Chapter XII: Book THE SIXTH (2)

She meets Norbert again; makes him talk of his future; discovers that he only dreams of it as bound up with the political career he has already entered upon; and though she sees that every vision of this future begins and ends in her, she sees, as justly, that its making or marring is in the Queen's hands. Here is a second motive for self-sacrifice. Norbert has no suspicion of what he has done. The Queen appears before Constance has had time to inform him of it; and the latter has now no choice but to let him learn it from the Queen's own lips. She draws her on, accordingly, under plea of Norbert's diffidence, to speak of what she believes him to have asked of her, and what she knows to be already granted. She tries to prompt his reply.

But Norbert will not be prompted. He is slow to understand what is expected of him, very indignant when he does so; and in terror lest he should still be misunderstood--in unconsciousness of the torture he is inflicting--he asserts and re-asserts his respect for the one woman, his absorbing passion for the other. The Queen goes out. Her looks and silence have been ominous. The shadow of a great dread falls upon the scene. The dance-music stops. Heavy footsteps are heard approaching. Norbert and Constance stand awaiting their doom. But they are united as they have never yet been, and they can defy it; for her love has shown itself as capable of all sacrifice--his as above temptation.

Various theories have been formed as to the kind of woman Mr. Browning meant Constance to be; but a careful and unbiassed reading of the poem can leave no doubt on the subject. He has given her, not the courage of an exclusively moral nature, but all the self-denial of a devoted one, growing with the demands which are made upon it. How single-hearted is her attempt to sacrifice Norbert's love, is sufficiently shown by one sentence, addressed to him after his interview with the Queen:

"You were mine. Now I give myself to you." (vol. vii. p. 28.)

"THE RING AND THE BOOK." 1868-69.

From the dramas, we pass naturally to the dramatic monologues; poems embodying a lengthened argument or soliloquy, and to which there is already an approach in the tragedies themselves. The dramatic monologue repeats itself in the finest poems of the "Men and Women," and "Dramatis Personæ;" and Mr. Browning's constructive power thus remains, as it were, diffused, till it culminates again in "The Ring and the Book:" at once his greatest constructive achievement, and the triumph of the monologue form. From this time onwards, the monologue will be his prevailing mode of expression, but each will often form an independent work. "The Ring and the Book" is thus our next object of interest.

Mr. Browning was strolling one day through a square in Florence, the Piazza San Lorenzo, which is a standing market for old clothes, old furniture, and old curiosities of every kind, when a parchment-covered book attracted his eye, from amidst the artistic or nondescript rubbish of one of the stalls. It was the record of a murder which had taken place in Rome, and bore inside it an inscription which Mr. Browning thus transcribes:--

"... A Roman murder-case:
Position of the entire criminal cause
Of Guido Franceschini, nobleman,
With certain Four the cut-throats in his pay,
Tried, all five, and found guilty and put to death
By heading or hanging as befitted ranks,
At Rome on February Twenty-Two,
Since our salvation Sixteen Ninety-Eight:
Wherein it is disputed if, and when,
Husbands may kill adulterous wives, yet 'scape
The customary forfeit." (vol. viii. p. 6.)

The book proved, on examination, to contain the whole history of the case, as carried on in writing, after the fashion of those days: pleadings and counter-pleadings, the depositions of defendants and witnesses; manuscript letters announcing the execution of the murderer; and the "instrument of the Definitive Sentence" which established the perfect innocence of the murdered wife: these various documents having been collected and bound together by some person interested in the trial, possibly the very Cencini, friend of the Franceschini family, to whom the manuscript letters are addressed. Mr. Browning bought the whole for the value of eightpence, and it became the raw material of what appeared four years later as "The Ring and the Book."

This name is explained as follows:--The story of the Franceschini case, as Mr. Browning relates it, forms a circle of evidence to its one central truth; and this circle was constructed in the manner in which the worker in Etruscan gold prepares the ornamental circlet which will be worn as a ring. The pure metal is too soft to bear hammer or file; it must be mixed with alloy to gain the necessary power of resistance. The ring once formed and embossed, the alloy is disengaged, and a pure gold ornament remains. Mr. Browning's material was also inadequate to his purpose, though from a different cause. It was too _hard_. It was "pure crude fact," secreted from the fluid being of the men and women whose experience it had formed. In its existing state it would have broken up under the artistic attempt to weld and round it. He supplied an alloy, the alloy of fancy, or--as he also calls it--of one fact more: this fact being the echo of those past existences awakened within his own. He breathed into the dead record the breath of his own life; and when his ring of evidence had re-formed, first in elastic then in solid strength, here delicately incised, there broadly stamped with human thought and passion, he could cast fancy aside, and bid his readers recognize in what he set before them unadulterated human truth.

All this was not effected at once. The separate scenes of the Franceschini tragedy sprang to life in Mr. Browning's imagination within a few hours of his reading the book. He saw them re-enacted from his terrace at Casa Guidi on a sultry summer night--every place and person projected, as it seemed, against the thundery sky--but his mind did not yet weave them into a whole. The drama lay by him and in him till the unconscious inspiration was complete; and then, one day in London, he felt what he thus describes:--

"A spirit laughs and leaps through every limb,
And lights my eye, and lifts me by the hair,
Letting me have my will again with these...."
(vol. viii. p. 32.)

and "The Ring and the Book" was born. All this is told in an introductory chapter, which bears the title of the whole work; and here also Mr. Browning reviews those broad facts of the Franceschini case which are beyond dispute, and which constitute, so far as they go, the crude metal of his ring. He has worked into this almost every incident which the chronicle supplies and his book requires no supplement. But the fragmentary view of its contents, which I am reduced to giving, can only be held together by a previous outline of the story.

There lived in Rome in 1679 Pietro and Violante Comparini, an elderly couple of the middle class, fond of show and good living, and who in spite of a fair income had run considerably into debt. They were, indeed at the period in question, in receipt of a papal bounty, employed in the relief of the needy who did not like to beg. Creditors were pressing, and only one expedient suggested itself: they must have a child; and thus enable themselves to draw on their capital, now tied up for the benefit of an unknown heir-at-law. The wife conceived this plan, and also carried it out, without taking her husband into her confidence. She secured beforehand the infant of a poor and not very reputable woman, announced her expectation, half miraculous at her past fifty years, and became, to all appearance, the mother of a girl, the Francesca Pompilia of the story.

When Pompilia had reached the age of thirteen, there was also in Rome Count Guido Franceschini, an impoverished nobleman of Arezzo, and the elder of three brothers, of whom the second, Abate Paolo, and the third, Canon Girolamo also play some part in the story. Count Guido himself belonged to the minor ranks of the priesthood, and had spent his best years in seeking preferment in it. Preferment had not come, and the only means of building up the family fortunes in his own person, was now a moneyed wife. He was poor, fifty years old, and personally unattractive. A contemporary chronicle describes him as short, thin, and pale, and with a projecting nose. He had nothing to offer but his rank; but in the case of a very obscure heiress, this might suffice, and such a one seemed to present herself in Pompilia Comparini. He heard of her at the local centre of gossip, the barber's shop; received an exaggerated estimate of her dowry; and made proposals for her hand; being supported in his suit by the Abate Paul. They did not, on their side, understate the advantages of the connection. They are, indeed, said to have given as their yearly income, a sum exceeding their capital, and Violante was soon dazzled into consenting to it. Old Pietro was more wary. He made inquiries as to the state of the Count's fortune, and declined, under plea of his daughter's extreme youth, to think of him as a son-in-law.

Violante pretended submission, secretly led Pompilia to a church, the very church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, where four years later the murdered bodies of all three were to be displayed, and brought her back as Count Guido's wife. Pietro could only accept the accomplished fact; and he so far resigned himself to it, that he paid down an instalment of his daughter's dowry, and made up the deficiency by transferring to the newly-married couple all that he actually possessed. This left him no choice but to live under their roof, and the four removed together to the Franceschini abode at Arezzo. The arrangement proved disastrous; and at the end of a few months Pietro and Violante were glad to return to Rome, though with empty pockets, and on money lent them for the journey by their son-in-law.

We have conflicting testimony as to the cause of this rupture. The Governor of Arezzo, writing to the Abate Paul in Rome, lays all the blame of it on the Comparini, whom he taxes with vulgar and aggressive behaviour; and Mr. Browning readily admits that at the beginning there may have been faults on their side. But popular judgment, as well as the balance of evidence, were in favour of the opposite view; and curious details are given by Pompilia and by a servant of the family, a sworn witness on Pompilia's trial, of the petty cruelties and privations to which both parents and child were subjected.

So much, at all events, was clear; Violante's sin had overtaken her; and it now occurred to her, apparently for the first time, to cast off its burden by confession. The moment was propitious, for the Pope had proclaimed a jubilee in honour of his eightieth year, and absolution was to be had for the asking. But the Church in this case made conditions. Absolution must be preceded by atonement. Violante must restore to her legal heirs that of which her pretended motherhood had defrauded them. The first step towards this was to reveal the fraud to her husband; and Pietro lost no time in making use of the revelation. He repudiated Pompilia, and with her all claims on her husband's part. The case was carried into court. The Court decreed a compromise. Pietro appealed from the decree, and the question remained unsettled.

The chief sufferer by these proceedings was Pompilia herself. She already had reason to dread her husband as a tyrant--he to dislike her as a victim; and his discovery of her base birth, with the threatened loss of the greater part of her dowry, could only result, with such a man, in increased aversion towards her. From this moment his one aim seems to have been to get rid of his wife, but in such a manner as not to forfeit any pecuniary advantage he might still derive from their union. This could only be done by convicting her of infielity; and he attacked her so furiously, and so persistently, on the subject of a certain Canon Giuseppe Caponsacchi, whom she barely knew, but whose attentions he declared her to have challenged, that at last she fled from Arezzo, with this very man.

She had appealed for protection against her husband's violence to the Archbishop and to the Governor. She had striven to enlist the aid of his brother-in-law, Conti. She had implored a priest in confession to write for her to her parents, and induce them to fetch her away. But the whole town was in the interest of the Franceschini, or in dread of them. Her prayers were useless, and Caponsacchi, whom she had heard of as a "resolute man," appeared her last resource. He was, as she knew, contemplating a journey to Rome; an opportunity presented itself for speaking to him from her window, or her balcony; and she persuaded him, though not without difficulty, to assist her escape, and conduct her to her old home. On a given night she slipped away from her husband's side, and joined the Canon where he awaited her with a carriage. They travelled day and night till they reached Castelnuovo, a village within four hours of the journey's end. There they were compelled to rest, and there also the husband overtook them. They were not together at the moment; but the fact of the elopement was patent; and if Franceschini had killed his wife there, in the supposed excitement of the discovery, the law might have dealt leniently with him. But it suited him best for the time being to let her live. He procured the arrest of the fugitives, and after a short confinement on the spot, they were conveyed to the New Prisons in Rome (Carceri Nuove) and tried on the charge of adultery.

It is impossible not to believe that Count Guido had been working towards this end. Pompilia's verbal communications with Caponsacchi had been supplemented by letters, now brought to him in her name, now thrown or let down from her window as he passed the house. They were written, as he said, on the subject of the flight, and as he also said, he burned them as soon as read, not doubting their authenticity. But Pompilia declared, on examination, that she could neither write nor read; and setting aside all presumption of her veracity, this was more than probable. The writer of the letters must therefore, have been the Count, or some one employed by him for the purpose. He now completed the intrigue by producing eighteen or twenty more of a very incriminating character, which he declared to have been left by the prisoners at Castelnuovo; and these were not only disclaimed with every appearance of sincerity by both the persons accused, but bore the marks of forgery within themselves.

Pompilia and Caponsacchi answered all the questions addressed to them simply and firmly; and though their statements did not always coincide, these were calculated on the whole to create a moral conviction of their innocence; the facts on which they disagreed being of little weight. But moral conviction was not legal proof; the question of false testimony does not seem to have been even raised; and the Court found itself in a dilemma, which it acknowledged in the following way: it was decreed that for his complicity in "the flight and deviation of Francesca Comparini," and too great intimacy with her, Caponsacchi should be banished for three years to Civita Vecchia; and that Pompilia, on her side, should be relegated, for the time being, to a convent. That is to say: the prisoners were pronounced guilty; and a merely nominal punishment was inflicted upon them.

The records of this trial contain almost everything of biographical or even dramatic interest in the original book. They are, so far as they go, the complete history of the case; and the result of the trial, ambiguous as it was, supplied the only argument on which an even formal defence of the subsequent murder could be based. The substance of these records appears in full in Mr. Browning's work; and his readers can judge for themselves whether the letters which were intended to substantiate Pompilia's guilt, could, even if she had possessed the power of writing, have been written by a woman so young and so uncultured as herself. They will also see that the Count's plot against his wife was still more deeply laid than the above-mentioned circumstances attest.

Count Guido was of course not satisfied. He wanted a divorce; and he continued to sue for it by means of his brother, the Abate Paul, then residing in Rome; but before long he received news which was destined to change his plans. Pompilia was about to become a mother; and in consideration of her state, she had been removed from the convent to her paternal home, where she was still to be ostensibly a prisoner. The Comparini then occupied a small villa outside one of the city gates. A few months later, in this secluded spot, the Countess Franceschini gave birth to a son, whom her parents lost no time in conveying to a place of concealment and safety. The murder took place a fortnight after this event. I give the rest of the story in an almost literal translation from a contemporary narrative, which was published, immediately after the Count's execution, in the form of a pamphlet[22]--the then current substitute for a newspaper.

"Being oppressed by various feelings, and stimulated to revenge, now by honour, now by self-interest, yielding to his wicked thoughts, he (Count Guido) devised a plan for killing his wife and her nominal parents; and having enlisted in his enterprise four other ruffians,"--labourers on his property, "started with them from Arezzo, and on Christmas-eve arrived in Rome, and took up his abode at Ponte Milvio, where there was a villa belonging to his brother, and where he concealed himself with his followers till the fitting moment for the execution of his design had arrived. Having therefore watched from thence all the movements of the Comparini family, he proceeded on Thursday, the 2nd of January, at one o'clock of the night,[23] with his companions to the Comparini's house; and having left Biagio Agostinelli and Domenico Gambasini at the gate, he instructed one of the others to knock at the house-door, which was opened to him on his declaring that he brought a letter from Canon Caponsacchi at Civita Vecchia. The wicked Franceschini, supported by two other of his assassins, instantly threw himself on Violante Comparini, who had opened the door, and flung her dead upon the ground. Pompilia, in this extremity, extinguished the light, thinking thus to elude her assassins, and made for the door of a neighbouring blacksmith, crying for help. Seeing Franceschini provided with a lantern, she ran and hid herself under the bed, but being dragged from under it, the unhappy woman was barbarously put to death by twenty-two wounds from the hand of her husband, who, not content with this, dragged her to the feet of Comparini, who, being similarly wounded by another of the assassins, was crying, '_confession_.'"

"At the noise of this horrible massacre people rushed to the spot; but the villains succeeded in flying, leaving behind, however, in their haste, one his cloak, and Franceschini his cap, which was the means of betraying them. The unfortunate Francesca Pompilia, in spite of all the wounds with which she had been mangled, having implored of the Holy Virgin the grace of being allowed to confess, obtained it, since she was able to survive for a short time and describe the horrible attack. She also related that after the deed, her husband asked the assassin who had helped him to murder her _if she were really dead_; and being assured that she was, quickly rejoined, _let us lose no time, but return to the vineyard_;[24] and so they escaped. Meanwhile the police (Forza) having been called, it arrived with its chief officer (Bargello), and a confessor was soon procured, together with a surgeon, who devoted himself to the treatment of the unfortunate girl."

"Monsignore, the Governor, being informed of the event, immediately despatched Captain Patrizj to arrest the culprits; but on reaching the vineyard the police officers discovered that they were no longer there, but had gone towards the high road an hour before. Patrizj pursued his journey without rest, and having arrived at the inn, was told by the landlord that Franceschini had insisted upon obtaining horses, which were refused to him because he was not supplied with the necessary order; and had proceeded therefore on foot with his companions towards Baccano. Continuing his march, and taking the necessary precautions, he arrived at the Merluzza inn, and there discovered the assassins, who were speedily arrested; their knives still stained with blood, a hundred and fifty scudi in coin being also found on Franceschini's person. The arrest, however, cost Patrizj his life, for he had heated himself too much, and having received a slight wound, died in a few days."

"The knife of Franceschini was on the Genoese pattern, and triangular; and was notched at the edge, so that it could not be withdrawn from the wounded flesh without lacerating it in such a manner as to render the wound incurable."

"The criminals being taken to Ponte Milvio, they went through a first examination at the inn there at the hands of the notaries and judges sent thither for the purpose, and the chief points of a confession were obtained from them."

"When the capture of the delinquents was known in Rome, a multitude of the people hastened to see them as they were conveyed bound on horses into the city. It is related that Franceschini having asked one of the police officers in the course of the journey _how ever the crime had been discovered_, and being told _that it had been revealed by his wife, whom they had found still living_, was almost stupefied by the intelligence. Towards twenty-three o'clock (the last hour before sunset) they arrived at the prisons. A certain Francesco Pasquini, of Città di Castello, and Allessandro Baldeschi, of the same town, both twenty-two years of age, were the assistants of Guido Franceschini in the murder of the Comparini; and Gambasini and Agostinelli were those who stood on guard at the gate."

"Meanwhile the corpses of the assassinated Comparini were exposed at San Lorenzo, in Lucina, but so disfigured, and especially Franceschini's wife, by their wounds in the face, that they were no longer recognizable. The unhappy Francesca, after taking the sacrament, forgiving her murderers, under seventeen years of age, and after having made her will, died on the sixth day of the month, which was that of the Epiphany; and was able to clear herself of all the calumnies which her husband had brought against her. The surprise of the people in seeing these corpses was great, from the atrocity of the deed, which made one really shudder, seeing two septuagenarians and a girl of seventeen so miserably put to death."

"The trial proceeding meanwhile, many papers were drawn up on the subject, bringing forward all the most incriminating circumstances of this horrible massacre; and others also were written for the defence with much erudition, especially by the advocate of the poor, a certain Monsignor Spreti, which had the effect of postponing the sentence; also because Baldeschi persisted in denial, though he was tortured with the rope, and twice fainted under it. At last he confessed, and so did the others, who also revealed the fact that they had intended in due time to murder Franceschini himself, and take his money, because he had not kept his promise of paying them the moment they should have left Rome."

"On the twenty-second of February there appeared on the Piazza del Popolo a large platform with a guillotine and two gibbets, on which the culprits were to be executed. Many stands were constructed for the convenience of those who were curious to witness such a terrible act of justice; and the concourse was so great that some windows fetched as much as six dollars each. At eight o'clock Franceschini and his companions were summoned to their death, and having been placed in the Consorteria, and there assisted by the Abate Panciatici and the Cardinal Acciajuoli, forthwith disposed themselves to die well. At twenty o'clock the Company of Death and the Misericordia reached the dungeons, and the condemned were let down, placed on separate carts, and conveyed to the place of execution."

It is farther stated that Franceschini showed the most intrepidity and cold blood of them all, and that he died with the name of Jesus on his lips. He wore the same clothes in which he had committed the crime: a close-fitting garment (_juste-au-corps_) of grey cloth, a loose black shirt (_camiciuola_), a goat's hair cloak, a white hat, and a cotton cap.

The attempt made by him to defraud his accomplices, poor and helpless as they were, has been accepted by Mr. Browning as an indication of character which forbade any lenient interpretation of his previous acts. Pompilia, on the other hand, is absolved, by all the circumstances of her protracted death, from any doubt of her innocence which previous evidence might have raised. Ten different persons attest, not only her denial of any offence against her husband, but, what is of far more value, her Christian gentleness, and absolute maiden modesty, under the sufferings of her last days, and the medical treatment to which they subjected her. Among the witnesses are a doctor of theology (Abate Liberate Barberito), the apothecary and his assistant, and a number of monks or priests; the first and most circumstantial deposition being that of an Augustine, Frà Celestino Angelo di Sant' Anna, and concluding with these words: "I do not say more, for fear of being taxed with partiality. I know well that God alone can examine the heart. But I know also that from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and that my great St. Augustine says: 'As the life was, so is its end.'"

It needed all the evidence in Pompilia's favour to secure the full punishment of her murderer, strengthened, as he was, by social and ecclesiastical position, and by the acknowledged rights of marital jealousy. We find curious proof of the sympathies which might have prejudiced his wife's cause, in the marginal notes appended to her depositions, and which repeatedly introduce them as lies.

"F. _Lie concerning the arrival at Castelnuovo._"

"H. _New lies to the effect that she did not receive the lover's letters, and does not know how to write_," &c., &c.[25]

The significant question, "Whether and when a husband may kill his unfaithful wife," was in the present case not thought to be finally answered, till an appeal had been made from the ecclesiastical tribunal to the Pope himself. It was Innocent XII. who virtually sentenced Count Franceschini and his four accomplices to death.

When Mr. Browning wrote "The Ring and the Book," his mind was made up on the merits of the Franceschini case; and the unity of purpose which has impressed itself upon his work contributes largely to its power. But he also knew that contemporary opinion would be divided upon it; and he has given the divergent views it was certain to create, as constituting a part of its history. He reminds us that two sets of persons equally acquainted with the facts, equally free from any wish to distort them, might be led into opposite judgments through the mere action of some impalpable bias in one direction or the other, which third, more critical or more indifferent, would adopt a compromise between the two; and he closes his introductory chapter with a tribute to that mystery of human motive and character which so often renders more conclusive judgments impossible.

"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." (vol. viii. p. 55.)

The three forms of opinion here indicated appear in the three following chapters as the respective utterance of "HALF-ROME," "THE OTHER HALF-ROME," and "TERTIUM QUID."

HALF-ROME has an instinctive sympathy with the husband who has been made ridiculous, and the nobleman who is threatened with an ignominious death; and is disposed throughout to regard him as more sinned against than sinning. "Count Guido has been unfortunate in everything. He is one of those proud and sensitive men who make few friends, and who meet reverses half-way. He has waited thirty years for advancement in the church, is sick of hope deferred, and is on the point of returning home to end his days, as he thinks, in frugality and peace, when a pretty girl is thrown in his way. Visions of domestic cheerfulness and comfort rise up before him. He is entrapped into marriage before he has had time to consider what he is doing, and discovers when it is too late that the parents reputed wealthy have little left but debts; and that in exchange for their daughter's dowry, present and prospective, he must virtually maintain them as well as her."

"He is far from rich, but he makes the best of a bad bargain--takes the three with him to Arezzo, and lodges them with his mother and his youngest brother, in the old family house. He is repaid with howls of disappointment. Pietro and Violante want splendour and good-living. They haven't married their daughter to a nobleman and gone to live in his palace, to be duller than they were at home, and have less to eat and drink. They abuse the mother, who won't give up her place in the household, and try to sneer the young brother-priest out of his respect for old-fashioned ways. They go back to Rome, trumpeting their wrongs: and, once there, spring a mine upon the luckless Count. They refuse to pay the remainder of Pompilia's dowry, on the ground that she is not their child. Violante Comparini has cheated her husband into accepting a base-born girl as his own, and a well-born gentleman into marrying her, but was ready to have qualms of conscience as soon as it should be convenient to tell the truth; and now the moment has come."

"Count Guido, left alone with his nameless and penniless wife, still hopes for the best. Pompilia is not guilty of her mock parents' sins. She has been honest enough to take part against them when writing to her brother-in-law in Rome.[26] He and she may still live in peace together. But now the old story begins again--that of the elderly husband and the young wife. Canon Caponsacchi throws comfits at Pompilia in the theatre; brushes against her in the street; has constantly occasion to pass under her window, or to talk to some one opposite to it. He, of course, looks up; Pompilia looks down; the neighbours say, 'What of that?' The Count is uncomfortable, but he is only laughed at for his pains; the fox prowls round the hen-roost undisturbed. He wakes one morning, after a drugged sleep, to find the house ransacked, and Pompilia gone, and everyone able to inform him that she has gone with Caponsacchi, and to Rome. He pursues them, and overtakes them where they have spent the night together. She brazens the matter out, covers her husband with invective, and threatens him with his own sword. He gives both in charge, and follows them to Rome, where he seeks redress from the law. But he does not obtain redress, though the couple's guilt is made as clear as day by a packet of love letters which they had left behind them. They swear that they did not write the letters, and the Court believes them. 'They have done wrong, of course, but there is no proof of crime;' and they are let off with a mere show of punishment."

"The Count returns to Arezzo to find the whole story known, and himself the laughing-stock of everybody. He is complimented on his patience under his wife's attack--congratulated on having come out of it with a whole skin. He pushes his claim for a divorce on the obvious ground of infidelity! is met by a counter-claim on the ground of--cruelty! One exasperating circumstance fellows another. At last he hears of the birth of a child, which will be falsely represented as his heir; and then the pent-up passion breaks forth, and in one great avenging wave it washes his name clear."

"Yet he gives the guilty one a last chance. He utters the name of Caponsacchi at her door. If she regrets her offence, that name will bar it. It proves a talisman at which the door flies open. The Count and his assistants must be tried for form's sake. But if they are condemned, there is no justice left in Rome. If he had taken his wife's life at the moment of provocation, he would have been praised for the act. But he called in the law to do what he was bound to do for himself; and the law has assessed his honour at what seemed to be his own price. The vengeance, too long delayed, has been excessive in consequence. It was clumsy into the bargain, since the Canon has escaped alive. Well, if harm comes, husbands who are disposed to take the new way instead of the old will have had a lesson; and the Count has only himself to thank."

THE OTHER HALF-ROME is chiefly impressed by the spectacle of a young wife and mother butchered by her husband in cold blood: and can only think of her as having been throughout a victim. It does not absolve Violante, but it allows something for honest parental feeling in the old couple's desire for a child; and something for the good done to this human waif by its adoption into a decent home. According to this version, it is the Count and his brother who lay the matrimonial trap, and the Comparini parents and child who fall into it. "The grim Guido is at first kept in the background. Abate Paolo makes the proposal. He is oily and deferential, and flatters poor foolish Violante, and dazzles her at the same time. 'His elder brother,' he says, 'is longing to escape from Rome and its pomps and glare. He wants his empty old palace at Arezzo, and his breezy villa among the vines,'--and here the emptiness of both is described so as to sound like wealth. 'Poor Guido! he is always harping upon his home. But he wants a wife to take there--a wife not quite empty-handed, since he is not rich for his rank--but above all, with a true tender heart and an innocent soul--one who will be a child to his mother, and fall into his own ways. Many a parent would be glad to welcome him as a son-in-law, but report tells him that Violante's daughter is just the girl he wants.'"

"The marriage takes place. Foolish Pietro is talked over and strips himself of everything he has. He and his wife have no choice but to go and live with their son-in-law and his mother and brother. They meet with nothing under his roof but starvation, insult, and cruelty, and return home after a few months, duped and beggared, to ask hospitality of those whom they had once entertained. Violante, overwhelmed by these misfortunes, confesses that Pompilia is not her child, and Pietro proclaims the fact; not that he wishes to leave Pompilia in the lurch, but because he thinks this a sure way of getting her back.--Count Guido is clearly not the man to wish to retain as his wife a base-born girl without a dowry, and whom he has never loved.--But the case must be settled by law, the law pronounces in Count Guido's favour so far as the actual marriage portion is concerned; and Count Guido clearly lays his plans so as to half-drive and half-tempt his wife into the kind of misconduct which will rid him of her without prejudicing his right to what she has brought him."

This half of Rome accepts Pompilia's story of all that led to her flight, and Caponsacchi's statement that he assisted in it simply to save her life. It thinks the husband's intrigues sufficiently proved by the fact that the Canon owns to having received letters which the wife denies having written, and which must, therefore, have been forged. Count Guido, it declares, has had no wrongs to avenge, and supposing he had wrongs, he has adopted too convenient a mode of avenging them. "He demands protection from the law, and the moment its balance trembles against him he flies out of court, declaring that wounded honour can only be cured by the sword. At all events he has given the law plenty to do: three courts at work for him, and an appeal to the Pope besides. If any law is binding on mankind it is that such as he shall be made an end of. He is the common enemy of his fellow-men."

TERTIUM QUID sees no reason for assuming that the wrong is altogether on either side, and reviews the circumstances in such a manner as to show that there is probably right on both. He lays stress on the expediency of judging the Comparini by the morals of their class, and Count Guido by the peculiarities of his own nature; admits the punishment of the wife and parents to have been excessive, and cannot admit it to have been unprovoked; does not pretend to decide between the conflicting statements, and does not consider that Pompilia's dying confession throws much light upon them; seeing that it may be equally true, or false, or neutralized by another reserved for the priest's ear. Does not regard putting the Count to the torture as the right mode of eliciting the truth: because he may be innocent. But declares that if _he_ does not deserve to undergo the torture, no one ever did or will. Tertium Quid is sometimes flippant in tone, and his neutral attitude seems chiefly the result of indifference or of caution. He is addressing himself to a Highness and an Excellency, and is careful not to shock the prejudices of either. Still, his statement is the nearest approach to a judicial summing up of which the nature of the work admits.

Mr. Browning now enters on the constructive part of his work. He puts the personages of the drama themselves before us, allowing each to plead his or her own cause. The imaginary occasion is that of Count Guido's trial; and all the depositions which were made on the previous one are transferred to this. The author has been obliged in every case to build up the character from the evidence, and to re-mould and expand the evidence in conformity with the character. The motive, feeling, and circumstance set forth by each separate speaker are thus in some degree fictitious; but they are always founded upon fact; and the literal truth of a vast number of details is self-evident. We first hear:

COUNT GUIDO FRANCESCHINI. He has been caught red-handed from the murder of his wife. His crime is patent. He has himself confessed it under torture. His only hope of reprieve lies in the colour which he may be able to impart to it; and his speech is cunningly adapted to the nature of the Court, and to the moral and mental constitution of those of whom it is composed. His judges are churchmen: neutral on the subject of marriage; rather coarsely masculine in their idea of the destiny of women. He does not profess to have entertained any affection for his wife. He derides the idea of having ill-used her, and thinks she might have liked him better if he had done so, instead of threatening her into good behaviour like a naughty child, with hair powder for poison, and a wooden toy for a sword; has no doubt that, if she had cared to warm his heart, some smouldering embers within it might still have burst into flame; but admits once for all that there was no question of feeling in the case; it was a bargain on both sides, and a fair one as far as he was concerned.

Paternity, however, is a condition with which his hearers may be supposed to sympathize; and he is absolutely eloquent, when he describes the desire he has cherished for a son, and the burning pain which filled him when he knew that it had been defrauded. He tells the story of his wife's intrigue and flight, much as the opinion of Half-Rome has reflected it; but he laces the question of his child's legitimacy in such a manner as to extract an equal advantage from either view. In either case it was Pompilia's crowning iniquity that she gave birth to a child, and placed it beyond his reach; and in either case it was the outraged paternal feeling which inspired his act.

The whole monologue is leavened by a spirit of mock deference for religion, for the Church, and for the law which represents the Church. Count Guido is led in from the torture, a mass of mock-patient suffering: wincing as he speaks, but quite in spite of himself--grateful that his pains are not worse--begging his judges not to be too much concerned about him; "since, thanks to his age and shaken health, a fainting fit soon came to his relief--indeed, torture itself is a kind of relief from the moral agonies he has undergone." He reminds his judges that the Church was his only mistress for thirty years. He would have served her, he declares, to the end of his life, but that his fidelity had been so long ignored. He trusted to the law--in other words to the Church--to avenge his honour when he ought to have done so himself. She deceived his trust, and still he hoped and endured. When he came to Rome, in his last frenzy of just revenge, he still stayed his hand, because the Feast of the Nativity had begun: it was the period at which the Church enjoins peace and good-will towards men. The face of the heavenly infant looked down upon him; he prayed that he might not enter into temptation. But the days went by, and the Face withered and waned, and the cross alone confronted him. Then he felt that the hour had come, and he found his way to his wife's retreat.

The door opened to the name of Caponsacchi. His worst fears were thus confirmed. Even so, had he been admitted by Pompilia, weak from her recent sufferings, he might have paused in pity--by Pietro, he might have paused in contempt; but it was the hag Violante who opened to him: the cheat, the mock-mother, the source of all his wrongs. The impulse to stamp out that one detested life involved all three. And now he triumphs in the deed. He has cast a foul burden from his life. He can look his fellow-men in the face again. Far from admitting that he deserves punishment, he claims the sympathy and the approval of those who have met to judge him: for he has done their work--the work of Divine justice and of natural law. In a final burst of rhetoric he challenges his judges to restore to him his life, his name, his civil rights, and best of all, his son; and together, he declares, they will rebuild the family honour, and revive the old forgotten tradition of domestic purity and peace. And if one day the son, about to kiss his hand, starts at the marks of violence upon it, he will smile and say, "it was only an accident--

"... just a trip
O' the torture-irons in their search for truth,--
Hardly misfortune, and no fault at all." (vol. ix. p. 82.)

GIUSEPPE CAPONSACCHI next tells his story. It includes some details of his earlier life, which throw light on what will follow. He is not a priest from choice. He had interest in the Church, and grew up in the expectation of entering it. But when the time came for taking his vows, he recoiled from the sacrifice which they involved, and yielded only to the Bishop's assurance that he need make no sacrifice; there were two ways of interpreting such vows, and he need not select the harder; a man of polish and accomplishments was as valuable to the Church as a scholar or an ascetic. Her structure stood firm, and no one need now-a-days break his back in the effort to hold her up. Let him write his madrigals (he had a turn for verse-making) and not become a fixture in his seat in the choir through too close an attendance there. The terms were easy, and Caponsacchi became a priest, no worse and no better than he was expected to be; but with the feelings and purposes of a truer manhood lying dormant within him. These Pompilia was destined to arouse.

He relates that he first saw her at the theatre. His attention was attracted by her strange sad beauty: and a friend who sat by him, and was a connection of the husband's, threw comfits at her to make her return his gaze, warning him at the same time to do nothing which could compromise her. He accepted the warning, but could not forget the face. He felt a sudden disgust for the light women and the light pleasures which were alone within his reach, and determined to change his mode of life, and leave Arezzo for Rome.

At this juncture a love-letter was brought to him. It purported to come from the lady at whom he had flung the comfits;[27] offered him her heart, and begged an interview with him. The bearer was a masked woman, who owned to an equivocal position in Count Guido's household. Caponsacchi saw through the trick, declined the proposed interview on the ground of his priesthood, and completed his answer with an allusion to the husband, which would punish him in the probable case of its passing directly into his hands. The next day the same messenger appeared with a second letter, reproaching him for his cruelty; he answered in the same strain. But the letters continued, now dropped into his prayer-book, now flung down to him from a window. At length they changed their tone. He had been begged to come: he was now entreated to stay away. The husband, before absent, had returned: indifferent, had become jealous. His vengeance was aroused; and the sooner Caponsacchi escaped to Rome, the better. This challenge to his courage had the intended effect. He wrote word that the street was public if the house was not, and he would be under the lady's window that evening.

He went. She was standing there, lamp in hand, like Our Lady of Sorrows on her altar. She vanished, reappeared on a terrace close above his head, and spoke to him. He had sent her letters, she said, which she could not read; but she had been told that they spoke of love. She thought at first that he must be wicked, and then she felt that he could not be so wicked as to have meant what that woman said; and now that she saw his face she knew he did not write it. Still, he meant her well when no one else did. Her need was sore; he alone in the world could help her; she had determined to call to him. If he had some feverish fancy for what was not her's to give, he would be cured of it so soon as he knew all. She told him her story, and entreated him to take her to Rome, and consign her to her parents' care. He promised, and then his heart misgave him. Would it be right in him? Would it be good for her? He passed two days in a ceaseless internal conflict, and then determined to see her once more, but only to comfort and advise.

She stood again awaiting him at her window. Again she spoke, reproaching him for the suspense she had undergone. Her manner dispelled all doubt, and he did for her what she desired. The journey, which he describes in detail, was to him one spontaneous and continued revelation of her purity and truth. Then came the trial and his banishment. He was compelled to leave her to the protection of the law; to the good offices of the Court which confronts him now--of the men who, as he reminds them, laughed in their sleeve at the young priest's escapade, and at the transparent excuses with which he had taxed their credulity,--of the men who, in consideration for his youth, merely sent him to disport himself elsewhere, leaving the woman he had striven to protect, to the husband who was to murder her.

The news which summons him from Civita Vecchia has fallen on him like a thunderbolt. His being is shaken to its foundations. He strives to contain himself in outward deference to the Court, but a storm of suppressed sorrow and indignation rages beneath all his words: now uttering itself in pitying tender reverence for Pompilia's memory; now in scorn of those who would defame her; now in anger at himself, who is casting suspicion on her innocence by the very passion with which he defends it, now in defiance of those who choose to call the passion by the vulgar name of love. He tears up the flimsy calumnies which have been launched against her and himself; flinging them back in short, contemptuous utterances in the teeth of whosoever may believe them; begs his judges to forget his violence; and makes a last attempt to convince himself and them that no selfish desire underlies it. Pompilia is dying: he too is dead--to the world. What can she be to him but a dream--a thinker's dream--of a life not consecrated to the Church, but spent, as with her, in one constant domestic revelation of the eternal goodness and truth--a dream from which he will pass content.... And here the whole edifice of self-control and self-deception breaks down, and the agonized heart sends forth its cry:--

"O great, just, good God! Miserable me!" (vol. ix. p. 166.)

The third speaker is POMPILIA. Her evidence is the story of her life. It is given from her deathbed; and its half-dreamy reminiscences are uttered with the childlike simplicity with which she may have opened her heart to her priest. She is full of strange pathetic wonder at the mystery of existence; at the manner in which the thing we seem to grasp eludes us, and the seemingly impossible comes to pass. "Husbands are supposed to love their wives and guard them. See how it has been with her! That other man--that friend--they say _he_ loves her; his kindness was all love! She is a wife and he a priest, and yet they go on saying it! Her boy, she imagined, would be hers for life: and he is taken from her. He, too, becomes a dream; and in that dream she sees him grown tall and strong, and tutoring his mother as an imprudent child, for venturing out of the safe street into the lonely house where no help could reach her. It all reminds her of the day when she and a child-friend played at finding each other out in the figures on the tapestry; and Tisbe recognized her in a tree with a rough trunk for body, and her five fingers blossoming into leaves. Things are, and are not at the same time."

One thing, however, is real amidst the unreality: her joy and pride in finding herself a mother. The event proved that when she left Arezzo the hope of maternity was already dawning upon her; and Mr. Browning has combined this fact with the latent maternal sentiment of all true women, and read it into every impulse of her remaining life. She was wretched. She had vainly sought for help. She had resigned herself to the inevitable. She had lain down at night with the old thought--

"... 'Done, another day!
How good to sleep and so get nearer death!'--
When, what, first thing at day-break, pierced the sleep
With a summons to me? Up I sprang alive,
Light in me, light without me, everywhere
Change!" (vol. ix. p. 216.)