The trial of Guido and his companions was carried forward to a prompt judgment, and on February 18 they were pronounced guilty and were condemned to death. A technical staying of sentence for four days was granted by reason of Guido's clerical privilege, but execution followed on February 22. The Old Yellow Book includes three original letters (pp. [237]-[8]) written from Rome immediately after the execution to Signor Cencini at Florence.
Yet the case was not quite at an end. A number of civil suits were promptly instituted by various claimants for the property of the Comparini. The Franceschini still pushed their claim in spite of the infamy they had suffered for that property. Pompilia's executor, Tighetti, claimed all in trust for the child, Gaetano. Then the refuge of the Convertites, under their legal right to the property of all women of evil life who died in Rome, accused the memory of Pompilia and claimed her property. The case seemed to be entering on one of those interminable struggles in court. The Procurator Lamparelli ([pamphlet 17)] goes back to analyse again the motives in the whole case and to justify Pompilia's innocence. The remainder of this trial is lost to us save for the final Definitive Sentence of the courts ([pamphlet 18)], issued in September 1698, which clears the memory of Pompilia entirely and for ever in the eyes of the law.
This was the record which fell into Browning's hands. The poet tells of his immediate interest in the tragedy, partly due to that common human interest in great crimes, partly to the casuistic presentation of motive throughout the Book, partly to his championing the rights of Pompilia, dishonoured and slain not merely by a brutally selfish husband, but by a corrupt social condition around her.
After some delay, Browning saw his way to embody in art the story which had interested him so deeply. The plan came to him, according to W. M. Rossetti, one day while he was walking at Biarritz, and from 1862 till the publication in 1868-9, he was working continuously on The Ring and the Book. He had mastered every detail of the Yellow Book by continuous re-readings, and in his art he was scrupulously, but never laboriously, accurate to the facts before him. In the poem he names thirty-three persons exactly as he found them in his original. Place names are adopted with the same accuracy. The specific dates recorded in the Book are followed at all points, save in the significant change of the date of Caponsacchi's rescue of Pompilia from April 29 to 23, St. George's Day. The incidents of the tragedy, even when compromising to Pompilia, whose cause he championed, are used without repression or falsification. And perhaps most remarkable of all, the poet had mastered all the technical paraphernalia and phraseology of the lawyers, and uses these with minute care, not entirely devoid of misunderstanding and error. In the Book he found all the points of law, all the precedents and authorities, and almost all of the Latin phrases and sentences found in the monologues of the lawyers of the poem. A remarkable instance of this is seen in his word for word adaptation of the long peroration of Arcangeli ([pamphlet 8)] in the close of the monologue of the Arcangeli of the poem. And the actual letter of Arcangeli (p. [235]) is reproduced verbatim in the poem, book xii. ll. 239-88. Altogether the poet affords one of the most remarkable illustrations of literal and detailed accuracy in the use of the raw material of art.
Yet here, as in all cases of true art, the greatness of the final product lies not so much in the material that fell to the artist as in the personal resource and power within himself which was able to use the material. Browning found suggestion for a suffering saint in Fra Celestino's report of Pompilia's death-bed (pp. [57], [58]), but the Pompilia of the poem embodies the poet's deepest insight into womanhood with all its spiritual relationships, in the love of man, the passion of maternity, and devotion to God. Browning ascertained in the Book that Caponsacchi was a resolute man, who had involved himself in many perils for the sake of Pompilia, but from his own personal resource of manly devotion, of chivalrous daring, of passionate indignation at wrong, of spiritual tenderness and reverence, he created a Caponsacchi. In the Book he found every turn of the cunning, of the greed, of the brutality of Guido and his family, but from his own deep realisation of the power of evil in the world, and of the black depravity of the lowest forms of humanity, he created his Franceschini. Thus at every point, founding himself on the fact of the Book, he is able to set forth this tragedy to the world as it grew in his own imagination while searching his own heart and the hearts of others through many years. And the chance-found Old Yellow Book at last occasioned the most profound utterance Robert Browning was to give to the world in all that concerns the human heart and its motives as they play the drama of the world before the eye of the Almighty.
"Do you see this square old yellow book ... pure, crude fact. Give it me back! The thing's restorative
I' the touch and sight."
A Setting-forth
of the entire Criminal Cause
against
GUIDO FRANCESCHINI, Nobleman
of Arezzo,
and his Bravoes,
who were put to death in Rome,
February 22, 1698.
The first by beheading, the other four by the gallows.