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"Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" Pompilia is conceived by Browning not as a pale, passive victim, but as strong with a vivid, interior life, and not more perfect in patience than in her obedience to the higher law which summons her to resistance to evil and championship of the right. Her purity is not the purity of ice but of fire.
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.
But there is a third set of writers who say that these pedigrees are but a piece of flattery used by writers, who, to gain favor with these great families, made them fictitious genealogies from the lineage of Numa; and that Pompilia was not the daughter of Tatia, but Lucretia, another wife whom he married after he came to his kingdom; however, all of them agree in opinion that she was married to the son of that Marcius who persuaded him to accept the government, and accompanied him to Rome where, as a mark of honor, he was chosen into the senate, and, after the death of Numa, standing in competition with Tullus Hostilius for the kingdom, and being disappointed of the election, in discontent killed himself; his son Marcius, however, who had married Pompilia, continuing at Rome, was the father of Ancus Marcius, who succeeded Tullus Hostilius in the kingdom, and was but five years of age when Numa died.
There is high devotion in Caponsacchi, a large-minded and free sagacity in Pope Innocent, and around Pompilia the tragic pathos of an incurable woe, which by its intensity might raise her to grandeur if it sprang from some more solemn source than the mere malignity and baseness of an unworthy oppressor.
Miserable me!" of the soldier-saint fell upon our ears. How we had listened! Earl steadily paced the floor, Barbara leaned her cheek upon my hand. Her soul was doing battle, and so was mine. We were all fighting the gallant fight. Read "Pompilia" and you are filled with reverence, read "Caponsacchi" and you are caught up by the spirit of action.
It might be that in spite of this new view of the case, it would ultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was really right, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia was really right.
Then again at night I know it can't come. I have always found that it doesn't do to take vulgar opinions. It is skippable the consequence of having a foolish scheme to fill out. But the story of Pompilia and Giuseppi is one of the finest things I know of anywhere. April 3d. It has been another week. I could not stand it any more. I am going over to the publishers' again this afternoon.
They will say that all the characters in The Blot on the 'Scutcheon take essentially the same view of the catastrophe of the play; that Pippa and Pompilia and Phene are the same person in the same state of mind. In fact, the family likeness is great. They will say that the philosophic monologues are repetitions of each other.
This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of débris, and comes nearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos and picturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This," which 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.
But we must take things as we find them, and perhaps a skilled writer knows his own business best. Never was Browning's mastery in narrative displayed with such effect as in Caponsacchi's account of the flight to Rome, which is not mere record, but record winged with lyrical enthusiasm. Never was his tenderness so deep or poignant as in his realisation of the motherhood of Pompilia.
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