These represent the episodical characters in this drama of life; and Browning has scattered them, as it were, behind the chief characters, whom sometimes they illustrate and sometimes they contrast.  Of these the whitest, simplest, loveliest is Pompilia, of whom I have already written.  The other chief characters are Count Guido and Giuseppe Caponsacchi; and to the full development of these two characters Browning gives all his powers.  They are contrasted types of the spirit of good and the spirit of evil conquering in man.  Up to a certain point in life their conduct is much alike.  Both belong to the Church—­one as a priest, one as a layman affiliated to the Church.  The lust of money and self, when the character of Pompilia forces act, turns Guido into a beast of greed and hate.  The same character, when it forces act, lifts Caponsacchi into almost a saint.  This was a piece of contrasted psychology in which the genius of Browning revelled, and he followed all the windings of it in both these hearts with the zest of an explorer.  They were labyrinthine, but the more labyrinthine the better he was pleased.  Guido’s first speech is made before the court in his defence.  We see disclosed the outer skin of the man’s soul, all that he would have the world know of him—­cynical, mocking, not cruel, not affectionate, a man of the world whom life had disappointed, and who wishing to establish himself in a retired life by marriage had been deceived and betrayed, he pleads, by his wife and her parents—­an injured soul who, stung at last into fury at having a son foisted on him, vindicates his honour.  And in this vindication his hypocrisy slips at intervals from him, because his hatred of his wife is too much for his hypocrisy.

This is the only touch of the wolf in the man—­his cruel teeth shown momentarily through the smooth surface of his defence.  A weaker poet would have left him there, not having capacity for more.  But Browning, so rich in thought he was, had only begun to draw him.  Guido is not only painted by three others—­by Caponsacchi, by Pompilia, by the Pope—­but he finally exposes his real self with his own hand.  He is condemned to death.  Two of his friends visit him the night before his execution, in his cell.  Then, exalted into eloquence by the fierce passions of fear of death and hatred of Pompilia, he lays bare as the night his very soul, mean, cruel, cowardly, hungry for revenge, crying for life, black with hate—­a revelation such as in literature can best be paralleled by the soliloquies of Iago.  Baseness is supreme in his speech, hate was never better given; the words are like the gnashing of teeth; prayers for life at any cost were never meaner, and the outburst of terror and despair at the end is their ultimate expression.