Part 2 (2/2)
Browning, on the other hand, insisted that Phelps, having been assigned the part, should retain it To baffle Macready in his design of presenting the play to the public in a , aided by his publisher, had the whole printed in four-and-twenty hours[25] A rupture of the long-standing friendshi+p with Macready followed, nor did author and actor 's life ”Mr Macready too”--writes Mrs Orr--”had recently lost his wife, and Mr Browning could only start forward, grasp the hand of his old friend, and in a voice choked with eedy was produced at Drury Lane on February nth, 1843, with Phelps, who acted adh it had been ill rehearsed and not a shi+lling had been spent on scenery or dresses, it was received with applause To a call for the author, Browning, seated in his box, declined to make any response
Thus, not without some soreness of heart, closed his direct connection with the theatre He heard with pleasure when in Italy that _A Blot in the 'Scutcheon_ was given by Phelps at Sadler's Wells Theatre in Nove of _Colombe's Birthday_ was projected by Charles Kean in 1844, but the long delays, which were inevitable, could not be endured by Browning, who desired to print his play forthwith aranates_
It was not until nine years later that this play, a veritable ”All for love, or the world well lost,” was presented at the Hay as the duchess Soon after _Colo sailed once more, in the autumn of 1844, for Italy[26] As he journeyed northwards and ho an opera nahorn an intervieith Trelawny, the generous-hearted friend of Shelley, by whose grave he had lately stood[27]
Browning's work as a playwright, consisting of eight pieces, or nine if we include the later _In a Balcony_, is sufficiently aenius as seen in drama Dramatic, in the sense that he created and studied minds and hearts other than his own, he pre-eminently was; if he desired to set forth or to vindicate his most intimate ideas or i the them a brain and a heart other than his own in which to live and
There is a kind of dramatic art which we may term static, and another kind which we may term dynamic The former deals especially with characters in position, the latter with characters in ht enius of either type; to represent passion and thought and action--action incarnating and developing thought and passion--the dynamic power is required And by action we are to understand not , an idea which has in it a direct operative force The dra was in the main of the static kind; it studies with extraordinary skill and subtlety character in position; it attains only an imperfect or a laboured success with character in movement The _dramatis personae_ are ready at al moments of passion, to fall away from action into reflection and self-analysis The play of nises of course as a matter of profound interest and iy which spirit transfers to spirit less in the actual ht and eroup of persons, receiving some modification from each He deals le and separate entity; each maintains his own attitude, and as he is touched by the common influence he proceeds to scrutinise it Mind in these plays threads its way dexterously in and out of action; it is not itself sufficiently incorporated in action The progress of the draain, as if the author perceived that the story had fallen behind or reue of retrospection is a co of popular plays, with a view to expound the position of affairs to the audience; but a drah his dialogue to the end which he has set before hi for the purpose of her value than one which leans and presses towards the future The invisible is for him more important than the visible; and so in truth it hest dramatist will not choose to separate the two The invisible is best captured and is most securely held in the visible
As a writer of drahts to study the noblest attitudes of the soul, and to wring a proud sense of triuedy rather than in co, but the joy is very grave and earnest, and the body of the play is s and serious hopes and fears There is no light-hearted aiety of teladness in her holiday froht that what is so bright _is_ also so brief, and it is encohtful Asolo, by the sins and sorrows of the world Bluphocks, with his sniggering wit and his jingles of rhyabond and a spy, who only covers the shaood spirits The genial cynicisniben is excellent of its kind, and pleases the palate like an olive amid wines; but this man of universal intellectual sympathies is at heart the satirist ofexperience of huently over his own skill in dealing with them; and has he not--we may ask--wound around his own spirit some of the incurable illusions of worldly wisdoniben, his smile is a comment upon the weakness and the blindness of the self-deceiver
Browning's tragedies are tragedies without villains The world is here the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares ith to entangle its victi aspirations, to dull their vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to , and amiably cynical, tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good Yet truth is truth, and fact is fact; worldly wisdoenuine wisdom after its kind; we shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure Ogniben can blandly and skilfully conduct a Chiappino to his valley of humiliation--”let him that standeth take heed lest he fall” But ould the wisdoniben be worth in its pronouncements on a Luria or a Colombe? Perhaps even in such a case not wholly valueless The self-pleased, keen-sighted Legate h-hearted gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile spirit Bishop Blougram--sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist--was not insensible to the superior 's nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare h ideals In creating his chief _dra them what he found within hiroups--characters in which the predo power is intellect, and characters in which thewith things that are real and positive, those persons in whoence is supreme may too easily become the children of this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify to theht that is in theence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment--the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublih a heroic folly and draw upon thes temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of ti is both; and to each he will endeavour to be just; but his heartvote, and this cannot be in favour of the casuist Every self-transcending passion has in it a divine proe; even the passion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries--”Not ion of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and of those great words fro asunder of the joints and ination, the East The nations of the West--and, before all others, the Italian race--are those of a subtly developed intelligence The worldly art of a Church-enuities of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western brain-craft But Italy is also a land of passion; and therefore at once, for its ardours of the heart--seen not in love alone but in carven capital and on frescoed wall--and for its casuistries of intellect, Browning looks to Italy for the roup of personages e roup ures of peculiar interest, by birth and inheritance children of the East, and by culture partakers, in a greater or a less degree, of the characteristics of the West--a Djabal, with his Oriental heart entangled by Prankish tricks of sophistry; a Luria, whose Moorish passion is enthralled by the fascination of Florentine intellect, and who can make a return upon himself with a half-painful western self-consciousness
Loyalties, devotions, to a person, to a cause, to an ideal, and the sacrifice of individual advantages, worldly prosperity, teeneral way, is the the in his dramas These loyalties may be well and wisely fixed, or they may contain a portion of error and illusion But in either case they furnish a test of manly and womanly virtue With a woainst ease, or high station, or the pride of power Colombe of Ravestein is offered on the one hand the restoration of her forfeited Duchy, the prospective rank of Eive love, is yet no ignoble wooer, a h ambition; on the other hand pleads the advocate of Cleves, a nameless provincial, past his days of youth, lean and sos of his townsfolk
Mere largeness in a life is so, is much; but the quality of a life is more Valence has set the cause of his fellow-citizens above himself; he has made the heart of the duchess for the first time thrill in sympathy with the life of her people; he has placed his loyalty to her far above his own hopes of happiness; he has urged his rival's clailances of regret, any half-doubts, prudent reserves, or condescending qualifications that Coloives herself to the advocate of the poor
She, in her youth and beauty, has been happy during her year of idlesse as play-duchess of Juliers; she is happier now as she abandons the court and, sure in her grave choice, turns with a light and joyous laugh to welcoift of freedo once aily as in soht toss aside a rose
The loyalty of men, their supre from the passion of love; but other tests than this are often proposed to the Charles of Sardinia it is duty to his people that summons him, from those modest and tranquil ways of life of which he dreath to accept without faltering the burden that is laid upon hin to his father, who reclaims it, the crohich God alone should have re's drareat father, daring in battle, profound in policy, should stand before hiift from his son--the pity of it revives an old weakness, an old instinct of filial submission, in the heart of Charles He has tasked hiained the affections of his subjects; he has conciliated a hostile Europe; is not this enough? Or was it also in the bond that he should tread a i, in the third part of _Pippa Passes_, is that of one who sees all the oppression of his people, who is enamoured of the antique ideal of liberty, and whose choice lies between a youth of luxurious ease and the virtue of one heroic crime, to be followed by the scaffold-steps, with youth cut short To hiive the -star! Have I God's gift Of the i will adventure forth--it may be in a kind of divine folly--as a doomsman commissioned by God to free his Italy The devotion of Luria to Florence is partly of the i of illusion But the actual Florence, with her astute politicians, her spies who spy upon spies, her incurable distrusts, her sinister fears, her ingrained ingratitude, is clearly exposed to him before the end Shall he turn the army, which is as much his own as the sword he wields, joined with the forces of Pisa, against the beautiful, faithless city? Or will his passionate loyalty endure the test? Luria withdraws from life, but not until he has made every provision for the victory of Florence over her enereatness has subdued all envies and all distrusts; at the close everyone is true to hiood creatures: but so slow[29]
Once again in Browning's earliest play, the test for the patriot Pyland and to freedom, the other to his early friend and former comrade in politics
His faith in Strafford dies hard; but it dies; he flings forward his hopes for the grand traitor to England beyond the confines of this life, and only the grieved unfaltering justiciary reure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric
But the writer, let us re; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions The loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our coallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worh this is the vain ro conceives, lies the test of Strafford A self-renouncing passion of any kind is not so co-worshi+p with scorn
Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of duchess Colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and half-huo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt To the sa old Vane and Savile of the court of Charles
To the sanor, who proves hi, the scoundrel Intendant In a happy nant wrath; he does not exclaiood Ithe villain!” is a substantial contribution to the justice of our world Under the ennobling influence of Charles and his Polyxena, the craft of D'Ornity; if he cannot quite attain the position of abetter than one who serves God at the devil's bidding And Braccio, plotter and betrayer, yet alith a certain fidelity towards his hteousness by the overnani would say--is the rain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision maythat there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane Browning's vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his Eastern Luria In Djabal, at once enthusiast and i y for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver ould fain half-deceive himself
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: Dr Moncure Conway in ”The Nation” vol i (an article written on the occasion of Browning's death) says that he was told by Carlyle of his first --as Carlyle rode upon Wi there alone, stopped him and asked for his acquaintance The incident has a soendary air]
[Footnote 19: Lady Martin (Helen Faucit), however, wrote in 1891 to Mrs Ritchie: ”The play was reat careminute attention to accuracy of costume prevailed The scenery was alike accurate”]
[Footnote 20: On which occasion Browning--er in the pit whether he was not the author of ”Romeo and Juliet” and ”Othello” ”No, so far as I a
Two burlesques of Shakespeare by a Mr Brown or Brownley were in course of performance in London _Letters of RB and EBB_, ii 132]
[Footnote 21: Fro's last volume]