terial became a matter of artistic conscience" to Browning, and that the original characters " were no mere fictitious creations which he might shape or reject or amplify as he pleased," lies in the miraculous conversion of a matter-of-fact young cleric who maintained simply that he saw his duty and did it, albeit reluctantly and because urged thereto by an importunate young woman, into a triple extract of Galahad, Persius, and Saint George. We do meet Caponsacchi in the Book through his own deposition and the rather dubious part he did play in the story, and have therefore some basis for first-hand impression.

One of the poet's ways of being "true to the Book in all its details," was to take great pains to be accurate about a totally insignificant trifle and then proceed deliberately and for a purely sentimental reason so to falsify recorded and unquestioned fact that the result of his meticulous research was misapplied after all! It seems that Browning wished his hero to refer to the new moon on the night of the flight (a phenomenon of the least concern to the Canon of the Pieve) and in order to verify this prodigy he procured De Morgan's register of lunar risings for centuries back. But he also wished this heroic episode to occur on April 23rd because that is Saint George's day, and since it was so inconsiderate as to occur on the 29th, there was nothing for it but to push the calendar back a week or so. It was on this falsified date that the

moon was new.

Not only the stage-setting for Caponsacchi's monologue did the veracious Browning invent, as he did Franceschini's first, but the whole implication of the content; his biography, attitude toward his profession, situation in Arezzo, and the glorified Platonic romance that crowned his career. For any romantic aspect of the affair the only warrant in the Book is, by a curious freak of circumstance, the collection of letters repudiated distinctly by the two accused of writing them, and used most dramatically by Browning to enhance their nobility and the vileness of Guido. What Browning does not see fit to mention is the priest's testimony that letters were exchanged between him and the Signora relative to arrangments for the flight; some of hers being sent by a servant, some flung from her window, and one of his being pulled up by her on a string. The awkwardness of this admission lay in Francesca's

Preface to the translation.

repeated declaration that she did not know how to write. The most personal remark of the priest's concerning his protégé was as to the absurdity of the love-letter charge, " for she was a modest young woman and such actions would be out of keeping with her station and her birth." This was sufficient for the building of an impassioned adoration, a chivalric devotion, by an architect who "made it a principle to use fact as he found it," who would not substitute a substantiated fact of the Book by one more agreeable to his feelings."5

66

An even more glaring manifestation of Browning's reverence for the truth" shines forth in his manipulation of the love-letter crux. The real Caponsacchi's affidavit that there was an innocent exchange of missives but no other kind suffers a sea-change in the assertion of the poet's Caponsacchi that there was an incriminating exchange of missives and no other kind. The latter is original also both in his theory of their forged origin and his description of their contents, for in no case does he even paraphrase those of the Book; his version is quite new and perfectly adapted to his version of the whole situation. Equally original is his account of Pompilia's conversation with him, at variance with both their depositions, while his vehement vituperation of the Count has just this much foundation,-that the Canon, being asked if he were a relative of Franceschini, replied that he was not; and that he is quoted by Lamparelli as saying to Guido, "I am a gallant man, and what I have done, I have done to free your wife from the peril of death."

It is in his idealization of this rescued wife that Browning reaches the highest point of his auto-hypnosis. In addition to his multiplex presentation of her as the heroine of his story, the poet has given this bit of outside revelation; "I assure you that I found her just as she speaks and acts in my poem, in that old book." That may be, but anyone reading with unholden eyes is constrained to find her quite otherwise.

Her speech as revealed through her own deposition is succinct,

Hodell, in The Nation, Oct. 3rd, 1907. He adds, "Such fidelity is doubtless a handicap to creative activity," and accounts for it on the ground that Browning had "come to share the regard for fact which is so characteristic of the scientific nineteenth century."

Said to Mr. Chadwick and reported in The Christian Register, Jan., 1888, under the title, "An Eagle Feather."

prosaic, unemotional, unimaginative, and spiced with a certain self-confident asperity. Her testimony conflicts at so many points both with that of the priest and with verified facts that it is at least open to suspicion.

Her actions are veiled behind the same impenetrable mystery that shuts us from all the characters and causes them to be seen as through a glass darkly, but the total impression is of a victim of most untoward circumstances, exploited from first to last, in an equivocal position, either partly of her own volition or altogether by force, and finally paying a terrific penalty either wholly vicariously or in part for her own folly.

Browning's Pompilia speaks with the tongue of men and of angels, and acts as though the combined mantles of Antigone, Desdemona, and the Virgin Mary had fallen upon her sanctified shoulders. By her own account her voluntary conduct was animated by maternal passion, a mature sense of responsibility and devotion combined with a child-like pride and joy. It was for this that she gave up her rôle of passive endurance, for its bliss that she pardoned the wrongs that preceded it, for his part in it that she worshipped the soldier-saint who rescued her, and looked up to him in an ecstasy of gratitude.

The thorough nature of the transformation is shown by such obvious contrasts as these: that from the Francesca of the Book we have not one recorded syllable concerning the child; that her avowed reason for flight was fear for her own life; that she was capable of retorting rather tartly to her husband concerning his disappointment over her sterility and his jealousy of younger men; that she took the escort of the priest quite as a matter of course, having rebuked him, indeed, for the dilatory manner in which he was carrying out the plan she had urged upon him. It is thus that Browning persuaded Hodell that he "would not misrepresent the truth for her sake." It is thus that "the incidents of the tragedy, even when compromising to Pompilia, whose cause he championed, are used without repression or falsification." merely took a young Italian girl, by birth bourgeois or worse, the facts of whose story it is impossible to come at, commonplace save through her suffering, and breathed into that common clay such breath of magic life that it became an ermine soul; at once God's gift whereby He

and

showed for once

How He would have the world go white.

Earth's flower

She holds up to the softened gaze of God!

It is precisely because the Juris Doctor Bottini did not see fit to do this that Browning slimes him over with a calumny quite as gratuitous, quite as complete, and quite as diabolically clever as that which he asserts the lawyer perpetrated upon Pompilia,-only it happens to be that assertion which lacks the proof.

7

That the poet's headstrong emotionalism should have betrayed him into flagrant injustice is not strange, but it is curious indeed that the whole flock of critics should have trotted along so docilely after him. They not only permit him, " in his abiding conscientiousness in the use of fact," to weave a conscienceless web of falsity, but they second him in giving no credit whatever to the inherent difficulties in the lawyer's position. As Advocate of the Fisc, appointed by the Court for the Prosecution, it was his task to show that the murderer had no provocation and was therefore guilty in the first degree. As the defense was based on "injured honor," it was sufficient to urge, as Bottini did, that the plea "had no foundation in fact and was irrelevant in law." To be versus Guido did not require him to be pro Francesca beyond that point. Being a mere attorney without benefit of poetic license, he was obliged to recognize and cope with certain stubborn items marshalled by the opposition. To ignore them, to contradict them, or to interpret them unreasonably, would be to offer an advantage to Archangeli which that official, not being quite the fatuous fool that Browning makes of him, would be quick enough to seize. To rebuke him for "his frank admission of the possibility of his client's guilt" is rather absurd, considering first that the then deceased Signora Francesca was not his client, and second that all that certainly could be said of the charge preferred against her was that it was not proven. Certainly it may be said of Bottini that he performed his official duty in a capable manner and that

See especially Louise Fagan Pierce in "A Guide for the Blind," Modern Philology, April, 1909; and Cook in his Commentary, pp. 161 and 180. Both are commenting upon Hodell. The former is caustic as to his translation but remarks incidentally that Browning's Bottini is not a caricature. The latter says it is an unfair caricature but diverting.

his diagnosis of the case is more conformable to the data actually submitted than is Browning's. Supported by his colleague Gambi, he refutes every refutable point presented by the other side, puts the best possible construction on its accusations, and admits nothing he is not compelled to by the evidence, some of which includes testimony from his "client" worth more to the opposition than to him. In our estimate of such admissions it makes all the difference in the world whether the man's tongue is in his cheek or in its proper place. There is no warrant whatever for reading into the Fisc's arguments one continuous sly insinuating leer or for presuming that they emanated from a salacious cynic who deliberately smirched a figure of pure alabaster in order to display his skill at whitewashing.

Equally patent as proof that Browning was "scrupulously, but never laboriously, accurate to the facts before him " is the delineation of Archangeli. It is here truly that "the poet affords one of the most remarkable illustrations of literal and detailed accuracy in the use of the raw material of art." This raw material consisted of a set of six arguments divided evenly between Archangeli and Spreti, similar in tone to those of the other side, uniformly courteous and technically resourceful.

Representing the Defense, the Procurator of the Poor fulfilled his official obligation by endeavoring to commute the death-penalty of a murderer. To do this he had to assume the conjugal unfaithfulness which constituted the "extenuating circumstance" but which he could no more prove than the Prosecution could disprove. In a sincere, forcible, manly way, Guido's attorney does his duty by his client, concluding with sufficient sagacity that even if the claim of injured honor were not established, the mere suspicion of it would induce a morbid state and serve to mitigate a crime which was "great indeed but very greatly to be pitied."

From this material the expertly veracious poet created a flabby, frivolous, ignorant, irresponsible fraud, puffed up with blubber and vanity, eaten up by jealousy of his rival, pride in his little son, and animosity toward the Pope. For none of these details is there the slightest authentic hint. In claiming that there is not only hint but whole cloth, Mr. Hodell is uniformly content to pronounce his unsubstantiated generalities but the almost sole instance he does cite is significant. He points out that Archangeli's perora