%efm. T^f^' m.:fi ms m? cT^' («:*■> ^.^^OlS^i^^^ ^-M^ w*^' W^d^ ^^i y:;^ K^>-i PM^^ ■*iS.i4*. The original of tliis bool< is in tlie Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013444769 ROBERT BROWNING ■anB 'tite A NOTE WALTER FAIRFAX LONDON; EEEVES & TUENEK 196^ STEAND 1891 In Pnyaraiion. By tite same AuAar. ARYANISM AND IDEALISM IN ACTING. A DRAMATIC NOTE. ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA A NOTE WALTER FAIRFAX LONDON EEEVES & TURNER 196 STRAND 1891 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. The second half of the present century has been marked by the existence in it of four men of supreme and comprehensive genius — Arthur Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, and 'Robert Browning. The last of them is now- gone, and the world is left, for the time being, without a representative of humanity at its highest. All four of these great n^en have deserved transcendently well of the Drama. Schopenhauer applied his titanic and all-illu- minating intelligence to the investigation of the problems underlying it as the highest and most exacting form of poetry ; Hugo exalted and transfigured melo-drama by advancing it into the loftiest poetic regions ; whUe Wagner (as music-dramatist) and Browning were masters of tragedy in that ideal and specific sense, with all differences of material, manner and con- struction, which necessitates the recognition of Sophocles as the indisputable sovereign of tragic art. 4 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. Never has the death of a great poet elicited a more spontaneous, widely spread arid rationally founded appreciation of his work than in the case of Robert Browning ; and yet, with a full ac- knowledgment of this fact, I feel that on three points complete justice still remains to be done him, and I venture to prophesy that the day is not far off when it will be universally recognized that (1) he was, broadly speaking, one of the greatest of the masters of rhythm and metre, (2) that in the special domain of blank verse he was a legitimate and paramount creator, and (3) that the comparatively small number of plays he has left entitles him to rank among the world's piti- ably few great dramatists. As far, at any rate, as English literature is concerned — setting aside Shakespeare, Shelley's Cenci and Milton's Samson Agonistes — a selection from its whole wide and opulent range would not furnish a body of eight (or nine) plays equal in combined poetic, dramatic, theatric and ethic value to the like number with which Browning has enriched the world. In support of this conviction I have no inten- tion here of entering upon a critical analysis of the works in question, for the reason that any such attempted demonstration would be equally useless with those who are already of my view and with those who, without coming to it, can read the plays themselves or witness one of them staged ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. and acted — A Blot in the 'Scutcheon, for instance, produced even as it was, when I saw it, in March 1888, without any specially notable advantage beyond the ideally tragic performance of Mildred by Miss Alma Murray, that incomparable ac- tress in whom are assembled all the highest perfections of her art. From the acting point of view, provided only that its audience comes pre- pared for something more than amusement, this play seems to me as perfect a piece of work as ever left the hands of a dramatist and well deserv- ing of the enthusiastic and loving praise bestowed upon it by so piercing and unfettered a judge as Charles Dickens, whose words it will not be out of place to reproduce here. They are as follows : " Browning's play has thrown me into a perfect passion of sorrow. To say that there is anything in its subject save what is lovely, true, deeply affecting, full of the best emotion, the most earn- est feeling, and the niost true and tender source of interest, is to say that there is no light in the sun, and no heat in blood. It is full of genius, natural and great thoughts, profound and yet simple, and yet beautiful in its vigour. I know nothing that is so affecting, nothing in any book I have ever read, as Mildred's recurrence to that 'I was so young — I had no' mother.' I know no love like it, no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its' conception, like it. 6 EGBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. And I swear it is a tragedy that must be played : and must be played, moreover, by Macready. There are some things in it that I would have changed if I could (they are very slight, ^mostly broken lines) ; and I assuredly would have the old servant begin his tale upon the scene ; and be taken by the throat, or drawn upon, by his master, in its commencement. But the tragedy I never shall forget, or less vividly remember than I do now. And if you [Forster] tell Browning that I have seen it, tell him that I believe from my soul there is no man living (and not many dead) who could produce such a work." The drama's effect upon the audience of which I was a member was just such as, supposing these words of Dickens to be true, might have been anticipated. It was followed from beginning to end with that tense and " tingling sHentness " which comes upon an as- sembly of people only when every individual in it is being, for the time, brought face to face with his most obdurately secret self, — when his whole moral nature is undergoing the properly tragic process of purgation by means of pity and terror. With regard to the situation at the close of the second act (so often triumphantly cited as a proof that Browning was no dramatist) where Guendolen has a long speech while Mildred is lying insensi- ble on the ground, the question is merely one of stagc-managcraent. The speech referred to should ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 7 of course be broken up (and perhaps slightly cut), while Guendolen busies herself with reviving Mildred and assisting her gradually to a chair or couch. Though I do not here speak of them in detail, I am by no means ignoring all the other points that it is customary to urge against Browning's writings for the stage ; on the contrary, I have considered them long and deeply, coming finally to the conviction that the objectors have touched nothing that concerns the vitals of the drama, and that his tragic faculty alone would be more than enough to dispose of a tenfold stronger case than any that has yet been advanced against him. So great and manifold are the demands made upon author or actor for the adequate embodiment of truly tragic ideals, that the possession of the indispensable qualities by either constitutes a difference almost of kind rather than of degree between him and his fellows. A tragic artist is and always has been the rarest production of the world, and we need not wonder, therefore, that, since Browning's death, it should be without a tragic poet, or that the secret of tragic acting at the present time should (as far as London has seen) be confined to two foreign actors and one English actress, whose Othello, Hamlet and Beatrice Cenci, for instance, mark a level of histrionic attainment hardly even suggested by 8 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. the performances of any other contemporary player •whatever. In spite of the unfathomable wealth of poetry, that, apart from his plays, Browning has left be- hind, I shall never cease to regret that circum- stances should have turned him from writing for the stage, and the loss the world has sustained in the plays which he did not write I account as second only to that accruing to it through the disappearance of a proportionate number of those that the three Greek Masters did write. That Browning was born with all the instincts and longings of an authentic dramatist rooted in the very fibre of his being could be shown in many ways, but sufficient proof of it exists in the single fact that, had he lived a year longer, we should in all probability have seen another drama from his pen. It is well known that after an abstin- ence from play-writing of more than thirty years, the dormant faculty had been so stimulated in him by Miss Alma Murray's performances of Beatrice Cenci and Mildred Tresham, that he was only waiting the occurrence to him of a fitting subject, or the suggestion of one from her, to be- gin work upon a new tragedy for her. What this actress's truly magical evocation of the long- buried daughter pf his heart and brain meant to the veteran poet can be gathered from the beautiful and touching letter which he wrote to her while ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 9 under the first vivid impression received from her embodiment of Mildred Tresham. * In it can be read, as in the tablets of his inmost nature, indi- cations of the undying aflfection with which he must have regarded the early offspring of his dramatic years, and, by implication, one further proof of the saying that " a veritably tragic per- sonage, can be born of no poet with any lighter pangs than those of a human mother for her child." The fact just mentioned does away, at once and by itself alone, with the theory that Browning aban loned play-writing because he had discovered that the drama proper was not a truly appropriate vehicle for the expression of what was in him, and had invented a more suitable one in the dra- matic monologue. Marvellous and imperishable as are his achievements in this practically new form of poetic art, I cannot but feel that, had he continued the career so nobly begun in Strafford and so superbly ended in In a Balcony, English literature would have been by some degrees richer even than he left it. So distinctly higher is the drama than any other species of poetry that, when a man once possesses the key of its mystery, the whole value of his poetic endowment is enhanced many times * See " Alma Murray, Portrait as Beatrice Oenci, with Critical Notice containing Four Letters from Robert Browning.'" Elkin Mathews, Yigo Street. 10 ROBEET BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. by the mere fact of its being utilized in dramatic ratlier tban any other form. No man can be a bom dramatist who does not cherish in his heart the insuperable desire to see his plays adequately acted, knowing, as he must, that there is no such thing as "a play for the study," that a play is a play for the stage, or no play at all. It takes a keen and very special intelligence to determine from the printed pages whether a drama is a drama or not — that is to say, not only whether it is suitable for, but whether it does not remain merely semi-Adtal without, stage-representation. Take the case of The Cenci, that tragedy of superhuman power and sublimity, which, as far as general opinion was concerned, lay for over sixty years under ffee im- putation of being a bad acting play. It waited its time ; an actress of genius; aspiration and intre- pidity was found to believe in it and to undertake its unparalleled leading r61e ; it was produced in the spirit befitting so high an enterprise, and proved itself an acting tragedy with hardly a superior to be named. Browning, one of the earliest and greatest believers in Shelley's, as he designated it, " unrivalled " Cenci, must have felt with all the poignant sympathy of a brother dramatist and poet, the inexpiable artis- tic criminality involved in the waste of such a tragic master-work, by its being suffered to remain ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 11 SO long unacted. Who knows but that it was the contemplation of this very example which, at a time when he saw no longer any prospect of his dramas being worthily produced, turned him re- solutely from play-writing, feeling as he did within him the power to develope, in the so-called "monodrama," a form of poetry which would enable him to be dramatic as few, and tragic as none, of his predecessors or contemporaries have been with their eyes averted from the play-house ? Be this as it may, it cannot be doubted that, how- ever great and however numerous the dramatic masterpieces with which he might' have followed In a Balcony, they would have shared the fate either of this perfect example of concentrated tragedy or that of the hardly less invulnerable specimens on a large scale, The Return of the Druses and Luria. It will be remembered that the first-named of these three plays was not acted till twenty-nine years afteritspublication,and that the other two remain yet to be produced. That such production is merely a question of time I do not doubt, for the parts of Djabal and Luria must offer an irresistible attraction to any actor endowed with that plastic equilibrium of physical, intellectual, and moral qualities which is demanded for their complete interpreta- tion. The r61es' of Anael (the marvellous and magical Druse-maiden) andof Domizia (the subtle. 12 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. passionate, and sure-brained Florentine) are already provided for, since in Miss Alma Murray, the " creator " of Constance — the reviver of Col- ombe and Mildred, we have that peculiar combin- ation of the ideal Shakespearean with the ideal Sophoclean heroine which Browning's great woman-parts require, — a combination which has not been apparent in any other actress since Miss Helen Faucit. There is something singularly and pathetically beautiful in the thought that of these two truly great actresses one should have been at Browning's disposal at the very opening of his dramatic career, and that the other should have appeared in time, but only in time, to fill him with the intention of once more turning to account that highest of his faculties which had so long been suffered to rest in him unused. It has been somewhere well and wisely observed that " a great play may consist in barely more than the unrolling of the panorama of a great soul, but that no amount of action or of inventiveness in situation can make a great play in the absence of the great soul to be set in action or shown in situation." Of this truth all dramatists of the first order — whether of the Sophoclean, the Shakespear- ean or the Eacinian type — have shown themselves mindful, reserving to themselves the liberty of practically dispensing with " plot " whenever they deemed that by so doing they would ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 13 be best serving the fundamental idea of the subject in hand. " Plot " indeed may as often be detrimental as beneficial to the drama in its pure and genuine form, and of "plot" Browning's plays have always enough for all high dramatic pur- poses, though the presentation and revealment of character are in all cases his chief end and aim. His dramatis personcBave always beings of organic life and full and freely-coursing blood, and, what is more, they preserve in their composition that golden mean between the type and the individual which the drama really demands, it being quite as easy for a play-wright to err on the side of too much as of too little individuality in his characters. No one really conversant with Browning's dramas has, to my knowledge, ever denied his mastery in the presentation of tragic passion, — it is needful therefore-only to remark that the passion is tragic, that is to say, always distinguished by a certain degree of reticence (at need, even, of aus- terity) indicating that the poet is the controller of the passion, instead of the passion being master of the poet. With his pathos the case is some- what different. Many, even among, those familiar with his plays, have been heard to deny him this gift ; but here also, I conceive, the like remark has to be made, that the pathos, namely, is tragic pathos ; always ready at command, never intro- duced for its own especial sake ; rather, in short. 14 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. the lofty and imperial pathos of Sophocles than the comparatively eaay and willing pathos — with all reverence, be it said, for three such mighty names — of Euripides, Victor Hugo, and, not un- frequently, even of Shakespeare. Browning's subjects are never common-place. It seems almost as if he had selected them with a view to their difficulty and their capability of affording a true test of a dramatist's power. He avoids the beaten and enticing road to dramatic success ; he brings the whole wealth of an un- bounded poetic faculty to bear upon his stage- creations, and by these means we are made to feel that in his plays we move in regions of idealised but still earth-rooted existence, of an intensified depth and fulness of actual life. We must mount many steps from the ordinary and familiarly trodden ground of motive and action before we can enter upon his dramatic world. And in no case does this world owe its existence to the play of a capricious phantasy ; it is always the result of a logical and in itself probable development of the forces that actuate men and women in real life. This condition of " realism " in the noble sense of the word Browning invariably and scrupulously observes. A recent number of the Quarterly Review, in an article on Sophocles, speaks of the first stasi- mon in the CEdiiius Coloneus as "this immortal ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 15 ode — which for anyone who can read Greek for pleasure at once raises the standard of what is possible for human achievement in poetry." Ex- tending the scope of this observation, I would say than an entire tragedy of Sophocles read fluently in the Greek at once raises the reader's standard of what is possible for human achievement in the drama, and would seek to emphasize the fact that the three English poets, who,since Shakespeare,have written great plays, were Greek scholars and fam- iliar with Sophocles in the original. To what result ? To this. That Milton, when addressing himself to the drama, preferred to work towards the Sophoclean ideal rather than the Shakespearean and produced a masterpiece worthy of even Milton's endeavour ; and that Shelley and Brown- ing, without abandoning the Shakespearean ideal, crossed and clarified it with inspiration drawn from the Sophoclean.* Leaving the particular field of drama and taking up a more general ptjint of view, I am inclined to think that, even among his warmest advocates, far too little stress is laid upon Browning's trans- * While this Note was in the press, my attention was drawn to an article on Browning in the Encyclopcedia Americana. It contains, to the honour of American discernment, the following passage i — " In the great tragedies, ' The Return of the Druses,' and ' King Victor and King Charles,' in that brilliant comedy, ' Colombe's Birthday ' ; in the wonderful lyrical drama ' Pippa Passes '; and in the three scenes of ' In a Balcony,' — dramatic art almost reaches perfection." 16 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. cendent merits as an executant. As regards the elements usually objected to in his language, there is very little for which the examples and analogies are not already in unchallenged currency in clas- sical English; in the pages of writers who are admittedly correct, but whose literary calibre does not invite the fierce scrutiny bestowed upon Browning ; or in the floating but no less authentic classicality of the normally spoken tongue. On the lines of these examples and analogies he moves with sovereign freedom, extending them, varying them, crossing them, in that unmistakable manner which shows a writer to be not only in possession of the science, but to be possessed hy the instinct, of language. His metres and rhythms, in all their varied novelty, never afi"ect us as merely clever and capricious inventions from without, but are felt to be the manifestations of principles hidden in his own individuality as well as in that of the language in which he writes ; so that when (as in the cases of all other poetic inventors of the first order) we have set aside a certain proportion of unorganic or semi-organic verbal growths, the residue of of what is new and specifically his will gradually be absorbed into the veins of the language and be felt at last as part and parcel of its natural music. In metaphor, that all-upholding pillar of the temple of high poetry, Browning is, if less ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 17 rich and varied than Shakespeare, less so than Shakespeare .alone, while his application of it seems always to be so inevitably called for that his richness is never felt to degenerate into pro- fusion. In simile he is abundant to the utmost need, but at the same time temperate and rigorously appropriate, his comparisons bearing frequently the stamp of such ideal illustrations as that of ^schylus in the Choephorce, lines 505 to 507,"' or that of Sophocles in the Trachinice, lines 31 to 33, which are not only in themselves mordantly objective but, by an inexplicable and subtle fitness to the mental situation of the speaker, seem to usurp something of the function of music in their direct and unopposable seizure upon our moral nature. Browning's blank verse, after Shakespeare's and Milton's, forms the third great vital and vital- izing tjrpe of the metre that we possess. It is generically distinct from that of any other poet.t It teems with passages both of " natural magic " and of " moral magic." It is always, even when least upborne by its matter, tingling, electric. * Dindorf, 1851. + Shelley, doubtless, set a strong yet " imsophisticating " im- press of hi^ own upon this metre ; but, however great the spon- taneous and creative individuality with which he is able to sustain it at the highest pitch of poetic inspiration, it seems to me to be representative rather of the difference between variety and variety than of that between genus and genus. 18 ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. palpitating, overbrimming with life, — woven as it were, to use his own words, of " An emulous exchange of pulses, vents Of nature into nature," while throughout vast stretches of it he maintains it at an intensity of poetic impetus beyond which no poet, at long flight, has ever gone. The Headmaster of Westminster, in the intro- duction to his recent edition of the Fourth Book of Thucydides (a classic, by the way, to whom Browning's all-embracing sanity makes him kin), has the following noteworthy sentences, — " Not that his (Thucydides's) style is in itself without difficulties, but they are difficulties . . . such as arise always when the language of a people receives the special impress of a great writer's mind and genius. Just in proportion to the measure of individuality with which a man is gifted, does his use of the language of his race differ from the common and normal use. We may know a language very well in an ordinary way, and yet be unable to enjoy per- fectly some of the greatest writers of it. We can imagine, for example, a person who has a very fai^ knowledge of ancient Greek derived from desultory reading of authors of every class and time, yet finding this knowledge inadequate to the intelligent study of Thucydides or J5sch- ROBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. 19 ylus or any other author possessed of a vigorous individuality. There is such a thing as genius modifying language ; there is such a thing as style .... If we re-read ^schylus, for example, afber some interval, We are for the first few hundred lines bewildered by the personal or individual element in his Greek. We cannot for the moment quite adjust it to our conceptions of the normal usage ; but it is not long before we see that we have to^ do with a style in which all the power and range of normal Greek idiom are legitimately used to produce a fashion of expressing thought which yet differs so entirely from the normal mode as to be a new creation. . . . But normal use is the basis of it all. " It would be impossible here to accentuate too strongly these words of Mr. Eutherford's, indicating as they do so accurately the spirit in which it behoves us to approach the study of Browning, a poet, be it borne in mind, who is in- tellectually the peer of Shakespeare and Milton, and whose profound and uncompromising origin- ality delays, while it assures, his acceptance as poet in that undebated fulness of the term with which the world at large has (not without resist- ance) been gradually schooled to apply it to his two mightiest predecessors in English poetry. To the eye of sober history the period of 1880 to 1890 will appear as perhaps the blackest that 20 EGBERT BROWNING AND THE DRAMA. the histrionic art in England has gone through Signs, however, are not wanting that the ground is breaking up beneath the systems that have ruled our theatres for the past ten or eleven years. Change is not only inevitable, but immi- nent. Whether for the better or the worse, who can say ? If for the worse, we may be thankful that what we shall arrive at is hidden from our view ; but, if seriously for the better, we may not unreasonably hold the belief that one of its earliest symptoms will be the production of those plays of Browning's which yet await their trial on the stage. BowDEN, Hldson & Co., Printers, 23, Rod Lioa Street, Holborn, London, W.C. Cornell University Library PR 4238.F16 Robert Browning and the drama; 3 1924 013 444 769 t^m- ^■.*r- 'M-^'^' var. ':^^:-t^ a%^'