Browning's Old Yellow Book

IT is now nearly fifty years since Robert Browning rescued from “odds and ends of ravage ” that strewed San Lorenzo square his unique source for The Ring and the Book, — the “old yellow book.” With eyes riveted to its pages, he made his way homeward that June day. By the time he reached Casa Guidi, his mere casual curiosity as a bibliophile had been quickened by hints of a more human interest. All the afternoon he read on and on in those time-stained pages, until as evening fell the book was finished and laid by. That night, as he trod the terrace, the story of forgotten crime acted itself over again to his mind’s eye, and the actors long since returned to dust were again suffering and sinning creatures. The human tragedy had reawakened from the gloomy, dull record. But it was only after the lapse of four years that the poet wrought from it his most protracted and comprehensive poem.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington, which has done much for science in its brief existence, now offers as its first publication on a literary subject this “old yellow book.” The poet’s original copy which he bequeathed to Balliol College, Oxford, has been reproduced in complete photo-facsimile.¹

This waif of a forgotten crime was not a published volume, but a collection of the testimony and arguments in the Franceschini murder case, tried in the criminal courts of Rome during January and February of 1698. The papal press had printed these matters in a series of pamphlets for use in the court. The pamphlets were then gathered along with certain other kindred material into a vellum cover, their collector probably being a Florentine lawyer of the day who had a technical interest in the case. This record is full of sophistries, of the shrewd thrust and parry of a great legal battle, of the torturing of fact and motive, of charge and countercharge, all weighed down by masses of precedent which further perplex the lay reader. It is one of the least literary, one of the most chaotic and forbidding of source books at first sight.

Yet the general fact of this tragic story which found its end in Guido’s execution is plain enough in the book. Franceschini, of a poor but noble house of Arezzo, had after years of vain service to a cardinal in Rome sought to mend his fortunes by marriage. His rank more than made amends for his age and mean appearance when he made advances to the Comparini, a family of the comfortable middle class, for the hand of their thirteenyear-old daughter. But there was cheating on both sides of the bargain. And so the marriage was scarcely made when domestic bitterness arose. The Comparini declared that Pompilia was a mere foundling of infamous birth, and accordingly had no rights in their property. The husband’s disappointed greed soon turned to deadly hatred against the childwife left in his power. After three years, she fled back to her foster parents in Rome, using the aid of a young priest, Canon Caponsacchi. The fugitives were overtaken and arrested. After trial for adultery at the husband’s accusation, Caponsacchi was given a light sentence, and Pompilia was placed for safe-keeping in a monastery, from which she was subsequently removed to her parents’ home. Here a few months later her husband sought her out and slew her along with her foster parents. It is the record of his trial for this murder which fills the pages of the old yellow book.

Such is the harsh story which fell into the poet’s hands. Sordidness, subterfuge, viciousness, brutality darken the record. These are intensified by the web of sophistries woven around them by the lawyers. Crime, not tragedy, is apparent. The art impulse seems utterly absent from the report. And yet by that strange affinity whereby the artist is drawn to his own proper material, Browning felt the call of the book. On its flyleaf he inscribed a motto from Pindar: “Her strongest winged dart my Muse hath yet in store.” In this conviction he devoted four of his ripest years to the transmutation of the crude old volume into his great poem.

The human interest which drew Browning to this old volume was probably due in large part to the few white pages that save the story. One piece of convincing testimony presents the child-wife as no mere negative victim, but as a suffering saint. This is the testimony of Fra Celestino, the Augustinian monk, who had been her spiritual guide during her dying hours. Only four days after her decease he made the following affidavit, which is further supported by the affidavits of ten other eye-witnesses: —

I, the undersigned, bare-footed Augustinian priest, pledge my faith, that inasmuch as I was present, helping Signora Francesca Pompilia from the first instant of her pitiable case, even to the very end of her life, I say and attest on my priestly oath, in the presence of the God who must judge me, that to my own confusion I have discovered and marvelled at an innocent and saintly conscience in that everblessed child. During the four days she survived, when exhorted by me to pardon her husband, she replied with tears in her eyes and with a placid and compassionate voice, “May Jesus pardon him, as I have already done with all my heart.” But what is more to be wondered at is that although she suffered great pain, I never heard her speak an offensive or impatient word, nor show the slightest outward vexation either toward God or those near by. But ever submissive to the Divine Will, she said : “ May God have pity on me,” in such a way indeed, as would have been incompatible with a soul that was not at one with God. To such an union one does not attain in a moment, but rather by the habit of years. I say further that I have always seen her selfrestrained, and especially during medical treatment. On these occasions, if her habit of life had not been good, she would not have minded certain details around her with a modesty well noted and marvelled at by me; nor otherwise could a young girl have been in the presence of so many men with such modesty and calm, as that in which the blessed child remained while dying. And you may well believe what the Holy Spirit speaks by the mouth of the Evangelist, in the words of St. Matthew, chapter 7: “ An evil tree cannot bring forth good fruit.” Note that he says “ can not ” and not “ does not,” that is, making it impossible to infer ability to do perfect deeds when oneself is imperfect and tainted with vice. You should therefore say that this girl was all goodness and modesty, since with all ease and all gladness, she performed virtuous and modest deeds even at the very end of her life. Moreover, she has died with strong love for God, with great composure, with all the sacred sacraments of the Church, and with the admiration of all bystanders, who blessed her as a saint. I do not say more lest I be taxed with partiality. I know very well that God alone is the searcher of hearts, but I also know that from the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks; and that my great St. Augustine says, “As the life, so its end.” Therefore, having noted in that ever-blessed child saintly words, virtuous deeds, modest acts, and the death of a soul in great fear of God, for the relief of my conscience I am compelled to say, and cannot do otherwise, that necessarily she has ever been a good, modest, and honorable girl.

This tenth day of January, 1698.

I, Fra Celestino Angelo of St. Anna, bare-footed Augustinian, affirm as I have said above, with my own hand.

And in irrepressible postscript, he adds : “She died as an innocent martyr.”

These words must have thrilled Robert Browning, the poet of the human soul, with an absolute conviction of their truth, as they thrill the reader to-day. They are their own proof. We recognize a grave true-hearted priest, moved to a passion of tenderness, and almost to awe at the death of a seven teen-year-old girl. He doubtless knew something of the ill-repute which had clouded her name for months past. Yet with unmistakable emotion, he crowns her saint, and is confirmed by all who witnessed her dying hours. This for Browning was the key of her character and story. The narrative was no longer one of cruel, meaningless suffering, but it recorded the making of one of God’s saints.

Now there was in Robert Browning a fine chivalrous attitude toward woman. He might have said with Tennyson: “I would withdraw my hand from my best friend were he to wrong a woman.” This shows itself in his Flight of the Duchess, The Glove, Count Gismond, A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, and Colombe’s Birthday. So when Browning found in the midst of this criminal record the soiled, bleeding Pompilia, an innocent victim, as he felt, of the human heart’s worst hell, he would save her. His human sympathy would make her live and die again in her true saintly purity, just as he had formerly made so many of the dead to relive in his Men and Women.

When Browning had once undertaken this task, it is quite evident from the first book of the poem that he felt an unusual self-consciousness in his artistic functioning. He has there described in detail the book and its finding, and by repeated metaphor has sought to explain the artist’s use of his material. Two cardinal truths seemed to impress him, the value of the original gold of fact, and the transmuting power of the artist. Fact and the creative mastery over fact were the almost equally important bases of his conception of art.

For the artist’s personal mastery he had indeed a high regard, but in theory and practice alike he looked upon it as re-creative rather than creative; its function is to revive the all but extinct life of persons and stories from the past. Of artists he says in Sordello, —

And Swinburne makes practically the same declaration in his Tristram of Lyonesse : —

This creative power seemed to Browning to be the artist’s highest prerogative: —

This masters death in moribund or extinct relics of life, and Browning likens it to the miraculous power of Elisha in raising the dead. And he describes the creative fervor which seized him in these words: —

This creative joy is akin to that divine creative joy which Paracelsus describes in his dying hour, and in it man has himself risen to godlike power. Such is the dignity and glory of creative art as seen by Robert Browning.

But Browning was equally insistent upon the value of the fact transmuted, and his figure of the “pure gold ” places a far higher estimate upon it than the artist would usually be willing to accredit to his sources. The old yellow book was to him an inviolable human document. Professor Dowden has said that he handled it almost reverently. Years of acquaintance with the volume familiarized him with its every detail. According to Mrs. Orr he had read the record through eight times. Then, with the honesty and minute, painstaking integrity of a historian he reorganized his material. He even went so far as to verify through an astronomer friend Caponsacchi’s casual statement, “ There’s new moon this eve.” Names, places, dates, incidents, details of motive, forms of expression, fragments of law are taken from the book in countless profusion. That strange, grotesque medley of law and sophistry in Arcangeli’s monologue is in fact a skillful mosaic of scores of fragments taken from all parts of the book and laid in an original design and cemented by irony and humor. This monologue is a good illustration of how much of a show of technical learning an artist may make in some unusual field by a brief application of his mind to it, and would refute some of the claims of professional knowledge in Shakespeare. Browning seems not to have gone beyond the book for his knowledge of the Civil Law, and yet he handles these abstruse matters with the ease of an adept. He also handles them with almost absolute accuracy. Shakespeare’s free modification of the ascertained fact of history is in striking contrast with this minute fidelity to the record of a forgotten crime. Fidelity conditioned and directed the poet through all his protracted dealing with the subject.

Even the architecture of the poem, its unusual plan, seems to have been devised with the purpose of the fullest truth-telling concerning the material before the artist. For Browning had it borne home to him on every page of the book that truth is not single, but that it “is this to me and that to thee.” Fact and motive change kaleidoscopically according to the angle of prejudice of the speaker. This is illustrated extensively in the two semipopular Italian narratives included in the book which are direct prototypes of Half Rome and the Other Half Rome. And as a matter of course, the real lawyers and witnesses in the case interpreted everything according to their own intense personal bias. Now the plan Browning has adopted will include all of this contradictory detail. The poet can thus present all the baffling fluctuations of motive and those sidelights on fact which are to be found in real life, and in the monologue of the Pope he has provided a place where he may speak his own wisest word concerning these actors and events from the long ago. Browning the lover of truth is nowhere more manifest than in the devising of this plan for telling the fullest truth of the book. And he follows it honestly, even to the giving of many facts and motives of the story which run counter to his own interpretation and his own sympathy in the case.

But while the poet thus respected the integrity of fact to an unusual degree, he knew that art is more than fact; it is fact intensified and made significant by the play of genius upon it. The detailed illustration of this is abundant and interesting in a comparison of source and poem. Such a significant fact as Pompilia’s sword-thrust at her husband is given new significance with the successive tellings of Guido, Caponsacchi, Pompilia, and the Pope, and all of these draw deeply upon the poet’s insight into human character and the spiritual law. Browning has not merely rearranged and readjusted the scattered details of the book. He has transmuted the facts of a crime into the higher truth of tragedy, a transmutation which was controlled by his own moral and spiritual insight. This play of the personal Browning upon the fact of the book is perhaps best illustrated in the characters and relationships of the three main personages, Guido, the ideal villain. Caponsacchi, the ideal hero, and Pompilia, the ideal saint in Browning’s gallery.

In the re-making of Guido Franceschini the poet has dealt honestly with the material before him. He has forged no new charges. Brutality, craft, and greed were characteristic of the real Guido. The poet is also by his dramatic power able to present all the self-sophistications of such a mind, and can, along with Half Rome and Tertium Quid, look at the story from the standpoint of the morals of that day, which differed so essentially from his own. But behind all this we realize the presence of the poet with his higher code of ethics and his higher manhood, rebuking the low in Guido. Then the really dire import of the character is intensified by increasing the passion of wickedness which controls his heart. “Hate has become the very truth of him.” The ideal virtues and graces of life shrivel before his cynical scorn. He has lost all faith in God and man because of the brutal greed which has dominated his struggle against a gambler’s world. The mere low cunning of the real Guido, however, has been sublimated into a self-possessed and subtle devilishness. Guido is no mere caricature; he is an embodiment of Browning’s knowledge of the darkest recesses of the human heart. The bad man in fiction is moreover an epitome of much of the deeper thought of his creator. His decadence, his subtle attitude toward his sin, his mastery over the world, the final nemesis which overtakes him, — all these draw largely upon the moral insight of the poet.

Canon Caponsacchi in the book has the same external relationship with the story. He had first excited the jealousy of Guido, and later had escorted Pompilia in her flight from her husband’s home. His affidavit when he was placed on trial, which is included in the book, is manly, but hardly heroic, and shows no personal feeling for the young woman he had rescued. There are other indications of his courage. When he had been overtaken at Castelnuovo by the husband, he faced the latter with the words, “I am a gallant man, and what I have done I have done to save your wife from death.” Guido had quailed at this bold front. But it is not mere physical courage and personal gallantry that sum the character of Browning’s hero. To these he has added nobler qualities of high manliness — delicate chivalry, religious sincerity, hatred of sham, hot indignation at brutality, and a scorn of the unsound conventional morality of his day. Much of this is Robert Browning himself. With it all there is an almost uncontrollable flood of passion which sweeps through the fact of the story with thrilling power.

The poet has in fact changed a rather impersonal helper as he found him in the book into an intensely human St. George. In this story, he too is brought to a spiritual crisis which transforms him from “fribble, fop, and coxcomb” into a Christian hero. The young priest was “named and known by that moment’s feat, there took his station and degree.” The conventional world around him became irksome, and a better taste and a truer religion found birth along with his love. It seems not at all improbable that the legend of St. George of Merry England may have had something to do with the poet’s general conception of his hero; for Caponsacchi is referred to five times as St. George, and his deed of rescue is changed from April 29 to St. George’s Day. Possibly Vasari’s fine St. George Slaying the Dragon, which is the altar piece in Caponsacchi’s church of the Pieve, forwarded this interpretation of the young priest as found in the record. But, apart from this, Caponsacchi undoubtedly drew from the poet’s noblest conception of Christian heroism.

Of Pompilia’s character, Browning is said to have remarked, “She is just as I found her in the book.” This however is but half true. The outward incident of her story is indeed the same, but she is usually spoken of as the wretched child or the unfortunate girl. It is only in Fra Celestino’s affidavit, given above, that we see something more of her character. Browning evidently felt that Fra Celestino had indeed seen the true Pompilia to whom all the rest of the world had been blind, but that he had seen her only in part. Accordingly, without changing the outward fact of her life, he deepened its spiritual current.

As she now stands, Pompilia is not merely the heroine of his masterpiece; she is the embodiment of the highest vision of Robert Browning as to the sphere and the potency of woman. She stands as his exemplar of the highest womanly soul. Without talent and without education, she has the higher beneficence of true saintliness. Mother love has never been more fully and more subtly expressed in English poetry than in this child-mother. There is “faith held fast despite the plucking fiend,” which cannot but see all well the day she is dying, — even the future of her babe. The effluence of her saintliness mastered all who watched over her dying bed, and it was this in “the sad, strange smile,” “the grave, griefful air,” that had converted Caponsacchi into the hero-saint. Her sane clear heart sees placidly and charitably into the turmoil of sin which had surrounded her.

The eternal womanly as thus conceived by the poet doubtless had much of Mrs. Browning’s spiritual nature in it. She too had an earnest religious devotion and faith, and had lived unconquered through long dark years of pain; finally her life was crowned by love and motherhood. The mother element in Pompilia, which is utterly unnoted in the record of the old yellow book, must have been an outcome of the lavishly passionate motherhood of the Casa Guidi home in Florence.

The poet seems likewise to have created his Pompilia in part through his reverent conception of the more spiritual Mariolatry in which he had come to share through long study of the Madonnas of Florence. The story of the Virgin Mary, with its perfect embodiment of so much that is highest in woman, — faith, endurance of pain, and reverent motherhood, — entered deeply into the final composition of Browning’s ideal. And Caponsacchi speaks of her again and again as the Madonna.

Such were the ideals from Browning’s deeper life which commingled with the mere fact of the book and gave immortality to the long-forgotten woman of sorrow.

One of the most interesting and personally significant additions which the poet has made to the fact of the book as he found it is the mutual love between Caponsacchi and Pompilia that sprang up in spite of the conventional barriers which kept them apart, and which even seemed to declare all love to be sinful. In the book, Pompilia turns to Caponsacchi in sheer desperation, and in spite of Guido’s attempt to prove a criminal love between them, there is no evidence of personal love on either side. Browning might have taken advantage of this to remove all trace of suspicion from his favorite hero and saint. But he created more truly. He realized that in their close contact there were elements of danger, but he had a confidence in the purity of finer manhood and in the holiness of womanhood. He knew indeed of the presence in this world of a love that is lust, and such love has been shown in Ottima and Sebald. But he recognized the presence of a higher spiritual love, independent of the passion of the body, — a love which is worship of the good and heavenly as embodied in an actual man or woman, a love which is a real yearning up to God.

Such “love is best,” such love is the “prize of life;” the “true end” for which we live is in “this love-way with some other soul to mingle.” With such a philosophy of the purifying and ennobling nature of love, Browning had no doubt nor fear concerning the soul recognition which, as he felt, must have been instant between these two characters. The conventional world around them would have sneered at such a love as but the thin veil of lust; but Browning felt it to be the crowning glory of his hero-saint Caponsacchi and his suffering saint Pompilia.

We see therefore that these characters, as the great fictitious characters of all ages, pass into the company of the blessed immortals of the human heart by no dint of correct copying. The Madonna of the Chair is no photographically accurate replica of a peasant woman, but derives its chief power from the personality of Raphael. Hamlet, the Dane, was drawn in his essential nature neither from the old play nor from flesh and blood prototype; he is a composite of innumerable vital forces which played through the spirit of Shakespeare. Dandie Dinmont undoubtedly owed more to Scott than to the Scotch farmer pointed out by Lockhart. It must always be so. These immortals live by reason of the immortal element in their creators. And here in this source-study, much of the profoundest inner life of Browning stands revealed as we watch him breathing the breath of his own life into the inert and crude clay of the characters as he found them in the record before him.

Fidelity to fact and creative and interpretative amplification have thus gone hand in hand throughout the making of the poem. The murder story is Browningized until

What had been the cunning and unsympathetic record of a brutal crime became a tragedy. No previous artist had given it shaping or interpretation. Nor had popular appreciation and criticism tested it. Thus it was virgin material for the artist. To it he applied his energies selfbound by a conscientious fidelity. And marshaling the material of the book into an entirely new order, he interpenetrated it with what lay wisest and deepest in his own nature, creating therefrom the most human and most significant longer poem of the nineteenth century.