rest of the poem, and takes us through what the remaining eleven books of the poem will cover: the murder of Pompilia and her parents, the trial of the murderer Count Guido, Pompilia’s husband. First off Browning draws our attention to two material items: a gold ring (the first half-line of the whole is: ‘Do you see this ring?’) — a friend of the Brownings had gifted Robert and Elizabeth a gold ring each, Browning’s being inscribed VIS MEA, ‘my strength’, and Elizabeth Barrett’s AEI, ‘forever’, and the poem opens with a description of this latter. Then there’s the Book, the ‘Old Yellow Book’, a compilation of documents from the trial in 1698, which Browning found in a Florentine market, and upon which he based the poem. Then we get a lengthy account of the poem itself: the different speakers: the three citizens of Rome, Guido the murderer, the victim Pompilia (on her deathbed), Caponsacchi (the priest who helped Pompilia escape her abusive husband), two lawyers, one acting for the defence the other for the prosecution, the Pope, who acts as final arbiter, and finally Guido again. In his first monologue, Guido is ingratiating and sly; in the second, having learned that his appeal has been rejected and that he will be executed, he explodes in savage verbal violence and resentment. After Guido there is one more book, the twelfth, which wraps up the story. But the summary of the forthcoming poem in Book 1 does not give us Book 12. Instead, after summarising Guido’s second monologue (‘carry the criminal to his crime’s award … how Guido made defence a second time’ 1318–21), Browning takes the poem in a different direction. There are three verse-paragraphs, rounding-off Book 1. These three passages are not easy to comprehend: the editors of the Ohio Browning edition (John Berkey, Ashby Bland Crowder Jr, Susan Crowl, Nathaniel Hart) lament the ‘somewhat digressive and ambiguous final three sections of the Book’, and it’s hard to disagree. Here’s the first of those three, with the other two below:

Finally, even as thus by step and step
I led you from the level of to-day
Up to the summit of so long ago,
Here, whence I point you the wide prospect round —
Let me, by like steps, slope you back to smooth,
Land you on mother-earth, no whit the worse,
To feed o’ the fat o’ the furrow: free to dwell,
Taste our time’s better things profusely spread
For all who love the level, corn and wine,
Much cattle and the many-folded fleece.
Shall not my friends go feast again on sward,
Though cognisant of country in the clouds
Higher than wistful eagle’s horny eye
Ever unclosed for, ’mid ancestral crags,
When morning broke and Spring was back once more,
And he died, heaven, save by his heart, unreached?
Yet heaven my fancy lifts to, ladder-like, —
As Jack reached, holpen of his beanstalk-rungs! [1:1322–39]

The conceit here is that the poem, by immersing the reader in the past (in the Rome of 1698) is elevating them, giving them a broader view — taking them to a mountain-top from where they can see ‘the wide prospect round.’ After doing this Browning, like a kind of Moses, will lead his readers harmlessly down the other side, to a pastoral lowland, ‘the level’ ground, full of ‘corn and wine,/much cattle and the many-folded fleece’. Milk and honey, we might say. These readers, even as they enjoy this lowland life, will remain ‘cognisant’ of the historical place and events they have seen, ‘the country in the clouds’. The ‘he’ of line 1337, who died never having reached heaven except ‘in his heart’ is obscure. Browning’s reader? Browning himself? Guido? The last two lines of this verse paragraph conflate, boldly enough, Jacob’s ladder with Jack and the Beanstalk, from sublime to ridiculous: from grand to homely, from Biblical to folk-tale. The implication is that the present-day is not so violent or jagged as the past: then is all violence and murder; now is easeful living off the fat of the land. I’m not sure about that, I must say: but that’s where the poem goes.

There’s something quite remarkable about Browning conceptualising ‘the past’ as a super-elevated mountain top, an Everest peak higher even than eagles fly, from which the climber gets a panoramic view. A view of what? Presumably of: the present, the level country to which Moses-Browning promises to return his people after having led them up the mountain. I can’t think of anyone else who has conceptualised history, ‘the past’, that way. Is a historical novel really a mountain top? Hmm.

Browning goes on:

A novel country: I might make it mine
By choosing which one aspect of the year
Suited mood best, and putting solely that
On panel somewhere in the House of Fame,
Landscaping what I saved, not what I saw:
— Might fix you, whether frost in goblin-time
Startled the moon with his abrupt bright laugh,
Or, August’s hair afloat in filmy fire,
She fell, arms wide, face foremost on the world,
Swooned there and so singed out the strength of things.
Thus were abolished Spring and Autumn both,
The land dwarfed to one likeness of the land,
Life cramped corpse-fashion. Rather learn and love
Each facet-flash of the revolving year! —
Red, green, and blue that whirl into a white,
The variance now, the eventual unity,
Which make the miracle. See it for yourselves,
This man’s act, changeable because alive! [1:1340–57]

Novel country is, I think, a pun. On the one hand the phrase means that this historical story — the murder of Pompilia and the Comparini — is a new, unfamiliar story: not Henry V at Agincourt, or Pericles at Athens, or Waterloo, but a corner of history you don’t already know. On the other hand the phrase means that the story is novelistic (Browning, discovering the Old Yellow Book, originally offered the story to Trollope to write up as a novel) and, we might say, the poem is too: Henry James thought so, and Susan Blalock’s ‘Browning’s The Ring and the Book: “A Novel Country”’, Victorian Literature and Culture 11 (1983), 39–50 argues that the poem is a novel in a Bakhtinian sense.

This verse-paragraph is Browning speculating how he might tell the story. There are two ways of doing it, he says. One would be to flatten it — he means, I suppose, tell a goodies-and-baddies story, have all the characters entirely virtuous or irredeemable wicked. I mean, it could be argued that this is pretty much what Ring and the Book does, actually. But it’s not what Browning says he’s going to do. He suggests that, instead of working with allegorical figures of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ (as Chaucer does in House of Fame: “Clear Laud”, “Slander” and so on—the point of Browning’s reference to that text) he will aim for more nuance, more roundedness. The year, he says, is more than just winter and summer (the goblin of frost, an anthropomorphic later summer heat). The artist hoping to represent the year needs to encompass spring and autumn too. A landscape artist should represent the land, not a mere ‘likeness of the land’ — quite the ask, really, this, but OK — and the poet who aims, as Browning does, to capture living ‘men and women’ needs to do that, and not give people ‘life cramped corpse-fashion’. I take the point here rather more than I do the House of Fame reference, in that it is Browning accepting that the subjects of his portraits are actually dead — both in the general sense that everyone who was alive in 1698 is now dead, and in ways specific to his work: Pompilia dies in the course of The Ring and the Book, the Pope’s monologue is full of references to how he is speaking on his last night alive, and dies before Book 11; and Guido is dead by Book 12. But poetry is a resurrectionist’s skill: an earlier passage in Book 1 makes precisely this case. At any rate, Browning says, a man’s action, as his motivation, is ‘changeable’ because that’s what it means to be alive. RB caps the ‘seasons’ analogy by imagining turning the spinning globe at tremendous velocity, so that all its colours, ‘red, green, blue’ blur into a single white — as happens with the spectrum. That is what ‘variance’ [1355] becomes, when looked at in such a way. And specifically the analogy seems to be: instead of regarding a particular white winter, or a particular green summer, take all the colours of all the seasons, ‘whirl’ them together and a ‘miracle’ occurs: diversity becomes unity. Apply that to human nature, and instead of seeing only one time-specific motivation or action in one particular human being, create a spinning globe of times and people — a ring, let’s say — and set it in motion.

I think this is what Browning is saying, though it seems a little garbled. If white is where the miraculous unity of colour is heading, it’s a distraction that Browning first mentions winter — which is famously white — as his first ‘fixed’ point [1345]. I’m also not sure of the valence of ‘saved’ in 1344 (redeemed? Set aside for later use?) or what the point of the House of Fame reference is. In Chaucer’s poem, the poet first enters a glass temple, on the walls of which are representations of Venus, Vulcan and Cupid; after he leaves this he is snatched by a giant eagle and carried high into the air to the actual House of Fame, a beautiful palace carved from a gigantic beryl gemstone on the summit of a colossal ice-mountain. Finally he descends again and comes across a huge circular wicker house (‘made of withies and wicker, like the material men make into cages, panniers and baskets’) — a mile in diameter or more, spinning furiously and making a huge racket as it does so. Inside here is a huge crowd of people, the medium by which Fame is turned into mere rumour and hearsay. The poet listens to various lies and truths, until the crowd falls silent: a unnamed man of ‘authority’ is approaching. The unfinished poem ends here, so we never find out the identity of this man. It is possible that Browning’s poetic imagination is picking up on the eagle mentioned in line 1334, thinking of the eagle in Chaucer’s poem, and in turn turning of Chaucer’s (bizarre, we can be honest) huge spinning wicker house, which in turn prompts him to think of the rapid whirligig world-globe blurring all its colours into white, or vice versa. Seems a stretch, maybe.

But the oddest thing is the verse-paragraph that follows this.

Action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought;
Man, like a glass ball with a spark a-top,
Out of the magic fire that lurks inside,
Shows one tint at a time to take the eye:
Which, let a finger touch the silent sleep,
Shifted a hair’s-breadth shoots you dark for bright,
Suffuses bright with dark, and baffles so
Your sentence absolute for shine or shade.
Once set such orbs, — white styled, black stigmatised, —
A-rolling, see them once on the other side
Your good men and your bad men every one,
From Guido Franceschini to Guy Faux,
Oft would you rub your eyes and change your names. [1:1366–78]

What is this ‘glass ball’? What on earth is Browning talking about?

To be clear: these three verse paragraphs don’t entirely end the poem. After the three passages quoted above there’s a short verse-paragraph (lines 1371–81) addressed to the ‘British Public, ye who like me not’, which is straightforward (in essence: ‘look, I know you don’t like me, but I’ve written you this poem, you should have a read’); and then a very final bit (lines 1382–1408) in which Browning supplies the ‘posy’ to his ring, addressing his dead wife Elizabeth Barrett: ‘O lyric Love, half angel and half bird/and all a wonder and a wild desire…’ which is also easy enough to grasp. But this glass ball puzzler is the final substantive image in Book 1.

What is the glass ball? Ohio hazards the following by way of footnoted explanation: ‘a reference to an “electric egg”, a device in which an electric current was discharged in a partial vacuum, so that as the glass vessel was progressively exhausted the pattern and shades of color of the charge shifted and changed’ [Ohio 7:286]. The Oxford Browning’s editors, Stefan Hawlin and Tim Burnett, come to the same conclusion: ‘Browning is thinking of a glass ball or “electric egg” — a glass bulb with two metal or carbon rods going through it. This was used to demonstrate an electric current through a vacuum, or through various gases. The current, crossing the gap between the rods, creates variable patterns of light and dark in the ball; a finger moved on the outside of the ball creates even more variation’ [Oxford 7:71]. Both editions follow John Killham’s ‘Browning’s “Modernity”: The Ring and the Book, and Relativism’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed) The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations (Routledge 1969) in assuming that this is the tenor of Browning’s analogy.

But I really don’t think this can be right. Yes, Michael Faraday constructed an ‘electric egg’ in the 1830s to demonstrate that static electricity does not need matter or atmosphere to conduct. His device looked like this:

That’s is actually a version of the egg manufactured by William Ladd in the 1850s: Faraday’s actual egg, now in the Royal Institution, looks like this:

You get the idea. The valves at top and bottom enable the air to be pumped out of the glass bulb; an electrical charge is applied at the top and sparks jump across the gap in the middle. In a vacuum this spark will be white, but if different gases are pumped into the bulb then different coloured sparks can be generated (Farrady’s discovery of this fact eventually resulted in the development of spectroscopy as a science).

But this is not what Browning is describing in his poem. For one thing, applying a human finger to the outside of a Faraday egg won’t affect the discharge between the two terminals inside, and certainly won’t change its colour — you need to pump in different gases to do that. It’s possible Killman, the Ohio and Oxford editors have confused Faraday’s device with the ‘plasma globe’, invented (decades after The Ring and the Book) by Nikolai Tesla, and sold as a popular toy in the 1980s — still, indeed, available. This device requires a much more powerful electrical input into a neon or argon-filled cavity to create a plasma inside the globe, such that a finger or hand placed on the outside of the glass will cause plasma filaments of mauve or blue to concentrate there. This has nothing to do with Browning’s image.

There are other problems. Herbert Tucker, responding to Killham’s article, and despite being ‘intrigued’ at the thought of Browning ‘putting contemporary science to poetic use’, notes that ‘Killham fails to show that the poet knew of this device’. It’s not likely he did, and it’s furthermore not likely that he would namecheck one of Faraday’s devices in a poem dedicated to his dead wife — for though neither of the Brownings ever met Faraday, Elizabeth disliked him on the strength of his published works (which manifested, she said in a letter of 1853, ‘a tone of insolence & arrogance which sets the blood burning in me’).

Besides, a Faraday egg doesn’t fit what Browning is describing in the poem. Go back to the passage itself: it follows directly on from a description of the whole earth spinning at such speed that the spectrum of its colours blur into white. For this section Browning shrinks the image down to a glass ball, coloured white or, if the finger turns it ever so slightly, black, and similarly spinning (‘a-rolling’, 1375). The point of both comparisons is that human nature is not simply black and white, that in motion (in life) these opposites blur. More, the whole point of the ‘glass ball’ analogy is that human thought is as much obscured as revealed by human action: ‘action now shrouds, now shows the informing thought’ [1366]. Indeed, we can go further: though ‘now shows’ was how the line went in the first edition, in later editions Browning changed it to ‘action now shrouds, nor shows the informing thought’ — which is even less transparent, even more obscured. My point is that there’s nothing obscured in a Faraday egg: everything is on display through perfect transparency of the glass cowl.

Browning has something other than this in mind, I think. I wondered at first if I was possible he was thinking of the experiments of 18th-century scientist Giovanni Battista Beccaria. Browning could have read his Elettricismo artificiale (1772) in the original, or could have come across the 1778 English translation Treatise Upon Artificial Electricity, in which various experiments with “glass balls” are related — these were solid balls of glass, enclosing various substances: one had at its heart a water droplet that, when electricity passed through it, boiled and shattered the glass; Beccaria also experimented with various metals and other substances. But this doesn’t match the specifics of the analogy Browning draws either.

So I found myself thinking about marbles. Perhaps we’ve been distracted into assuming that ‘spark’ must refer to electricity, particularly with its proximity to ‘magic fire that lurks within’. But maybe spark here means not fire or electricity, but as per OED 2c ‘a speck or spot upon a ground or in a substance of a different colour’ — indeed, the first citation OED gives for this meaning refers to marble, though to the stone, rather than the little glass balls (‘Though it seem to be a white marble fill’d with black sparks’ R. Plot, Natural History Staffordshire (1686) iv. 158’). Marbles as toys go back to ancient times, when they were carved and rounded out of stone (hence the name). But they have enjoyed pretty much continuous popularity as a toy and diversion for kids. Early in the nineteenth-century marbles might be expensive stone balls, or cheaper terracotta ones (though those were liable to breakage). Then in the 1850s German industry developed a way of creating small perfectly round glass balls with ‘sparks’ of colour inside them, added by injecting ribbons of other coloured glass into the molten globe before it cooled. Originally these were quite expensive, handmade with special molten-glass-cutting marble scissors. It wasn’t until 1903 that the mass production of glass marbles, on a machine invented by Martin Frederick Christensen, of Akron Ohio, began: ‘his company, M. F. Christensen & Son Co., manufactured millions of toy and industrial glass marbles until they ceased operations in 1917’. Today 12 million glass marbles are manufactured daily. But go back to Browning’s time: glass marbles like these are rare, valuable: worked individually by a craftsman.

19th-century French glass marble, possibly 1870s.

Imagine, the poem is saying, holding one in your hand. It is semi-transparent, and inside are ribbons of black and white glass: ‘sparks’ like flames inside the glass. Held like his, the white ribbons catch the light, but turn it ‘a hair’s-breadth’ and’ light coming through the glass now ‘shoots you dark for bright’ [1371] and turn it slightly further and ‘suffuses bright with dark.’ You cannot call this glass ball ‘black’ or ‘white’ (it ‘baffles/your sentence absolute for shine or shade’). Roll them along — ‘set such orbs … a-rolling’ — and you see the rapid alteration of ‘white styled, black stigmatized’. This means that the image of the ‘glass ball’ picks up, in miniature, the image from a few lines earlier of the whole globe spinning.

This reading removes the electricity, but keeps the sphericity — the roundness that is also a feature of the titular ring — and what Tucker calls the craftsmanship (‘in the whirl of this chromatic globe Browning celebrates a craftsman’s formal triumph in his rounded ring’ [Tucker, 319] — though Tucker’s argument is that the “glass ball” is RB’s version of Shelley’s ‘life like a dome of many colour’d glass/stains the white radiance of eternity’, which I don’t think is right). The point is that modern readers, we whose lives are absolutely interpenetrated by electricity and electrical devices, gravitate to a reading of ‘spark’ and ‘magic fire’ that reads it as galvanic. But for a reader, or writer, in the 1860s electricity was a curio, an abstruseness. Spark would primarily signify a spark from an actual fire, a conflagration, and secondarily a speck or spot in some other medium; and the semantic field of ‘magic fire’ was a way, via alchemy and zoroastrianism, of talking about the human soul or spirit. That works for the analogy Browning is advancing here.

Isobel Armstrong’s magisterial Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (OUP 2008) has, disappointingly, nothing whatsoever to say about glass marbles (and nothing to say about Faraday eggs, which surprised me; but perhaps only speaks to how rare and unusual those scientific devices were). But she does note how ‘both manufacturers and workers believed that glass had “aura”. They believed they could leave their traces in it and through it’ [90]. I think understanding this ‘glass ball’ — the last poetic metaphor of Book 1 — as a glass marble rather than an ‘electric egg’ — makes sense of these crucial, culminating verse-paragraphs, Ohio’s ‘somewhat digressive and ambiguous final three sections of the Book’. There are two things at play. One is vertical: The Ring and the Book as a mountain-top panorama of the world, a 1698 vantage point from which the whole world can be surveyed, followed by a sense of the present day as horizontal, fertile pastureland where you and I can ‘feed o’ the fat of the furrow’. Elements of (as it were) verticality include the summit [1332], the eagle, viewing the world below with its horny eye [1342], Jacob’s ladder/Jack’s beanstalk [1347], perhaps the winter moon [1354] and ‘a-top’ [1367]. But set alongside this is a thematic of rotation, of the vector of spin: the gigantic spinning wicker-structure of House of Fame [1351], the ‘facet flash of the revolving year’ [1361] of the whole globe, and the ‘rolling’ marble [1375] that alternates black and white ‘sparks’, or filaments in its craftsman-made glass body. There is an intuitive, or imaginative-associative, connection between these things, and they connect with the more obvious governing images of Book 1. Not to be too simple-minded, but the ring goes round, and the book goes up:

Do you see this square old yellow Book, I toss
I’ the air, and catch again, and twirl about. [1:33–34]

Oxford append a rather sweetly pedantic note to these lines: ‘throughout the rest of his life Browning often showed [The Old Yellow Book] to friends, it seems usually with considerable care, rather than, as here, throwing it in the air’ [7:8]. But of course: the point here is not that Browning is actually being careless with his source material: it’s that ‘fact’, the material out of which he will construct his poem, is in a sense vertical, up in the air, like a mountain summit or an eagle’s flight. The point, I suppose, is reading elevates us; the love-connected turns us round upon ourselves, and upon others.