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Blot on the 'Scutchcon,
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Luria,
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In a Balcony, is not dramatic in even the most conventional sense. Above all, indeed--as Mr. Walter Pater has said--his is the poetry of situations. In each of the _dramatis personæ_, one of the leading characteristics is loyalty to a dominant ideal. In Strafford's case it is that of unswerving devotion to the King: in Mildred's and in Thorold's, in the
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Blot on the 'Scutcheon, it is that of subservience respectively to conventional morality and family pride (Lord Tresham, it may be added, is the most hopelessly monomaniacal of all Browning's
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): in Valence's, in
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Colombe's Birthday, to chivalric love: in Charles, in
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King Victor and King Charles, to kingly and filial duty: in Anael's and Djabal's, in
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The Return of the Druses, respectively to religion and unscrupulous ambition modified by patriotism: in Chiappino's, in
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A Soul's Tragedy, to purely sordid ambition: in Luria's, to noble steadfastness: and in Constance's, in
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In a Balcony, to self-denial. Of these plays,
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The Return of the Druses seems to me the most picturesque,
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Luria the most noble and dignified, and
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In a Balcony the most potentially a great dramatic success. The last is in a sense a fragment, but, though the integer of a great unaccomplished drama, is as complete in itself as the Funeral March in Beethoven's _Eroica_ Symphony. The
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Blot on the 'Scutcheon has the radical fault characteristic of writers of sensational fiction, a too promiscuous
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by syncope and suicide. Another is the juvenility of Mildred:--a serious infraction of dramatic law, where the mere tampering with history, as in the circumstances of King Victor's death in the earlier play, is at least excusable by high precedent. More disastrous, poetically, is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when, after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer, she, like the typical young _Miss Anglaise_ of certain French novelists, betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect,
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What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon? Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I _think_ I do. Thorold, my dear brother, how very wretched you must be!
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There's a woman like a dew-drop, she's so purer than the purest, is, in the circumstances, nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous. No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted, Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window, caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory. It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception, like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance, that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama as
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In the instance of Luria, that second Othello, suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution: the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold's suicide is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred's broken heart was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician.
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Colombe's Birthday has a certain remoteness of interest, really due to the reader's more or less acute perception of the radical divergence, for all Valence's greatness of mind and spirit, between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover: a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity. Though
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A Soul's Tragedy
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The Return of the Druses, where the Prefect, drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated; and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry, hails Djabal as _Hakeem_--as Divine--and therewith falls dead at his feet. Nor will he forget that where, in the
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Blot on the 'Scutcheon,
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I--I--was so young! Besides I loved him, Thorold--and I had No mother; God forgot me: so I fell----
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Strange! This is all I brought from my own land To help me.
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Strafford, 1837;
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King Victor and King Charles, 1842;
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The Return of the Druses, and
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A Blot on the 'Scutcheon, 1843;
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Colombe's Birthday, 1844;
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Luria, and
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A Soul's Tragedy,
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Pippa Passes, and to
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Sordello, that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry, I should like--out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details--to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest pertinent to the present theme. One is that the song in
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A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,
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There's a woman like a dew-drop, written several years before the author's meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely in the style of
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Lady Geraldine's Courtship,