Browning and the Dramatic Monologue

by S. S. Curry

Metre will never be fully understood until studied in connection with vocal expression, nor will vocal expression ever rise to its true place until applied to the interpretation not only of poetic thought, but of such elements of poetic form as metre. And where can a better means be found for both steps than the study of the monologue?

The student should observe the metre as well as the thought of every monologue he examines, and read it aloud, attending faithfully to the spirit of its metric expression. So poor is the ordinary rendering of metre, that it is almost impossible to tell the metre from the ordinary reading.

Trochaic metre is often read, as if it were a kind of crude iambic. When one is in the mood or spirit of one foot, unless he has imaginative and emotional flexibility, all feet will be read as practically the same. I have known readers, speakers, and actors who have completely lost the dactylic and even the trochaic spirit or mode of expression.

Let any one select a poem and render it successively with different metres and note the effect. We must often be made to feel the power of wrong vocal expression to pervert a poem before we can realize the force of right voice modulation in interpreting its spirit.

The student must realize each metric foot as an objective expression of a subjective feeling. Doubt is often felt even by the best critics, and great difference of opinion exists among them, but the reader who understands vocal expression, studies into the heart of the poem and uses his own voice to express his intuition, will settle most of these difficulties satisfactorily to himself. Vocal interpretation is the last criterion of metric expression.

The universal lack of attention to metre is, no doubt, connected with a universal neglect of the expressive modulations of the voice. In our day the printed word and not the spoken word is regarded as the real word. This has gone so far that some educated men seem to regard metre as solely a matter of print.

While metre may be one of the last points to be considered, it is not the least important to study; nor is it, when mastered, the least useful to the thought, feeling, imagination, and passion, or to the right action of the voice in interpreting the spirit of the monologue.

There is an almost universal tendency to regard as superficial, actors and those capable of interpreting human experience by the living voice. Men who should have known better have said that it is not mental force but simply a certain peculiarity of temperament that gives dramatic power.

One of the most important things to be sought is the better understanding of the psychology of dramatic instinct. I have already tried to awaken some attention to the peculiar nature and importance of this in “Imagination and Dramatic Instinct,” but the subject is by no means exhausted. That discussion was meant only as a beginning.

When actors and public readers feel it necessary to train the voice and the ear, to develop imagination and feeling, to apprehend the true nature of human art, and to meditate profoundly over the spirit of some great poem; when they treat their own art with respect and give themselves technical training, adequate metric expression will begin to be possible.