Chapter 5 - Page 2

Browning bought
for a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latin
record of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for the
murder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it is
scarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ring
and the Book_.

Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem during
his wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more the
dimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came at
last, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his
_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then came
the great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for something
sufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his brain
going like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing,"
he said, "whether I like it or not." And thus finally he took up the
scheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with a
degree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustible
scholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of the
world to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literary
and spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference to
its curious and original form of narration, I shall speak
subsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which has
more direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular that
few, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is the
extraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in the
poem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem which
constituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing,
properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death;
and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under alien
symbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truth
about his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in this
sense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty of
having to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without the
reward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi,
preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish and
honourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger of
men who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibility
seeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousness
of the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousness
of the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what he
seriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself would
never have had the cant to deny, ought to be