A blot in the 'scutcheon, Colombe's birthday, A soul's tragedy, and In a balcony

Section III The English Drama

FROM ITS BEGINNING TO THE PRESENT DAY

GENERAL EDITOR

GEORGE PIERCE BAKER, A. B.

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY

BROWNING IN 1835 Engraved by J. G. Armytage

A BLOT IN THE SCUTCHEON

COLOMBE'S BIRTHDAY

A SOUL'S TRAGEDY

AND

IN A BALCONY

By ROBERT BROWNING

EDITED BY [ ,

ARLO BATES

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

BOSTON, U.S.A., AND LONDON

D. C. HEATH & CO., PUBLISHERS

NOV 30 I9U4

Oopyriirni tnrry

COPY B.

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY D. C. HEATH & CO.

Printed in United States of America

'hioqx^v^V

Robert Browning was born May 7, 1812, in the Parish of St. Giles, Camberwell, London. His father was a bank clerk, but a man of cultivation and refined tastes. The boy was educated at a private school and by a tutor, and perhaps more by the intellectual and artistic atmosphere of his home than by either. He read largely, and tells how greatly he was delighted and impressed by the poems of Shelley, which came into his hands when he was a dozen years old. He attended lectures at University College, London, for a short time, but did not go either to Cambridge or Oxford. His first published poem, Pauline, appeared in January, 1833. In that year and the next he traveled in Russia and Italy, and in 1835 brought out Paracelsus. He made the acquaintance of Macready, the tragedian, who suggested the writing of a play, and the result was Strafford, acted and published in 1837. Sordello came next, 1840, and in 1841 Browning began the publication of Bells and Pomegranates. These poems appeared at irregular intervals in shilling numbers badly printed and bound in yellow paper covers. They included Dramatic Lyrics, 1842, Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, 1845, the dramas: Pippa Passes, 1841; King Victor and King Charles, 18425 T'he Return of the Druses and A Blot' in the ^Scutcheon, 1843; Colombe'' s Birthday, 1844; Luria and A Sour s Tragedy, 18465 In a Balcony, 1853. In 1 846 he married the poetess, Elizabeth Barrett, and went to Italy. His only child, Robert Barrett Browning, was born in 1849.

Mrs. Browning died in 1861. After the death of his wife, Browning divided his time between England and the Continent, although Italy is perhaps to be regarded as having been his home. His reputation as a poet, though of slow growth, was well established during his lifetime, and his output was almost uninterrupted. The bulk of his work is large, and when the quality is considered is amazing. In 1850 he published Christmas E^e and Easter Day, Men and Women appeared in 1855, ^^^ Dramatis Persona in 1864. In these two collections of lyrics are some of those which most strikingly combine Browning's deep insight into life with his command of melody, although it must b6 conceded that as time went on the lyric form became less satisfactory. In 1868-9 ^^e poet published The Ring and the Booky the most wonderful poem of the latter half of the century and perhaps the most amazing tour de force in all literature. In the two books entitled Pompilia and The Popey Browning is at the height of his superb power, both for matter and for form. After this came the beautiful paraphrases from the Greek tragedians, Balaustion* s Adventure (1871) and Aristophanes'" Apology (1875)5 several volumes, — Jocoseria, 1883, Ferishtah'' s Fancies y 1884, and Parley ings ^ith Certain People of Importance in their Day, 1887, especially, — in which philosophical analysis was more notable than poetic beauty; Prince HohenstieUSchiJoangaUy Saviour of Society y 1871, a study of the moral unsoundness of Napoleon III, biting and subtle but unpoetic, hard, and at times bewildering j Fifine at the Fairy 1872, a discussion of the relations of man and woman in which are strangely and often confusingly mingled truth and sophistry, obscurity and poetic beauty; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country y 1873, a melodramatic story told with some heaviness of style but with great intensity; Dramatic Idyls y First Series, 1879, Second Series, 1880, of which the most striking are Cli^e and I'van

Biograp^^ vii

I<vanonjitch ,• with a body of miscellaneous lyrics large enough and striking enough to have established the reputation of the poet. The amount and variety of this work is in itself astonishing, and yet more so is its quality. Robert Browning died at the Palazzo Rezzonico, on the Grand Canal in Venice, on December 12, 1889. His last book of poems, Asolando^ was published in London the same month. His burial took place on December 31, in Westminster Abbey.

9!nttotittct(on

Although it is with Browning the dramatist that this book has to do, it must be remembered that the greater bulk of his poetry was not written for the stage. His artistic characteristics and rank as a playwright can be intelligently considered only when his work, with its wonderful variety of form, its amazing breadth, its great virility, its keen subtilty, and its almost unique originality, is studied as a whole. To understand Browning the dramatist, however, it is necessary to study at least the more strongly marked traits of Browning the poet.

A poet is to be estimated according to his manner and to his matter. His workmanship and his message have equal claims for consideration. Both what he says and the way in which he says it are to be judged by their imaginative beauty and imaginative truth. Mere mastery of music does not make the highest poetry, as is too often proved by the exquisitely melodious verse of Swinburne; and equally is it true, as might be illustrated by such a poem as Browning's own Reverie, that the highest is not attained when beauty of form is absent however rich and deep may be the thought. Poetry exists to express what cannot be said in prose, and this expression is possible because form is itself a language, an essential part of the message imperfection in which impairs the completeness of the whole. In

X ^Introduction

even the most superficial examination of a poet's work, therefore, it is necessary to consider both his artistic technique and his message.

The limitations of Browning as a master of poetic form have been often dwelt upon. The common talk about his obscurity and roughness has so commonly been repeated that it comes at once to mind; nor is it difficult to find passages, especially in Sordello on the one hand or on the other in his latest work, which may seem to justify this. In the matter of melody and mastery of poetic form, however, not Tennyson and hardly Swinburne exceeded Browning at his best. The songs in Pippa Passes : *^ A King lived long ago," ** You '11 love me yet"; those in Paracelsus : *'Heap cassia, sandal-buds, and stripes," ** Over the sea our galleys went," or the exquisite *^ Where the Main glideth " may serve as examples; or the wonderful silver-trumpet exultation of parts o^ Saul :

** Oh, the wild joys of living ! the leaping from rock up to rock, The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver

shock Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the bear, And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. The meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold dust divine. And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full draught of

wine.

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes tell That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and well. How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to employ All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy ! '*

In the blank verse of Browning at its best the music is no less masterly and enticing. Take this from The Ring and the Book :

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** I stood at Naples once, a night so dark I could have scarce conjectured there was earth Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : But the night's black was burst through by a blaze — Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and bore, Through her whole length of mountain visible : There lay the city thick and plain with spires, And like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea.**

Or passages like these in Pippa Passes :

** The garden's silence ! even the single bee Persisting in his toil, suddenly stopped : And where he hid you only could surmise By some campanula chalice set a-swing.**

** Sings, minding not that palpitating arch Of hands and arms, nor the quick drip of wine From the drenched leaves o'erhead, nor crowns cast ofF, Violet and parsley crowns to trample on."

Certain it is that no one with a quick ear can fail to recognize how fully Robert Browning had that power of evoking from words a music and an enchantment which belongs only to the true poet.

Imaginative beauty of phrase is perhaps even more common in the poetry of Browning than melody. As years went on he came more and more to sacrifice form to content, but he never lost wholly the magic quality of flashing a thought into beauty. Often the image used is suggested by some loveliness of nature, but whatever the phrase be, it is made alive by that identification of the mind of the poet with the idea which is the hallmark of genuine imagination.

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** Great stars That had a right to come first and see ebb The crimson wave that drifts the sun away.*'

— Pippa Passes,

* * For the air is still, and the water still, When the blue breast of the dipping coot Dives under and all is mute.**

— The Flight of the Duchess,

" The Duke rode past in his idle way, Empty and fine like a swordless sheath.**

— The Statue and the Bust,

*' When is man strong until he feels alone ? **

— Colomhe's Birthday,

** Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.*' — Tivo in the Campagna.

* * A scanty patch Of primroses too faint to catch A weary bee.** — Paracelsus.

**But spring-wind, like a dancing psaltress, passes . . .

and God renews

His ancient rapture.** — lb.

Examples might be endlessly multiplied, but they are most surely convincing when the reader discovers them for himself, coming upon them as he reads and taking them in their proper settings.

Unfortunately for his art. Browning not infrequently, and as he grew older more and more often, allowed the pleasure of intellectual dexterity to override in his work the imaginative and poetic mood. That he recognized his own danger is sufficiently evident from the poem

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called Transcendentalism y in which he warns a young poet against this very fault, and tells him instead of giving ** naked thoughts" to take <* the harp back to your heart again." It is also true that he is apt to assume in his readers special knowledge which they are not likely to possess. He is full of curious information, and his allusions to it are continually a stumbling-block to those not so well read. Both these causes have helped to make his work difficult to the average reader. The matter was discussed between him and Miss Barrett, and on April 22, 1846, she writes: <^ Your obscurities, ... so far as they concern the medium, . . . you have been throwing off gradually and surely this long time."

More than all has Browning perplexed the Philistine by the subtilty of his thought. He deals with shades of character so delicate, with distinctions so complex that the intellect must be alert and keenly discerning which would always and easily follow him. It has been justly said of him: *« Browning treats obscure subjects deeply, not deep subjects obscurely."

The subjects with which Browning most gladly dealt are characterized by the phrase just quoted. How wide is his range of thought and how varied can be appreciated only by the reader who knows the poet thoroughly. Great as is the variety of theme in Tennyson, Browning has surpassed it; and Browning has gone far deeper into the mysteries of human nature and hfe than any other poet of his century. Dr. Furnivall has called him '* the manliest, the strongest, the life-fullest, the deepest, and the fullest poet of his time. " It is hardly posxiv 3|ntrotiuction

sible to make a fair estimate of a contemporary or to arrive at any conclusion which may not be discarded by posterity; but it seems sure that in the ultimate ranking of the poets who have thus far enriched Enghsh hterature only three — Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milton — can possibly be set higher in the hst than Robert Browning, — and possibly not all of these.

The dramatic work of Browning is not in bulk a large part of his poetry, and it is not the best he has achieved. H his rank depended only on what he wrote for the stage a number of the Elizabethans would eclipse him. Yet taken for what they are, the plays of Browning stand higher as literature than those of any of his contemporaries, and with the exception of Shelley's Ce/^d higher than any poetry written for the English stage since the close of the Elizabethan period. Comparison with the dramas of Tennyson shows Luna, A Blot in the ^Scutcheon, and Colombe^s Birthdayy if less eifective on the stage, to be superior in virility, in conviction, and in beauty ; while in the century has appeared no other rival worthy of consideration.

In his plots, which for the most part he invented. Browning is not happy. He is seldom able to give to a play that unity of movement, uniform progression, and significance of action which are the essentials of successful dramatic effect. He is interested in the character, the temperament, the motives of his personages, and shows little of that love for action itself which is the mark of a genuine dramatist. In Strafford, his first immature attempt at dramatic work, he labored painfully to produce action, and the result was that he injflntroDuction xv

volved his characters in a complication of intrigues which no audience could follow and which no reader can understand without more effort than is compatible with dramatic enjoyment. In King Victor and King Charles he deals again with court intrigue, and does indeed make it simpler ; but he depends upon word rather than deed for the enlightenment of the audience. He shows in The Return of the Druses that he has learned by previous failures, and makes the story both more dramatic and more interesting ; yet the action is still so largely intellectual and mental as to leave the play unfit for the stage. He brings to the making of A Blot in the ' Scutcheon still greater knowledge of stage-craft ; the story, however, is not only painful but unconvincing, and to a considerable extent is told rather than acted. He most nearly approaches the art of the skilled playwright in Colombe^s Birthday. In every play which he wrote actually for the stage Browning gained something ; and had the age demanded and circumstances favored, he might have followed in the steps of Dryden, who was by nature as little dramatic as he, yet who gave so much of the best of his productive life to the stage. By the time Luria was written Browning had come to be so fully under the dominion of his natural tendencies that the whole play may almost be said to take place in the minds of the characters. After that he can hardly be held to have written for representation, since In a Balcony and J SouP s Tragedy are scarcely more actable than Pippa Passes, In no one of all these has Browning been able to conceive and present an effective dramatic story, wrought out by xvi 3Introi)uct(on

action rather than by speech and exhibiting by outward events what changes of character go on beneath the surface.

It is equally true that he is seldom able to place before the audience what in theatrical language is known as a good situation. In A Blot in the ' Scutcheon the one strong situation is where Tresham believes his sister willing to marry one man while being the mistress of another ; the reappearance of Luitolfo in A SouTs Tragedy and the discovery of Norbert and Constance by the Queen are practically the only other good situations in the four plays given in the present volume. In these the audience is able to see and to feel the sharp contention of interests and emotions ; and the bringing of conflicting passions visibly to bay is one of the essentials of successful stage-craft.

All this is perhaps only resaying once more what has often been noted, that the dramas of Browning are inward. His temperament led him to select as the motiv of a play a theme so spiritual that its completeness could not be made visible even to those of fairly acute perception in that swift first view which is all that the stage allows. When he had worked out this theme, moreover, he took no trouble to complete the outward story. The result in representation was sure to be disconcerting and episodical. Striking examples of this are Pippa Passes and In a Balcony, where as far as outward events are concerned nothing is finished and an audience must inevitably feel that it had seen only part of the play. Yet each is complete in 'the spiritually dramatic sense. The theme of the first, for instance, is the influence of jflntroliuction xvii

Pippa upon other lives, unseen and unseeing ; and this is fully shown. What happens as a consequence of the influence is not part of the spiritual theme. The drama, however, demands the completeness of the visible, whereas Browning was content with the working out of the spiritual.

In all his work Browning exhibits a curious lack of realization of his audience. This he shows often in the obscurity of his literary language : in the allusions to books few readers can have read, or to facts few are likely to know; in the turns of thought which are almost arbitrarily personal ; in the lack of continuity which sometimes leaves gaps to be filled by the ordinary reader only with considerable difficulty. He shows it, too, in the choice of subject and in the subtilty of psychical distinctions and analysis. Especially in the dramas does he betray this lack of power to realize the audience to which a play must be addressed. The difficulties of language and the over- delicacies of thought — from a stage point of view — are everywhere present; and what is of perhaps greater importance, the progress of the play is almost always dependent upon inner experiences neither visible to the audience nor coming within the probable range of their comprehension.

Next to plot and situation in the drama come the drawing of character and the exhibition of the action of one personality upon another. Browning possessed rather the art of analyzing than of developing character. The personages in his plays are apt to be much the same at the end as at the beginning. Perhaps the very xviii 31ncroiJuctton

keenness of vision which enabled him to see into the secret recesses of the souls of the men and women of whom he wrote was a hindrance when he came to the attempt to show how those souls might be altered bycircumstance and opportunity. He perceived what they were so clearly that it must have been difficult not to be blinded to the alterations which circumstance and human relations may bring. This is shown more strongly, if more subtly, in the fact that the plays are comparatively deficient in the interaction of personalities. Each character pursues his individual way, aiFected of course by the acts of others, but seldom much changed mentally. As Browning seems to care for his plot only in so far as it exhibits what his actors are rather than to be interested in what events may make of them, so he uses the relations of his personages as means to bring out the mental traits of each rather than as forces which must interact. Each temperament in his treatment remains almost agate-hard and intractable to the influence of others ; and while this makes greatly for vigor in the presentation of spiritual portraits, it tells almost equally against dramatic effectiveness.

It follows from this method that the characters in Browning's plays, if the seeming paradox may be permitted, have more personality than individuality. They are personal in the sense that they are well differentiated; but they lack the flavor of particular life which marks the human being as individual, forever unique among his fellows. Tresham, Mildred, Luria, Chiappino, and the rest are particularized so that we have no difficulty in regarding each as a person, yet

31ntrotiuttion xix

each somehow lacks individuality. No one of them lives and moves and has his being in an unviolated sphere of consciousness such as surrounds the soul of Othello, of Imogen, of FalstafF. To make comparison with the highest may seem unfair; but this best brings out the idea and Browning is worthy of being tried by lofty standards. Pompilia or the Pope in The Ring and the Book is no less true than Juliet or Coriolanus; but the same cannot be said of any one of the characters in Browning's plays. Some of the minor figures have a good deal of vitality. Guendolen, slight as is her part, is truly alive, perhaps because the poet was not hampered by the necessity of making her work out his plot, and so could write of her with freedom. On the whole, however, the personages in the dramas have something of the effect of figures in a camera obscura, startlingly real yet not wholly human.

Of the women in Browning's dramas Constance, Mildred, and Anael are the most carefully studied. Constance is easily the most subtle, although Anael is perhaps more difficult to understand. Ottima, in the one tremendous scene in the shrub-house, is more convincingly and passionately real than all the rest, and burns with a vitality at once splendid and terrible. Most attractive of his heroines — for it is hardly possible to call sweet and dear Pippa by so dignified a name — is Colombe, with her straightforwardness, her freshness, her delicious childliness. She is of character sufficiently complex to be interesting, yet she is always so readily understood as not to lose her hold on the sym-

XX ^IntroUttttton

pathy. She is warmly human, intellectual, — as every character must be in the hands of Browning, from Caliban up, — yet feminine, and admirably womanly in her faithfulness to love when against it is set the temptation of ambition.

Of his heroes. Browning has perhaps succeeded best with Luria. Norbert is, however, consistent, manly, and so attractive throughout that while Constance provokes speculation and the Queen arouses pity, Norbert takes the strongest hold upon the sympathy. Tresham dominates A Blot in the ^ Scutcheony even in spite of the possible intention of the author that Mildred should most command interest ; Chiappino and Ogniben divide the honors in J SouP s Tragedy. Whether Colombe or Valence seem the more attractive must remain largely a question of personal taste; Colombe is impulsive and winning while it is not impossible to find Valence somewhat too unreasonably and all but exasperatingly perfect. The plays as a whole, like the dramatic lyrics and The Ring and the Book, show how naturally the genius of Browning turned for expression to the embodiment of masculine types.

The plays seem, moreover, to carry throughout the strongest marks of the characteristics which have been noted in considering the lyrics. The quality of portraying masculine types connects itself with the subtilty with which Browning followed the working of both temperament and intellect through their most intricate windings. He deals constantly with emotion, and he is in reality the most passionate poet of his time, Swinburne and Rossetti notwithstanding; but he is still a

3IntroDttction xxi

poet of intellectual subtilties of character rather than of emotions. From this it follows logically that he is at his best rather with men than with women; with the sex which may feel no less strongly than the other, but which after all is less likely to be dominated and directed by emotion pure and simple. Browning succeeds best in portraying men because, to speak somewhat paradoxically, he is too keenly alive to the play of the intellect to be able to find the satisfactory expression of his genius in dealing with wom.en.

If this claim be true, it necessarily follows that as a dramatist he must always be somewhat unequal in his treatment of men and of women. Such certainly seems to be the fact. This intellectual subtilty, moreover, leads him constantly toward regions of consciousness which cannot be sucessfuUy presented from the stage, or which at least can be effectively embodied in a play only by a poet who is born with supreme dramatic genius. The struggle to keep within bounds, so as not to confuse his audience, must in itself have been enough to prevent the free play of Browning's imagination. Constantly his imaginative perception saw farther than he dared say, and constantly in the plays he is apparently holding himself in hand, and resisting the impulse to utter what he feels could not be comprehended across the footlights.

Nothing more strikingly marks the fact that Browning was not at his ease in dramatic work than the inferiority of the quality of his verse in the plays. In Strafford^ King Victor and King CharleSy and A SouV 5 Tragedy is very little which is up to the averxxii 3|ntroi>uctton

age of his best work and hardly a line which approaches his highest. In the other dramas this is less markedly true, but he is evidently always at a disadvantage, always constrained by the conditions under which one writes for the stage. It is in Pippa Passes, which can never have been intended for actual representation, that he is poetically most successful; and it is in the scene in the shrub-house only that he shows an intensity and fire which suggest possibilities of dramatic greatness. Taken as a whole, the plays certainly do not represent Browning as a poet at the height of his power.

The plays included in this volume fairly present the most strongly marked characteristics of Browning as a dramatist. A Blot in the ^Scutcheon is — except possibly Colombe* s Birthday — the most obviously actable of Browning's plays. The story is simple, its presentation is direct, and it contains one really great dramatic situation.' As in all the plays, the dialogue lacks crispness and the speeches are too long; but on the whole the play is unusually free from those passages in which the intellect of the poet moves too rapidly to be followed by an ordinary audience at the theatre. The artificiality of the scheme has been censured, and not without justice. The plot is melodramatic in the sense that it rests upon manifest improbability. Melodrama is essentially sensational rather than inevitable, and in so far necessarily falls below the highest levels of art. The absence of acquaintance between the neighboring families is incredible. The relation between Mildred and her lover is not impossible, but it is ' See note on Act ii, 11. 250-360.

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no less unlikely than unpleasant. The youthfulness which is insisted upon to make it less unreal produces rather the result of rendering the whole situation revolting. Mr. W. L. Courtney rather too sharply comments :

*^ The situation is not dramatically legitimate; but when we find that these two characters began their clandestine meetings when they were almost children, that they are not the characters of mingled goodness and badness which experience in such matters might create, but represented as living models of purity (*a depth of purity immovable,' is the expression of Tresham . . .), it is impossible to avoid the criticism that such a situation ... is grotesquely abnormal." — Studies New and Old,

The fact that not incident but emotion is the real subject — a fact which makes for the poetic while it lessens the dramatic value of the work, — preserves the play from sinking to low melodramatic levels. In any case, as was remarked by the Literary Gazette in its criticism of the first performance, ** there is sufficient variety and constant moving in the action, which keeps the mind engaged, and prevents it from detecting and dwelling on the faultiness of the plot."

While Colombe^s Birthday stands next to A Blot in the ' Scutcheon as an acting play, it has hardly anything which can in the true dramatic sense be called action. It is an exquisite dialogue, relieved by some movement and by one or two fairly good situations. Its eiFectiveness depends chiefly upon the fact that its central motive — the triumph of love over ambition — is one xxiv 3(|ntroi)ttction

of which the attraction is perennial. All the characters move on somewhat conventional lines, but the genius of Browning imparts to them a good deal of reality. The story is too slight for the length at which it is treated, and for acting purposes would probably be more effective in three acts than in five, — perhaps even in one than in three; but as a closet drama we would not willingly have it shorter.

Of In a Balcony whatever is said is sure to be disagreed with by somebody. Diversity of interpretation is perhaps the best proof of the vitality and truth to human nature which a drama can have. The artificial and the false do not leave the reader or the spectator in doubt what is intended, but that which is fiill of the complexity and the mystery of life inevitably affects different natures in divers ways, and leads them to varied conclusions. In a Balcony has perhaps had this form of indorsement in a manner more marked than that accorded to any other of Browning's plays; and in a sense the highest praise one can bestow upon it is to say: ^* Others have interpreted it thus and so; but to me the conclusion that its meaning is different is no less than inevitable."