Life of Robert Browning [35]
is the ruinous banality of Mildred's anticlimax when,
after her brother reveals himself as her lover's murderer,
she, like the typical young `Miss Anglaise' of certain French novelists,
betrays her incapacity for true passion by exclaiming, in effect,
"What, you've murdered my lover! Well, tell me all. Pardon?
Oh, well, I pardon you: at least I THINK I do. Thorold, my dear brother,
how very wretched you must be!"
I am unaware if this anticlimax has been pointed out by any one,
but surely it is one of the most appalling lapses of genius
which could be indicated. Even the beautiful song in
the third scene of the first act, "There's a woman like a dew-drop,
she's so purer than the purest," is, in the circumstances,
nearly over the verge which divides the sublime from the ridiculous.
No wonder that, on the night the play was first acted,
Mertoun's song, as he clambered to his mistress's window,
caused a sceptical laugh to ripple lightly among the tolerant auditory.
It is with diffidence I take so radically distinct a standpoint from that
of Dickens, who declared he knew no love like that of Mildred and Mertoun,
no passion like it, no moulding of a splendid thing after its conception,
like it; who, further, at a later date, affirmed that he would rather have
written this play than any work of modern times: nor with less reluctance,
that I find myself at variance with Mr. Skelton, who speaks of the drama
as "one of the most perfectly conceived and perfectly executed tragedies
in the language." In the instance of Luria, that second Othello,
suicide has all the impressiveness of a plenary act of absolution:
the death of Anael seems as inevitable as the flash of lightning
after the concussion of thunder-clouds. But Thorold's suicide
is mere weakness, scarce a perverted courage; and Mildred's broken heart
was an ill not beyond the healing of a morally robust physician.
"Colombe's Birthday" has a certain remoteness of interest,
really due to the reader's more or less acute perception
of the radical divergence, for all Valence's greatness of mind and spirit,
between the fair young Duchess and her chosen lover:
a circumstance which must surely stand in the way of its popularity.
Though "A Soul's Tragedy" has the saving quality of humour,
it is of too grim a kind to be provocative of laughter.
In each of these plays* the lover of Browning will recall passage
after passage of superbly dramatic effect. But supreme in his remembrance
will be the wonderful scene in "The Return of the Druses", where the Prefect,
drawing a breath of relief, is almost simultaneously assassinated;
and that where Anael, with every nerve at tension in her fierce
religious resolve, with a poignant, life-surrendering cry,
hails Djabal as `Hakeem' -- as Divine -- and therewith falls dead at his feet.
Nor will he forget that where, in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon",
Mildred, with a dry sob in her throat, stammeringly utters --
"I -- I -- was so young!
Besides I loved him, Thorold -- and I had
No mother; God forgot me: so I fell ----"
or that where, "at end of the disastrous day," Luria takes the phial of poison
from his breast, muttering --
"Strange! This is all I brought from my own land
To help me."
--
* "Strafford", 1837; "King Victor and King Charles", 1842;
"The Return of the Druses", and "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", 1843;
"Colombe's Birthday", 1844; "Luria", and "A Soul's Tragedy", 1845.
--
Before passing on from these eight plays to Browning's most imperishable
because most nearly immaculate dramatic poem, "Pippa Passes",
and to "Sordello", that colossal derelict upon the ocean of poetry,
I should like -- out of an embarrassing quantity of alluring details --
to remind the reader of two secondary matters of interest, pertinent to
the present theme. One is that the song in "A Blot in the 'Scutcheon",
"There's a woman like a dew-drop", written several years before
the author's meeting with Elizabeth Barrett, is so closely
in the style of "Lady