against his better judgment, restores his father, who immediately and
conveniently dies. It is a play of court intrigue and of politics, and
these are not made interesting by any action, such as we call dramatic,
in the play. From end to end there is no inter-movement of public
passion. There are only four characters. D'Ormea, the minister, is a
mere stick in a prime-minister's robes and serves Victor and Charles
with equal ease, in order to keep his place. He is not even subtle in
his _role_. When we think what Browning would have made of him in a
single poem, and contrast it with what he has made of him here, we are
again impressed with Browning's strange loss of power when he is writing
drama. Victor and Charles are better drawn than any characters in
_Strafford_; and Polyxena is a great advance on Lady Carlisle. But this
piece is not a drama; it is a study of soul-situations, and none of them
are of any vital importance. There is far too great an improbability in
the conception of Charles. A weak man in private becomes a strong man in
public life. To represent him, having known and felt his strength, as
relapsing into his previous weakness when it endangers all his work, is
quite too foolish. He did not do it in history. Browning, with
astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a
foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it. And the
reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental
one--a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as
Strafford is supposed to have for Charles I.--the kind of love which
intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for
an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it.
Even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a
failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing.

* * * * *

The Return of the Druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its
predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives
which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is
with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry. Browning,
having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire
to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor
are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected
conversations, political intrigue. Things are in th