The poem was suggested by the opening of the third ode of the third Book of Horace: "Justum et tenacem propositi virum."
It will be more convenient to treat In a Balcony in a separate section than under the general heading of Men and Women, for it is, to all intents and purposes, an independent work of another order.
16. DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.
[Published in 1864 (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol. VII., pp. 43-255).]
Dramatis Personæ, like Men and Women (which it followed after an interval of nine years) is a collection of dramatic monologues, in each of which it is attempted to delineate a single character or a single mood by setting the "imaginary person" in some revealing situation. Of the two possible methods, speech and soliloquy, Browning for the most part prefers the former. In Dramatis Personæ, however, he recurs, rather more frequently than usual, to the latter; and the situations imaged are usually suggestive rather than explicit, more incomplete and indirect than those in the Men and Women. As an ingenious critic said, shortly after the volume was published, "Mr Browning lets us overhear a part of the drama, generally a soliloquy, and we must infer the rest. Had he to give the story of Hamlet, he would probably embody it in three stanzas, the first beginning, 'O that this too too solid flesh would melt!' the second 'To be or not to be, that is the question;' and the third, 'Look here upon this picture, and on that!' From these disjointed utterances the reader would have to construct the story." Here our critic's clever ingenuity carries him a little too far; but there is some truth in his definition or description of the special manner which characterises such poems as Too Late, or The Worst of It. But not merely the manner of presentment, the substance, and also the style and versification, have undergone a change during the long-silent years which lie between Men and Women and Dramatis Personæ. The first note of change, of the change which makes us speak of earlier and later work, is here sounded. From 1833 up to 1855 forms a single period of steady development, of gradual and unswerving ascent. Dramatis Personæ stands on the border line between this period and another, the "later period," which more decisively begins with The Ring and the Book. Still, the first note of divergence is certainly sounded here. I might point to the profound intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmanship; or, yet again, to the new and very marked partiality for scenes and situations of English and modern rather than of mediæval and foreign life.
The larger part of the volume consists of dramatic monologues. Three only are in blank verse; the greater number in varied lyric measures. The first of these, and the longest, James Lee, as it was first called, James Lee's Wife[[36]] as it is now more appropriately named, is a Lieder Kreis, or cycle of songs, nine in number, which reveal, in "tragic hints," not by means of a connected narrative, the history of an unhappy marriage. There is nothing in it of heroic action or suffering; it is one of those old stories always new which are always tragic to one at least of the actors in them, and which may be tragic or trivial in record, according as the artist is able to mould his material. Each of the sections shows us a mood, signalized by some slight link of circumstance which may the better enable us to grasp it. The development of disillusion, the melancholy progress of change, is finely indicated in the successive stages of this lyric sequence, from the first clear strain of believing love (shaken already by a faint tremor of fear), through gradual alienation and inevitable severance, to the final resolved parting. This poem is worthy of notice as the only one in which Browning has employed the sequence form; almost the only instance, indeed, in which he has structurally varied his metre in the course of a poem.
James Lee's Wife is written in the form of soliloquy, or reflection. In two other poems, closely allied to it in sentiment, The Worst of it and Too Late, intense feeling expresses itself, though in solitude, as if the object of emotion were present; each is, in great part, a mental appeal to some one loved and lost. In James Lee's Wife a woman was the speaker, and the burden of her lament was mere estrangement. The Worst of it and Too Late are both spoken by men. The former is the utterance of a man whose wife has been false to him; the latter of a man whose loved one is dead. But in each case the situation is further complicated. The woman over whose loss of virtue her forsaken husband mourns with passionate anguish and unavailing bitterness of regret, has been to him, whom she now leaves for another, an image of purity: her love and influence have lifted him from the mire, and "the Worst of it," the last pang which he cannot nerve himself to endure, is the knowledge that she had saved him, and, partly at least through him, ruined herself. The poem is one of the most passionate and direct of Browning's dramatic lyrics: it is thrillingly intense and alive; and the swift force and tremulous eagerness of its very original rhythm and metre translate its sense into sound with perfect fitness. Similar in cadence, though different in arrangement, is the measure of Too Late, with its singularly constructed stanza of two quatrains, followed respectively by two couplets, which together made another quatrain. It is worth noticing how admirably and uniformly Browning contrives to connect, in sound, the two halves of the broken quatrains, placing them so as to complete each other, and relieve our ear of the sense of distance. The poem is spoken by a lover who was neither rejected nor accepted: like the lover of Evelyn Hope, he never told his love. His Edith married another, a heartless and soulless lay-figure of a poet (or so at least his rival regards him), and now she is dead. His vague but vivid hopes of some future chance to love her and be loved; the dull rebellion of rashly reasoning sorrow; the remembrance, the repentance, the regret; are all poured out with pathetic naturalness.