Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

book were wrong. 26 But they were wrong because Chesterton had read Browning so much that he had learned him by heart. And he had learned it so well that he had not needed to consult Browning’s work a single time. He was wrong precisely because he knew it. 27 It is a pity that the editor of the series,
English Men of Letters
, Virginia Woolf’s father, LeslieStephen, reinstated the original text. It would have been interesting to compare Browning’s original text to how they appear in Chesterton’s text. Unfortunately, they were corrected, and the printed book contains Browning’s texts. It would have been lovely to know how Chesterton transformed in his memory Browning’s verses—for memory is also made up of forgetting.
    I feel some kind of remorse. I think I have been unfair to Browning. But with Browning something happens that happens with all poets, that we must question them directly. I think, in any case, that I have done enough to interest you in Browning’s work. The pity is, as I already said, that Browning wrote his work in verse. If not, he would now be known as one of the great novelists and one of the most original short-story writers in the English language. Though if he had written in prose, we would have lost much admirable music. Because Browning was a consummate master of English verse. He mastered it as well as Tennyson, or Swinburne, or any other. But there is no doubt that for a book like
The Ring and the Book
—a book made up of the same story repeated several times—it would have been better in prose. The curious thing about
The Ring and the Book
, to which I will now return, is that although each character recounts the same events, and although there is no difference in
what
they tell, there is a fundamental difference, which belongs to the realm of human psychology, the fact that each of us believes we are justified. For example, the count admits he is a murderer, but the word “murderer” is too general. We know this from reading other books. If we read
Macbeth
, for example, or if we read
Crime and Punishment
by Dostoyevsky—I think the original is called “Guilt and Expiation”—we do not feel that Macbeth or Raskolnikov are murderers. That word is too blunt. We see how events have led them to commit a murder, which is not the same as being a murderer. Is a man defined by what he has done? Cannot a man commit a crime, and cannot his crime be justified? A man is led to the execution of a crime through thousands of circumstances. In the case of
Macbeth
, for example, we have the first scene with the three witches, who are also the three Fates. These witches prophesize what will take place. And so Macbeth, upon seeing that these prophecies are correct, comes to think that he was predestined to murder Duncan, his king, and then he commits other murders. And the same thing happens in
The Ring and the Book
: none of the characters lies, but each one of the characters feels justified. Now, Browning believes there is a guilty party, that this guilty party is the count, even though he thinks he is justified, given the circumstances, for murdering his wife.
    And Chesterton, in his book about Browning, writes about other great poets; he says thatHomer might have thought, for example, “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell them the truth based on the fall of a great city, on the defense of that city,” and he made the
Iliad
. And then another poet, whose name has been forgotten, says: “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell it based on what a just man suffered, his friends’ reproaches, the voice of God who descends in a swirl,” and he wrote the
Book of Job
. And another poet could say, “I will tell them the truth about the world, and I will tell it by describing to them an imaginary or visionary journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise,” and that poet isDante. And Shakespeare could have thought, “I will tell them the truth about the world by telling stories about a son who learned, from a ghost’s revelations, that his mother had been an adulteress and a murderer,” and he wrote
Hamlet
. But what Browning did was stranger. He said, “I have found this story of a criminal trial, a sordid story of adultery, the story of a murder, the story of lies and deceptions. And based on that story, which all of Italy talked about, and which all of Italy has forgotten, I will reveal to them the truth about the world,” and he