_THE DRAMAS_
Of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to
write dramas in poetry, Browning was the most persevering. I suppose
that, being conscious of his remarkable power in the representation of
momentary action and of states of the soul, he thought that he could
harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a number of persons, and
of their passions in sword-play with one another; and then conduct to a
catastrophe their interaction. But a man may be capable of writing
dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances without being capable of writing a
drama. Indeed, so different are the two capabilities that I think the
true dramatist could not write such a lyric or romance as Browning calls
dramatic; his genius would carry one or the other beyond the just limits
of this kind of poetry into his own kind. And the writer of excellent
lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real
drama. I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term
"dramatic" were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself. I
have heard Chaucer called dramatic. It is a complete misnomer. His
genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama. Had he
lived in Elizabeth's time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one,
but he must have failed. The genius for story-telling is just the genius
which is incapable of being a fine dramatist. And the opposite is also
true. Shakespeare, great as his genius was, would not have been able to
write a single one of the Canterbury Tales. He would have been driven
into dramatising them.
Neither Tennyson nor Browning had dramatic genius--that is, the power to
conceive, build, co-ordinate and finish a drama. But they thought they
had, and we may pardon them for trying their hand. I can understand the
hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men,
succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the
serious drama, written in poetry. It is a legitimate ambition; but poets
should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their
energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well. That men
like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding
what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the
master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to
say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Molière on
the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed,
and versed; that they, having written a play like _Harold_ or
_Strafford_, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it
on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem
incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so
curiously liable to self-deceit.
The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed. It would be
unnatural not to try one's hand. It is the writing of the others which
is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning. They ought to have felt,
being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic
capacity. Other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves
better. Byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have
them represented on the stage. He felt they were not fit for that; and,
moreover, such scenic poems as _Manfred_ and _Cain_ were not intended
for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense. To write
things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the
purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a
poet's work, and among them, in Browning's work, might be classed _In a
Balcony_, which I suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely
call a drama.
Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a
novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical
event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most
likely to write a drama well--had self-knowledge enough to understand,
after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power.
Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama.
Coleridge tried, and staged _Remorse_. It failed and deserved to fail.
To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his
mind as he wrote it--a fatal want in a dramatist. Even its purple
patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it.
Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious. One
would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least
likely of men to write a true drama. Yet the _Cenci_ approaches that
goal, and the fragment of _Charles the First_ makes so great a grip on
the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are
so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature
that it should have been finished. Yet Shelley himself gave it up. He
knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.
Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits. They
went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural
and legitimate, but for the stage. This is a curious psychological
problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had
chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself. I wish,
having in his mature age read _Strafford_ over, and then read his other
dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as
_Strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a
dramatist and could not." Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this. He
was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if
he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with
awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked
in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.
However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas,
than Browning's. That is natural enough. For Browning's dramas were
written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was
small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed.
Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the Drama was great, and when
his intellect had undergone years of careful training. He studied the
composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage
situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from
that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced
songs, like Shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and
at the same time strove hard to make his own original. He laboured at
the history, and _Becket_ and _Harold_ are painfully historical. History
should not master a play, but the play the history. The poet who is
betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his
conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and _Harold_
and _Becket_ both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of those
critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.
Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the
imagination, not by dramatic genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative
success. He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Scott or Byron. _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_ get along in one's
mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire.
Some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill.
We cannot forget the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells in the
mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in
_Becket_ of the mighty and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its
own possession the soul of the world. But the minor characters; the
action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action
and circumstance together towards the catastrophe--these things were out
of Tennyson's reach, and still more out of Browning's. They could both
build up characters, and Browning better than Tennyson; they could both
set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their
character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and
women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of
a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a
town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king's
palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that
nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or
unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and Browning more
incapable than Tennyson.
There is another thing to say. The three long dramas of Tennyson are
better as dramas than the long ones of Browning. But the smaller
dramatic pieces of Browning are much better than the smaller ones of
Tennyson. _The Promise of May_ is bad in dialogue, bad in composition,
bad in delineation of character, worst of all in its subject, in its
plot, and in its motives. _The Cup_, and _The Falcon_, a beautiful story
beautifully written by Boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised,
by Tennyson. The _Robin Hood_ play has gracious things in it, but as a
drama it is worthless, and it is impossible to forgive Tennyson for his
fairies. All these small plays are dreadful examples of what a great
poet may do when he works in a vehicle--if I may borrow a term from
painting--for which he has no natural capacity, but for which he thinks
he has. He is then like those sailors, and meets justly the same fate,
who think that because they can steer a boat admirably, they can also
drive a coach and four. The love scene in _Becket_ between Rosamund and
Henry illustrates my meaning. It was a subject in itself that Tennyson
ought to have done well, and would probably have done well in another
form of poetry; but, done in a form for which he had no genius, he did
it badly. It is the worst thing in the play. Once, however, he did a
short drama fairly well. _The Cup_ has some dramatic movement, its
construction is clear, its verse imaginative, its scenery well
conceived; and its motives are simple and easily understood. But then,
as in _Becket_, Irving stood at his right hand, and advised him
concerning dramatic changes and situations. Its passion is, however,
cold; it leaves us unimpressed.
On the contrary, Browning's smaller dramatic pieces--I cannot call them
dramas--are much better than those of Tennyson. _Pippa Passes_, _A Soul's
Tragedy_, _In a Balcony_, stand on a much higher level, aim higher, and
reach their aim more fully than Tennyson's shorter efforts. They have
not the qualities which fit them for representation, but they have those
which fit them for thoughtful and quiet reading. No one thinks much of
the separate personalities; our chief interest is in following
Browning's imagination as it invents new phases of his subject, and
plays like a sword in sunlight, in and out of these phases. As poems of
the soul in severe straits, made under a quasi-dramatic form, they reach
a high excellence, but all that we like best in them, when we follow
them as situations of the soul, we should most dislike when represented
on the stage.
* * * * *
_Strafford_ is, naturally, the most immature of the dramas, written
while he was still writing _Paracelsus_, and when he was very young. It
is strange to compare the greater part of its prosaic verse with the
rich poetic verse of _Paracelsus_; and this further illustrates how much
a poet suffers when he writes in a form which is not in his genius.
There are only a very few passages in _Strafford_ which resemble poetry
until we come to the fifth Act, where Browning passes from the jerky,
allusive but rhythmical prose of the previous acts into that talk
between Strafford and his children which has poetic charm, clearness and
grace. The change does not last long, and when Hollis, Charles and Lady
Carlisle, followed by Pym, come in, the whole Act is in confusion.
Nothing is clear, except absence of the clearness required for a drama.
But the previous Acts are even more obscure; not indeed for their
readers, but for hearers in a theatre who--since they are hurried on at
once to new matter--are forced to take in on the instant what the
dramatist means. It would be impossible to tell at first hearing what
the chopped-up sentences, the interrupted phrases, the interjected
"nots" and "buts" and "yets" are intended to convey. The conversation is
mangled. This vice does not prevail in the other dramas to the same
extent as in _Strafford_. Browning had learnt his lesson, I suppose,
when he saw _Strafford_ represented. But it sorely prevails in
_Colombe's Birthday_.
Strafford is brought before us as a politician, as the leader of the
king's side in an austere crisis of England's history. The first scene
puts the great quarrel forward as the ground on which the drama is to be
wrought. An attempt is made to represent the various elements of the
popular storm in the characters of Pym, Hampden, the younger Vane and
others, and especially in the relations between Pym and Strafford, who
are set over, one against the other, with some literary power. But the
lines on which the action is wrought are not simple. No audience could
follow the elaborate network of intrigue which, in Browning's effort to
represent too much of the history, he has made so confused. Strong
characterisation perishes in this effort to write a history rather than
a drama. What we chiefly see of the crisis is a series of political
intrigues at the Court carried out by base persons, of whom the queen is
the basest, to ruin Strafford; the futility of Strafford's sentimental
love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; Strafford's
blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the
Parliament House, and the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low
intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impression on the mind, not
the mighty struggle, not the fate of the Monarchy and its dark
supporter.
Browning tries--as if he had forgotten that which should have been first
in his mind--to lift the main struggle into importance in the last Act,
but he fails. That which ought to be tragic is merely sentimental.
Indeed, sentimentality is the curse of the play. Strafford's love of the
king is almost maudlin. The scenes between Strafford and Pym in which
their ancient friendship is introduced are over-sentimentalised, not
only for their characters, but for the great destinies at stake. Even at
the last, when Pym and Strafford forgive each other and speak of meeting
hereafter, good sense is violated, and the natural dignity of the scene,
and the characters of the men. Strafford is weaker here, if that were
possible, than he is in the rest of the drama. Nothing can be more
unlike the man.
Pym is intended to be especially strong. He is made a blusterer. He was
a gentleman, but in this last scene he is hateful. As to Charles, he was
always a selfish liar, but he was not a coward, and a coward he becomes
in this play. He, too, is sentimentalised by his uxoriousness. Lady
Carlisle is invented. I wish she had not been. Stratford's misfortunes
were deep enough without having her in love with him. I do not believe,
moreover, that any woman in the whole world from the very beginning was
ever so obscure in her speech to the man she loves as Lady Carlisle was
to Strafford. And the motive of her obscurity--that if she discloses the
King's perfidy she robs Strafford of that which is dearest to him--his
belief in the King's affection for him--is no doubt very fine, but the
woman was either not in love who argued in that way, or a fool; for
Strafford knew, and lets her understand that he knew, the treachery of
the King. But Browning meant her to be in love, and to be clever.
* * * * *
The next play Browning wrote, undeterred by the fate of _Strafford_, was
_King Victor and King Charles_. The subject is historical, but it is
modified by Browning, quite legitimately, to suit his own purposes. In
itself the plot is uninteresting. King Victor, having brought the
kingdom to the verge of ruin, abdicates and hands the crown to his son,
believing him to be a weak-minded person whose mistakes will bring
him--Victor--back to the throne, when he can throw upon the young king
the responsibility of the mess he has himself made of the kingdom.
Charles turns out to be a strong character, sets right the foreign
affairs of the kingdom, and repairs his father's misgovernment. Then
Victor, envious and longing for power, conspires to resume the throne,
and taken prisoner, begs back the crown. Charles, touched as a son, and
against his better judgment, restores his father, who immediately and
conveniently dies. It is a play of court intrigue and of politics, and
these are not made interesting by any action, such as we call dramatic,
in the play. From end to end there is no inter-movement of public
passion. There are only four characters. D'Ormea, the minister, is a
mere stick in a prime-minister's robes and serves Victor and Charles
with equal ease, in order to keep his place. He is not even subtle in
his _rôle_. When we think what Browning would have made of him in a
single poem, and contrast it with what he has made of him here, we are
again impressed with Browning's strange loss of power when he is writing
drama. Victor and Charles are better drawn than any characters in
_Strafford_; and Polyxena is a great advance on Lady Carlisle. But this
piece is not a drama; it is a study of soul-situations, and none of them
are of any vital importance. There is far too great an improbability in
the conception of Charles. A weak man in private becomes a strong man in
public life. To represent him, having known and felt his strength, as
relapsing into his previous weakness when it endangers all his work, is
quite too foolish. He did not do it in history. Browning, with
astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a
foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it. And the
reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental
one--a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as
Strafford is supposed to have for Charles I.--the kind of love which
intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for
an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it.
Even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a
failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing.
* * * * *
The Return of the Druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its
predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives
which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is
with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry. Browning,
having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire
to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor
are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected
conversations, political intrigue. Things are in this play as the logic
of imaginative passion wills, as Browning's conception drove him. But,
unfortunately for its success as a true drama, Browning doubles and
redoubles the motives which impel his characters. Djabal, Anael, Loys,
have all of them, two different and sometimes opposite aims working in
them. They are driven now by one, now by the other, and the changes of
speech and action made by the different motives surging up, alternately
or together, within their will, are so swift and baffling that an
audience would be utterly bewildered. It is amusing to follow the
prestidigitation of Browning's intellect creating this confused battle
in souls as long as one reads the play at home, though even then we
wonder why he cannot, at least in a drama, make a simple situation. If
he loved difficult work, this would be much more difficult to do well
than the confused situation he has not done well. Moreover, the
simplified situation would be effective on the stage; and it would give
a great opportunity for fine poetry. As it is, imaginative work is
replaced by intellectual exercises, poetry is lost in his analysis of
complex states of feeling. However, this involved in-and-out of thought
is entertaining to follow in one's study if not on the stage. It is done
with a loose power no one else in England possessed, and our only regret
is that he did not bridle and master his power. Finally, with regard to
this play, I should like to isolate from it certain imaginative
representations of characters which embody types of the men of the time,
such as the Prefect and the Nuncio. The last interview between Loys and
the Prefect, taken out of the drama, would be a little masterpiece of
characterisation.
* * * * *
_The Blot in the Scutcheon_ is the finest of all these dramas. It might
well be represented on the stage as a literary drama before those who
had already read it, and who would listen to it for its passion and
poetry; but its ill-construction and the unnaturalness of its situations
will always prevent, and justly, its public success as a drama. It is
full of pathetic and noble poetry; its main characters are clearly
outlined and of a refreshing simplicity. It has few obtrusive
metaphysical or intellectual subtleties--things which Browning could not
keep out of his dramas, but which only a genius like Shakespeare can
handle on the stage. It has real intensity of feeling, and the various
passions interlock and clash together with some true dramatic
interaction. Their presentation awakens our pity, and wonder for the
blind fates of men. The close leaves us in sorrow, yet in love with
human nature. The pathos of the catastrophe is the most pathetic thing
in Browning. I do not even except the lovely record of Pompilia. The
torture of the human heart, different but equal, of Tresham and Mildred
in the last scene, is exceedingly bitter in its cry--too cruel almost to
hear and know, were it not relieved by the beauty of their tenderness
and forgiveness in the hour of death. They die of their pain, but die
loving, and are glad to die. They have all of them--Mildred, Tresham,
and Mertoun--sinned as it were by error. Death unites them in
righteousness, loveliness and love. A fierce, swift storm sweeps out of
a clear heaven upon them, destroys them, and saves them. It is all over
in three days. They are fortunate; their love deserved that the ruin
should be brief, and the reparation be transferred, in a moment, to the
grave justice of eternity.
The first two acts bear no comparison with the third. The first scene,
with all the servants, only shows how Browning failed in bringing a
number of characters together, and in making them talk with ease and
connectedly. Then, in two acts, the plot unfolds itself. It is a marvel
of bad construction, grossly improbable, and offends that popular common
sense of what is justly due to the characters concerned and to human
nature itself, to which a dramatist is bound to appeal.
Mildred and Mertoun have loved and sinned. Mertoun visits her every
night. Gerard, an old gamekeeper, has watched him climbing to her
window, and he resolves to tell this fatal tale to Tresham, Mildred's
brother, whose strongest feeling is pride in the unblemished honour of
his house. Meantime Mertoun has asked Tresham for Mildred's hand in
marriage, and these lovers, receiving his consent, hope that their sin
will be purged. Then Gerard tells his story. Tresham summons Mildred.
She confesses the lover, and Tresham demands his name. To reveal the
name would have saved the situation, as we guess from Tresham's
character. His love would have had time to conquer his pride. But
Mildred will not tell the name, and when Tresham says: "Then what am I
to say to Mertoun?" she answers, "I will marry him." This, and no
wonder, seems the last and crowning dishonour to Tresham, and he curses,
as if she were a harlot, the sister whom he passionately loves.
This is a horrible situation which Browning had no right to make. The
natural thing would be for Mildred to disclose that her lover and Lord
Mertoun, whom she was to marry, were one and the same. There is no
adequate reason, considering the desperate gravity of the situation, for
her silence; it ought to be accounted for and it is not, nor could it
be. Her refusal to tell her lover's name, her confession of her
dishonour and at the same time her acceptance of Mertoun as a husband at
her brother's hands, are circumstances which shock probability and
common human nature.
Then it is not only this which irritates a reader; it is also the
stupidity of Tresham. That also is most unnatural. He believes that the
girl whom he has loved and honoured all his life, whose purity was as a
star to him, will accept Mertoun while she was sinning with another! He
should have felt that this was incredible, and immediately understood,
as Guendolen does, that her lover and Mertoun were the same. Dulness and
blindness so improbable are unfitting in a drama, nor does the passion
of his overwhelming pride excuse him. The central situation is a
protracted irritation. Browning was never a good hand at construction,
even in his poems. His construction is at its very worst in this drama.
But now, when we have, with wrath, accepted this revolting
situation--which, of course, Browning made in order to have his tragic
close, but which a good dramatist would have arranged so differently--we
pass into the third act, the tragic close; and that is simple enough in
its lines, quite naturally wrought out, beautifully felt, and of
exquisite tenderness. Rashness of wrath and pride begin it; Mertoun is
slain by Tresham as he climbs to Mildred's window, though why he should
risk her honour any more when she is affianced to him is another of
Browning's maddening improbabilities. And then wrath and pride pass
away, and sorrow and love and the joy of death are woven together in
beauty. If we must go through the previous acts to get to this, we
forgive, for its sake, their wrongness. It has turns of love made
exquisitely fair by inevitable death, unfathomable depths of feeling. We
touch in these last scenes the sacred love beyond the world in which
forgiveness is forgotten.
* * * * *
_Colombe's Birthday_ is of all these plays the nearest to a true drama.
It has been represented in America as well as in England, and its
skilful characterisation of Valence, Colombe, and Berthold has won
deserved praise; but it could not hold the stage. The subject is too
thin. Colombe finds out on her birthday that she is not the rightful
heir to the Duchy; but as there is some doubt, she resolves to fight the
question. In her perplexities she is helped and supported by Valence, an
advocate from one of the cities of the Duchy, who loves her, but whom
she believes to serve her from loyalty alone. Berthold, the true heir,
to avoid a quarrel, offers to marry Colombe, not because he loves her,
but as a good piece of policy. She then finds out that she loves
Valence, and refusing the splendid alliance, leaves the court a private
person, with love and her lover. This slight thing is spun out into five
acts by Browning's metaphysics of love and friendship. There is but
little action, or pressure of the characters into one another. The
intriguing courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit together. The
only thing alive in them is their universal meanness. That meanness, it
is true, enhances the magnanimity of Valence and Berthold, but its dead
level in so many commonplace persons lowers the dramatic interest of the
piece. The play is rather an interesting conversational poem about the
up-growing of love between two persons of different but equally noble
character; who think love is of more worth than power or wealth, and who
are finally brought together by a bold, rough warrior who despises love
in comparison with policy. Its real action takes place in the hearts of
Valence and Colombe, not in the world of human life; and what takes
place in their hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so curiously
apart from the simplicities of human love, so complicated, even beyond
the complexity of the situation--for Browning loved to pile complexity
on complexity--that it makes the play unfit for public representation
but all the more interesting for private reading. But, even in the quiet
of our room, we ask why Browning put his subject into a form which did
not fit it; why he overloaded the story of two souls with a host of
characters who have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are
extremely wearisome? It might have been far more successfully done in
the form of _In a Balcony_, which Browning himself does not class as a
drama.
* * * * *
_Luria_, the last of the dramas in date of composition, may be said to
have no outward action, except in one scene where Tiburzio breaks in
suddenly to defend Luria, who, like a wounded stag, stands at bay among
the dogs and hunters who suspect his fidelity to Florence. It is a drama
of inward action, of changes in the souls of men. The full purification
of Luria is its one aim, and the motive of Luria himself is a single
motive. The play occupies one day only, and passes in one place.
Luria is a noble Moor who commands the armies of Florence against Pisa,
and conquers Pisa. He is in love with the city of Florence as a man is
with a woman. Its beauty, history, great men, and noble buildings
attract his Eastern nature, by their Northern qualities, as much as they
repel his friend and countryman Husain. He lives for her with unbroken
faithfulness, and he dies for her with piteous tenderness when he finds
out that Florence distrusts him. When he is suspected of treachery, his
heart breaks, and to explain his broken heart, he dies. There is no
other way left to show to Florence that he has always been true to her.
And at the moment of his death, all who spied on him, distrusted and
condemned him, are convinced of his fidelity. Even before he dies, his
devotion to his ideal aim, his absolute unselfishness, have won over and
ennobled all the self-interested characters which surround him--Puccio,
the general who is jealous of him; Domizia, the woman who desires to use
him as an instrument of her hate to Florence; even Braccio, the
Macchiavellian Florentine who thinks his success must be dangerous to
the state. Luria conquers them all. It is the triumph of
self-forgetfulness. And the real aim of the play is not dramatic. It is
too isolated an aim to be dramatic. It is to build up and image the
noble character of Luria, and it reaches that end with dignity.
The other characters are but foils to enhance the solitary greatness of
Luria. Braccio is a mere voice, a theory who talks, and, at the end,
when he becomes more human, he seems to lose his intelligence. The
Secretaries have no individuality. Domizia causes nothing, and might
with advantage be out of the play. However, when, moved by the nobleness
of Luria, she gives up her revenge on Florence, she speaks well, and her
outburst is poetical. Puccio is a real personage, but a poor fellow.
Tiburzio is a pale reflection of Luria. Husain alone has some
personality, but even his Easternness, which isolates him, is merged in
his love of Luria. All of them only exist to be the scaffolding by means
of which Luria's character is built into magnificence, and they
disappear from our sight, like scaffolding, when the building is
finished.
There are fine things in the poem: the image of Florence; its men, its
streets, its life as seen by the stranger-eyes of Luria; the contrast
between the Eastern and the Latin nature; the picture of hot war; the
sudden friendship of Luria and Tiburzio, the recognition in a moment of
two high hearts by one another; the picture of Tiburzio fighting at the
ford, of Luria tearing the letter among the shamed conspirators; the
drawing of the rough honest soldier-nature in Puccio, and, chief of all,
the vivid historic painting of the time and the type of Italian
character at the time of the republics.
* * * * *
The first part of _A Soul's Tragedy_ is written in poetry and the second
in prose. The first part is dull but the second is very lively and
amusing; so gay and clever that we begin to wish that a good deal of
Browning's dramas had been written in prose. And the prose itself,
unlike his more serious prose in his letters and essays, is good, clear,
and of an excellent style. The time of the play is in the sixteenth
century; but there is nothing in it which is special to that time: no
scenery, no vivid pictures of street life, no distinct atmosphere of the
period. It might just as well be of the eighteenth or nineteenth
century. The character of Chiappino may be found in any provincial town.
This compound of envy, self-conceit, superficial cleverness and real
silliness is one of our universal plagues, and not uncommon among the
demagogues of any country. And he contrasts him with Ogniben, the Pope's
legate, another type, well known in governments, skilled in affairs,
half mocking, half tolerant of the "foolish people," the alluring
destroyer of all self-seeking leaders of the people. He also is as
common as Chiappino, as modern as he is ancient. Both are representative
types, and admirably drawn. They are done at too great length, but
Browning could not manage them as well in Drama as he would have done in
a short piece such as he placed in _Men and Women_. Why this little
thing is called _A Soul's Tragedy_ I cannot quite understand. That title
supposes that Chiappino loses his soul at the end of the play. But it is
plain from his mean and envious talk at the beginning with Eulalia that
his soul is already lost. He is not worse at the end, but perhaps on the
way to betterment. The tragedy is then in the discovery by the people
that he who was thought to be a great soul is a fraud. But that
conclusion was not Browning's intention. Finally, if this be a tragedy
it is clothed with comedy. Browning's humour was never more wise,
kindly, worldly and biting than in the second act, and Ogniben may well
be set beside Bishop Blougram. It would be a privilege to dine with
either of them.
Every one is in love with _Pippa Passes_, which appeared immediately
after _Sordello_. It may have been a refreshment to Browning after the
complexities and metaphysics of _Sordello_, to live for a time with the
soft simplicity of Pippa, with the clear motives of the separate
occurrences at Asolo, with the outside picturesque world, and in a lyric
atmosphere. It certainly is a refreshment to us. It is a pity so little
was done by Browning in this pleasant, graceful, happy way. The
substance of thought in it and its intellectual force are just as strong
as in _Sordello_ or _Paracelsus_, and are concerned, especially in the
first two pieces, with serious and weighty matters of human life. Beyond
the pleasure the poem gives, its indirect teaching is full of truth and
beauty; and the things treated of belong to many phases of human life,
and touch their problems with poetic light and love. Pippa herself, in
her affectionate, natural goodness, illuminates the greater difficulties
of life in a single day more than Sordello or Paracelsus could in the
whole course of their lives.
It may be that there are persons who think lightly of _Pippa Passes_ in
comparison with _Fifine at the Fair_, persons who judge poetry by the
difficulties they find in its perusal. But _Pippa Passes_ fulfils the
demands of the art of poetry, and produces in the world the high results
of lovely and noble poetry. The other only does these things in part;
and when _Fifine at the Fair_ and even _Sordello_ are in the future
only the study of pedants, _Pippa Passes_ will be an enduring strength
and pleasure to all who love tenderly and think widely. And those
portions of it which belong to Pippa herself, the most natural, easy and
simplest portions, will be the sources of the greatest pleasure and the
deepest thought. Like Sordello's song, they will endure for the healing,
comforting, exalting and impelling of the world.
I have written of her and of other parts of the poem elsewhere. It only
remains to say that nowhere is the lyric element in Browning's genius
more delightfully represented than in this little piece of mingled song
and action. There is no better love-lyric in his work than
You'll love me yet!--and I can tarry
Your love's protracted growing;
and the two snatches of song which Pippa sings when she is passing under
Ottima's window and the Monsignore's--"The year's at the spring" and
"Overhead the tree-tops meet"--possess, independent of the meaning of
the words and their poetic charm, a freshness, dewiness, morning
ravishment to which it is difficult to find an equal. They are filled
with youth and its delight, alike of the body and the soul. What
Browning's spirit felt and lived when he was young and his heart beating
with the life of the universe, is in them, and it is their greatest
charm.
* * * * *