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The greatest development of character is seen in Guido, who starts with a defiant spirit of certain victory, but gradually becomes more subdued and abject, when he finds that he is to be killed, and finally shrieks in agony for the help of his victim, Pompilia. In Caponsacchi there is the inward questioning of the right and the wrong.
When the second volume, containing Giuseppe Caponsacchi, appeared, men no longer found it sordid or ugly; the third, with Pompilia, convinced them that the subject was not, after all, so incurably unlovely; and the fourth, with The Pope, and the passage from the Friar's sermon, may well persuade those who needed persuasion, that moral fruitfulness depends on the master, his eye and hand, his vision and grasp, more than on this and that in the transaction which has taken possession of his imagination.
Browning shows that all this testimony is necessary to establish a complete circle of evidence in regard to the central truth of the tragedy. The poem thus becomes a remarkable analytic study of the psychology of human minds. The four important characters, Guido, the husband; Caponsacchi, the priest; Pompilia, the girl-wife; and the Pope, stand out in strong relief.
Our public is beginning to measure the right and possible in art by the superficial probabilities of life and manners within a ten-mile radius of Charing Cross. Is it likely, asks the critic, that Duke Silva would have done this, that Fedalma would have done that? Who shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi acted thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils so?
Nine different speakers tell nine different stories, stories of varying incidents about different persons for the Pompilia of Guido and the Pompilia of Caponsacchi are as remote, each from other, as a marsh-fire from a star, and so with the rest.
He had with him one book and no other a Euripides, in which he read vigorously, and that the readings were fruitful his later poetry of the Greek drama bears witness. At present however his creative work lay in another direction; the whole of "the Roman murder story" the story of Pompilia and Guido and Caponsacchi he describes as being pretty well in his head.
The most interesting of the characters are Guido, the husband, who changes from bold defiance to abject fear; Caponsacchi, the young priest, who aids the wife in her flight from her brutal husband, and is unjustly accused of false motives; Pompilia, the young wife, one of the noblest characters in literature, fit in all respects to rank with Shakespeare's great heroines; and the Pope, a splendid figure, the strongest of all Browning's masculine characters.
Paracelsus and Rabbi Ben Ezra, Lippo Lippi, Karshish, Caponsacchi, and Ferishtah will all appear to be run in the same mould. They will seem to be the thinnest disguises which a poet ever assumed. The lack of the dramatic element in Browning a lack which is concealed from us by our intense sympathy for him and by his fondness for the trappings of the drama will be apparent to the after-comers.
Breckenridge's hand a package which proved to be a little book on Browning of which he had spoken to her. On the fly leaf was written in the donor's small, fine handwriting, "R. from G. The way WAS Caponsacchi." Rachael put the book on her bedside table, and wore June colors all day for the giver's sake.
For me it is also difficult to report a social function. At this one Browning presided, for Melville took up "Caponsacchi" and read it to us. That voice of his is in itself an interpretation, but Browning needs interpreting less than any other man who wrote great poems, because he wrote the greatest. It was four in the morning when the "O great, just, good God!
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