An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 4

action,
considered only in connection with a particular grouping of events, and
only so far as it produces or operates upon these. The processes are
concealed from us, we see the result. In the very highest realisations of
this dramatic power, and always in intention, we are presented with a
perfect picture, in which every actor lives, and every word is audible;
perfect, complete in itself, without explanation, without comment; a
dogma incarnate, which we must accept as it is given us, and explain
and illustrate for ourselves. If we wish to know what this character or
that thought or felt in his very soul, we may perhaps have data from
which to construct a more or less probable hypothesis; but that is all.
We are told nothing, we care to know nothing of what is going on in
the thought; of the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which
will perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation
in action, but by which the soul's life in reality subsists. This is not the
intention: it is a spectacle of life we are beholding; and life is action.
But is there no other sense in which a poet may be dramatic, besides
this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, which
"Peradventure may outgrow,
The simulation of the painted scene,

Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
And take for a
nobler stage the soul itself,
In shifting fancies and celestial lights,

With all its grand orchestral silences,
To keep the pauses of the
rhythmic sounds."[2]
This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Browning, a drama
of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul. Instead of a grouping of
characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result in
action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they
influence the character or the mind. This is very clearly explained in the
original Advertisement to Paracelsus, where Browning tells us that his

poem is an attempt
"to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set
forth any phenomenon of the mind or the
passions, by the operation
of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an
external machinery of
incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire
to
produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood
itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it
is influenced and determined, to be
generally discernible in its effects
alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded."
In this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled
(thinking himself into it, as all dramatists must do) to bring out its
characteristics, to reveal its very nature. Suppose him to be attracted by
some particular soul or by some particular act. The problem occupies
him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is; he
winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks to
pieces the machinery. Presently he begins to reconstruct, before our
eyes, the whole series of events, the whole substance of the soul, but,
so to speak, turned inside out. We watch the workings of the mental
machinery as it is slowly disclosed before us; we note the specialties of
construction, its individual character, the interaction of parts, every
secret of it. We thus come to see that, considered from the proper point
of view, everything is clear, regular and explicable in however
entangled an action, however obscure a soul; we see that what is
external is perfectly natural when we can view its evolution from what
is internal. It must not be supposed that Browning explains this to us in
the manner of an anatomical lecturer; he makes every character explain
itself by its own speech, and very often by speech that is or seems false
and sophistical, so only that it is personal and individual, and explains,
perhaps by exposing, its speaker.
This, then, is Browning's consistent mental attitude, and his special
method. But he has also a special instrument, the monologue. The
drama of action demands a concurrence of several distinct personalities,
influencing one another rapidly by word or deed, so as to bring about
the catastrophe; hence the propriety of the dialogue. But the

introspective drama, in which the design is to represent and reveal the
individual, requires a concentration of interest, a focussing of light on
one point, to the exclusion or subordination of surroundings; hence the
propriety of the monologue, in which a single speaker or thinker can
consciously or unconsciously exhibit his own soul. This form of
monologue, learnt perhaps from Landor, who used it with little
psychological intention, appears in almost the earliest of Browning's
poems, and