So in The Laboratory, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of fierce impassioned consciousness:—
"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—I am here."
Both kinds—drama and dramatic lyric—continued to attract him, while neither altogether satisfied; and they engaged him concurrently throughout the decade.
In this power of seizing the salient moment of a complex situation and laying bare at a stroke all its issues, Browning's monologues have no nearer parallel than the Imaginary Conversations of Landor, which illuminate with so strange a splendour so many unrecorded scenes of the great drama of history. To [Landor], according to his wife's testimony, Browning "always said that he owed more than to any contemporary"; to Landor he dedicated the last volume of the Bells and Pomegranates. Landor, on his part, hailed in Browning the "inquiring eye" and varied discourse of a second Chaucer. It is hardly rash to connect with his admiration for the elder artist Browning's predilection for these brief revealing glimpses into the past. Browning cared less for the actual personnel of history, and often imagined his speakers as well as their talk; but he imagined them with an equal instinct for seizing the expressive traits of nationalities and of times, and a similar, if more spontaneous and naïve, anti-feudal temper. The French camp and the Spanish cloister, Gismond and My Last Duchess (originally called France and Italy), are penetrated with the spirit of peoples, ages, and institutions as seized by a historical student of brilliant imagination and pronounced antipathies.
But in one point Landor and Browning stood at opposite poles. Landor, far beyond any contemporary English example, had the classic sense and mastery of style; Browning's individuality of manner rested on a robust indifference to all the traditional conventions of poetic speech. The wave of realism which swept over English letters in the early 'Forties broke down many barriers of language; the new things that had to be said demanded new ways of saying them; homely, grotesque, or sordid life was rendered in sordid, [grotesque], and homely terms. Pickwick in 1837 had established the immense vogue of Dickens, the Heroes in 1840 had assured the imposing prestige of Carlyle; and the example of both made for the freest and boldest use of language. Across the Channel the stupendous fabric of the Comédie Humaine was approaching completion, and Browning was one of Balzac's keenest English readers. Alone among the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart and analogue of their prose.
I.
Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of Paracelsus convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good play, yet one with an effective tragic rôle for himself. Strained relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly suggested Strafford. He was full of the subject, having recently assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was [performed] at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It went through five performances.
Browning's Strafford, like his Paracelsus, was a serious attempt to interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have, as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness. Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement, self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying Paracelsus thus hangs [over] the final scene in which Strafford goes to meet the fate which the one friend imposes on him and the other cannot turn aside. All the characters have something of the "deep self-consciousness" of the author of Pauline. Not that they are, any of them, drawn with very profound grasp of human nature or a many-sided apprehension of life. They are either absolutely simple, like Lady Carlisle, or built upon a rivalry or conflict of simple elements, like Strafford and Charles; but there is so much restless vivacity in their discourse, the broad surface of mood is so incessantly agitated by the play and cross-play of thought and feeling, that they seem more complex than they are.
Though played for only five nights, Strafford had won a success which might well have dazzled a young and untried aspirant, and which was sufficiently impressive to shrewd men of business like Messrs Longman to induce them to undertake its publication free of cost. It appeared in April, with an interesting preface, subsequently withdrawn, from which a significant sentence has already been quoted. The composition of Strafford had not only "freshened a jaded mind" but permanently quickened his zest for the drama of political crises. New projects for historical dramas chased and jostled one another through his busy brain, which seems to have always worked most prosperously in a highly charged atmosphere. I am going "to begin ... thinking a Tragedy," he wrote characteristically to Miss Haworth—"(an Historical one, so I shall want heaps of [criticisms] on Strafford), and I want to have another tragedy in prospect; I write best so provided."[16]
[16] Orr, Life, p. 103.