Robert Browning. C. H. Herford
an ordinary Hamlet from his task of vengeance. But Mertoun and Mildred are at once too timid and too audacious, too tremulous in their consciousness of guilt, too hardy and reckless in their mutual devotion, to carry through so difficult a game. Mertoun falters and stammers in his suit to Tresham; Mildred stands mute at her brother's charge, incapable of evasion, only resolute not to betray. Yet these same two children in the arts of politic self-defence are found recklessly courting the peril of midnight meetings in Mildred's chamber with the aid of all the approved resources and ruses of romance—the disguise, the convenient tree, the signal set in the window, the lover's serenade. And when the lover, who dared all risks to his lady and to himself for a stolen interview with her night by night, finally encounters Tresham, he is instantly paralysed, and will not even lift a sword in his own defence. Upon this union of boundless daring for one another's sake and sensibility to the shame of having wronged the house and blotted the 'scutcheon Mertoun's fate hangs, and with his Mildred's, and with hers Tresham's.
Beside the tragedy and the stain of the love of Mertoun and Mildred, Browning characteristically sets the calm, immaculate, cousinly affection of Gwendolen and Austin. One has a glimpse here of his habitual criticism of all satisfied attainment, of all easy completeness on a low plane. It is Gwendolen herself who half disarms that criticism, or makes it, as applied to her, more pathetic than trenchant by instantly detecting and proclaiming the different quality of Mertoun's love. "Mark him, Austin: that's true love! Ours must begin again." In Tresham Browning seems to have designed to portray the finest type of ancestral pride. He is "proud" of his "interminable line," because the men were all "paladins" and the women all of flawless honour; and he has the chivalrous tenderness of ideal knighthood, as well as its honourable pride. When Mertoun has received his death-stroke and told his story, the tenderness comes out; the sullied image of his passionately loved sister not only recovers its appeal, but rises up before him in mute intolerable reproach; and Mildred has scarcely breathed her last in his arms when Tresham succumbs to the poison he has taken in remorse for his hasty act. It is unlucky that this tragic climax, finely conceived as it is, is marred by the unconscious burlesque of his "Ah—I had forgotten: I am dying." In such things one feels Browning's want of the unerring sureness of a great dramatist at the crucial moments of action.
Although not brilliantly successful on the boards, A Blot in the 'Scutcheon made a deep impression upon the more competent part of the audience. For Browning himself the most definite result was that Macready passed out of his life—for twenty years they never met—and that his most effective link with the stage was thus finally severed. But his more distant and casual relations with it were partly balanced by the much enlarged understanding of dramatic effect which he had by this time won; and A Blot in the 'Scutcheon was followed by a drama which attains a beauty and charm not far below that of Pippa Passes under the conditions of a regular dramatic plot. The ostensible subject of Colombe's Birthday is a political crisis on the familiar lines;—an imperilled throne in the centre of interest, a background of vague oppression and revolt. But as compared with King Victor or The Druses the dispute is harmless, the tumult of revolution easily overheard. The diplomatic business is not etherealised into romance, like the ladies' embassy in Love's Labour's Lost; but neither is it allowed to become grave or menacing. Berthold's arrival to present his claim to the government of this miniature state affects us somewhat like the appearance of a new and formidable player in some drawing-room diversion; and the "treason" of the courtiers like the "unfairness" of children at play. Nevertheless, the victory of love over political interest which the motto foreshadows is not accomplished without those subtle fluctuations and surprises which habitually mark the conduct of Browning's plots. The alternative issues gain in seriousness and ideality as we proceed, and Browning has nowhere expressed the ideal of sovereignty more finely than it is expressed in this play, by the man for whose sake a sovereign is about to surrender her crown.[20] Colombe herself is one of Browning's most gracious and winning figures. She brings the ripe decision of womanhood to bear upon a series of difficult situations without losing the bright glamour of her youth. Her inborn truth and nature draw her on as by a quiet momentum, and gradually liberate her from the sway of the hollow fictions among which her lot is cast. Valence, the outward instrument of this liberation, is not the least noble of that line of chivalrous lovers which reaches from Gismond to Caponsacchi. With great delicacy the steps are marked in this inward and spiritual "flight" of Colombe. Valence's "way of love" is to make her realise the glory and privileges of the rulership which places her beyond his reach, at the very moment when she is about to resign it in despair. She discovers the needs of the woman and the possibilities of power at the same time, and thus is brought, by Valence's means, to a mood in which Prince Berthold's offer of his hand and crown together weighs formidably, for a moment, against Valence's offer of his love alone, until she discovers that Berthold is the very personation, in love and in statecraft alike, of the fictions from which she had escaped. Then, swiftly recovering herself, she sets foot finally on the firm ground where she had first sought her "true resource."
[20] This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage. Browning with good reason directed its omission unless "a very good Valence" could be found.
Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning's mundane personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth. He comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity of Valence. He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process unaffectedly boring. Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently share his own. An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open contempt. His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet. By birth and principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning's men of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker. He "watches his mind," and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and exposes them with ironical candour. Few of Browning's less right-minded persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:—
"All is for the best.
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
To pluck and set upon my barren helm
To wither—any garish plume will do."
Colombe's Birthday was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the Bells, but had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however, the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at Sadler's Wells.
The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing Colombe's Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul's Tragedy exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the Wild Duck. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes. Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see