Browning and the Dramatic Monologue. S. S. Curry
in the impression made upon the character speaking. In conversation, at times, a talker becomes more or less oblivious of his companion, yet the presence of his listener all the time affects the attitude of his mind.
If we render a letter artistically to a company of people, we necessarily turn it into a monologue. We read the letter with the person in our mind, as a listener, to whom it is directed. We do not give its deeper ideas and personal or dramatic suggestions to a company as a speech.
It is not surprising to find many monologues in epistolary form. Browning’s “Cleon,” in which is so truly presented the spirit of the Greeks—to whom Paul spoke and wrote and among whom he worked—is a letter written by Cleon, a Greek poet, to King Protus, his friend. Protus has written to Cleon concerning the opinions held by one Paulus, a rumor of whose preaching of the doctrine of immortality has reached him. “An epistle containing the strange Medical Experiments of Karshish, the Arab Physician,” is a letter from Karshish to his old teacher describing the strange case of Lazarus with an account of an interview with him after he had risen from the dead.
This poem illustrates also the fact that a monologue may not be on the personal plane. Browning is seemingly the only writer in English who has been able to present a character completely negative, or one without personal relations to the events. The character in this poem has a purely scientific attribute of mind and looks upon this event from a purely neutral point of view. It is only to him a curious case. By this method, the deeper significance may be given to the events while at the same time accentuating a peculiar type of mind, or it may be a rare moment in the life of nearly every individual. This poem is accordingly very interesting from a psychological point of view. It illustrates the scientific temper. The French have many examples of such writers, but Browning gives the best—in fact almost the only illustration in English literature.
“The Biglow Papers,” by Lowell, though in the form of letters, are really dramatic monologues. Each character is made to speak dramatically or in his own peculiar way. The chief interest of every one of these poems centres in the character speaking. The mental action is sustained consistently; the dramatic completeness, the definite point of view, and the dialect, enable us to picture the peculiar characters who think and feel, live and move, talk and act for our enjoyment.
The monologue, accordingly, is nearer to the dialogue than to a letter. The differences between the dialogue and the monologue are the chief differences between the monologue and the play. In a dialogue there is a constant and immediate effect of another personality upon the speaker. The same is true of the monologue. The speaker of the monologue must accentuate the effect of his interlocutor as flexibly and freely as in the case of the dialogue. In the dialogue, however, the speaker and the listener change places; the monologue has but one speaker, and can only suggest the views or character of a listener by revealing some impression produced upon the speaker while in the act of speaking. This makes pauses and expressive modulations of the voice even more necessary in the monologue than in the dialogue.
Yet the mere fact that a poem or literary work has but one speaker does not make it a monologue; it may be a speech. Burns’s “For A’ That and A’ That” is a speech. Matthew Arnold may not be quite fair when he says that it is mere preaching, that Burns was not sincere, and that we find the real Burns in “The Jolly Beggars.” Still, all must feel in reading it that Burns is exhorting others and railing a little at the world, but not revealing a character unconsciously or indirectly, through contact with either a man of another type, or through the exigencies of a given situation. Burns is boasting a little and asserting his independence.
The monologue demands not only a speaker, but a speaker in such a situation as will cause him to reveal himself unconsciously and indirectly, and such a moment as will lay bare his deepest motives. He must speak also in a natural, lifelike way. There must be no suggestion of a platform, no conscious presentation of truth for a definite end, as with the orator.
It is a peculiar fact that the most difficult of all things is to tell the truth. Every man “knows a good many things that are not so.” For every affirmation of importance, we demand witnesses. Whenever a man speaks, we look into his character, into the living, natural languages which are unconscious witnesses of the depth of his earnestness and sincerity. Even in every-day life men judge of truth by character. What a man is, always colors, if it does not determine, what he says. But the essence of the monologue is to bring what a man says and what he is into harmony.
The interpreter of a monologue must be true to the character of the speaker. He must faithfully portray, not his own, but the attitude and bearing, feelings and impression, of this character. Every normal person would greatly admire the beauties of “the villa,” but the “Italian person of quality,” in Browning’s monologue, feels for it great contempt.
In Browning’s “Youth and Art” we feel continually the point of view, the feeling, and the character of the speaker.
YOUTH AND ART
It once might have been, once only:
We lodged in a street together,
You, a sparrow on the housetop lonely,
I, a lone she-bird of his feather.
Your trade was with sticks and clay,
You thumbed, thrust, patted, and polished,
Then laughed, “They will see, some day,
Smith made, and Gibson demolished.”
My business was song, song, song;
I chirped, cheeped, trilled, and twittered,
“Kate Brown’s on the boards ere long,
And Grisi’s existence imbittered!”
I earned no more by a warble
Than you by a sketch in plaster:
You wanted a piece of marble,
I needed a music-master.
We studied hard in our styles,
Chipped each at a crust like Hindoos,
For air, looked out on the tiles,
For fun, watched each other’s windows.
You lounged, like a boy of the South,
Cap and blouse—nay, a bit of beard, too;
Or you got it, rubbing your mouth
With fingers the clay adhered to.
And I—soon managed to find
Weak points in the flower-fence facing,
Was forced to put up a blind
And be safe in my corset-lacing.
No harm! It was not my fault
If you never turned your eye’s tail up
As I shook upon E in alt., Or ran the chromatic scale up; For spring bade the sparrows pair, And the boys and girls gave guesses, And stalls in our street looked rare With bulrush and water-cresses. Why did not you pinch a flower In a pellet of clay and fling it? Why did not I put a power Of thanks in a look, or sing it? I did look, sharp as a lynx (And yet the memory rankles) When models arrived, some minx Tripped up stairs, she and her ankles. But I think I gave you as good! “That foreign fellow—who can know How she pays, in a playful mood, For his tuning her that piano?” Could you say so, and never say, “Suppose we join hands and fortunes, And I fetch her from over the way, Her, piano, and long tunes and short tunes?” No, no; you would not be rash, Nor I rasher and something over: You’ve to settle yet Gibson’s hash, And Grisi yet lives in clover. But you meet the Prince at the Board. I’m queen myself at bals-parés, I’ve married a rich old lord, And you’re dubbed knight and an R. A. Each life’s unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still patchy and scrappy; We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired—been happy. And nobody calls you a dunce, And people suppose me clever; This could but have happened once, And we missed it, lost it forever.
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