Browning and the Dramatic Monologue. S. S. Curry

       And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas,

       We loved, sir—used to meet:

       How sad and bad and mad it was—

       But then, how it was sweet!

      Here, evidently, the speaker, who has “come to die,” has been aroused by some “reverend sir,” who has been expostulating with him and uttering conventional phrases about the vanity of human life. Such superficial pessimism awakens protest, and the dying man remonstrates in the words of the poem.

      The speaker is apparently in bed and hardly believes himself fully possessed of his senses. He even asks if the curtain is “green or blue to a healthy eye,” as if he feared to trust his judgment, lest it be perverted by disease.

      An abrupt beginning is very characteristic of a monologue, and when given properly, the first words arrest attention and suggest the situation.

      After the speaker’s bewildered repetition of the visitor’s words and his blunt answer “not I,” which says such views are not his own, he talks of his “bedside hand,” turns a row of bottles into a street, and tells of the sweetest experience of his life. He refuses to say that it was not sweet; he will not allow an abnormal condition such as his sickness to determine his views of life. The result is an introspection of the deeper hope found in the heart of man.

      The poem is not an essay or a sermon, it is not the lyric expression of a mood; it portrays the conflict of individual with individual and reveals the deepest motives of a character. It is not a dialogue, but only one end of a conversation, and for this reason it more intensely and definitely focuses attention. We see deeper into the speaker’s spirit and view of life, while we recognize the superficiality of the creed of his visitor. The monologue thus is dramatic. It interprets human experience and character.

      No one who intelligently reads Browning can fail to realize that he was a dramatic poet; in fact he was the first, if not the only, English dramatic poet of the nineteenth century. With his deep insight into the life of his age, as well as his grasp of character, he was the one master whose writing was needed for the drama of that century; yet he early came into conflict with the modern stage and ceased to write plays before he had mastered the play as a work of art.

      He was, however, by nature so dramatic in his point of view that he could never be anything else than a dramatic poet. Hence, he was led to invent, or adopt, a dramatic form different from the play. From the midst of the conflict between poet and stage, between writer and stage artist, the monologue was evolved, or at least recognized and completed as an objective dramatic form.

      Any study of the monologue must thus centre attention upon Browning. As Shakespeare reigns the supreme master of the play, so Browning has no peer in the monologue. Others have followed him in its use, but his monologues remain the most numerous, varied, and expressive.

      The development of the monologue, in some sense, is connected with the struggles of the modern stage to express the conditions of modern life. A great change has taken place in human experience. In modern civilization the conflicts and complex struggles of human character are usually hidden. Men and women now conceal their emotions. Self-control and repression form a part of the civilized ideal. Men no longer shed tears in public as did Homer’s heroes. In our day, a man who is injured does not avenge himself, or if he does he rarely retains the sympathy of his fellow-men. On the contrary, the person wronged now turns over his wronger to the law; conflicts of man with man are fought out in the courts, and a well-ordered government inflicts punishment and rights wrongs.

      All modern life and experience have become more subjective; hence, it is natural that dramatic art should change its form. Let no one suppose, however, that this change marks the death of dramatic representation. Dramatic art in some shape is necessary as a means of expression in every age. It has become more subtle and suggestive, but it is none the less dramatic.

      An important phase of the changes in the character of dramatic art is the recognition of the monologue. The adoption of this form shows the tendency of dramatic art to adapt itself to modern times.

      The dramatic monologue, however, did not arise in opposition to the play, but as a new and parallel aspect of dramatic art. It has not the same theme as the play, does not deal with the expression of human life in movement or the complex struggles of human beings with each other, but it reveals the struggle in the depths of the soul. It exhibits the dramatic attitude of mind or the point of view. It is more subjective, more intense, and also more suggestive than the play. It reveals motives and character by a flash to an awakened imagination.

      However this new dramatic form may be explained, whatever may be its character, there is hardly a book of poetry that has appeared in recent years that does not contain examples. Many popular writers, it may be unconsciously, employ this form almost to the exclusion of all others. The name itself occurs rarely in English books; but the name is nothing—the monologue is there.

      The presence of the form of the monologue before its full recognition is a proof that it is natural and important. Forms of art are not invented; they are rather discovered. They are direct languages; each expresses something no other can say. If the monologue is a distinct literary form, then it possesses certain possibilities in expressing the human spirit which are peculiar to itself. It must say something that nothing else can say so well. Its use by Browning, and the greater and greater frequency of its adoption among recent writers, seems to prove the necessity of a careful study of its peculiarities, possibilities, and rendition.

II. THE SPEAKER

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      What is there peculiar about the monologue? Can its nature or structure be so explained that a seemingly difficult poem, such as a monologue by Browning, may be made clear and forcible?

      In the first place, one should note that the monologue gets its unity from the character of the speaker. It is not merely an impersonal thought, but the expression of one individual to another. It was Hegel, I think, who said that all art implies