a as well as in England, and its
skilful characterisation of Valence, Colombe, and Berthold has won
deserved praise; but it could not hold the stage. The subject is too
thin. Colombe finds out on her birthday that she is not the rightful
heir to the Duchy; but as there is some doubt, she resolves to fight the
question. In her perplexities she is helped and supported by Valence, an
advocate from one of the cities of the Duchy, who loves her, but whom
she believes to serve her from loyalty alone. Berthold, the true heir,
to avoid a quarrel, offers to marry Colombe, not because he loves her,
but as a good piece of policy. She then finds out that she loves
Valence, and refusing the splendid alliance, leaves the court a private
person, with love and her lover. This slight thing is spun out into five
acts by Browning's metaphysics of love and friendship. There is but
little action, or pressure of the characters into one another. The
intriguing courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit together. The
only thing alive in them is their universal meanness. That meanness, it
is true, enhances the magnanimity of Valence and Berthold, but its dead
level in so many commonplace persons lowers the dramatic interest of the
piece. The play is rather an interesting conversational poem about the
up-growing of love between two persons of different but equally noble
character; who think love is of more worth than power or wealth, and who
are finally brought together by a bold, rough warrior who despises love
in comparison with policy. Its real action takes place in the hearts of
Valence and Colombe, not in the world of human life; and what takes
place in their hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so curiously
apart from the simplicities of human love, so complicated, even beyond
the complexity of the situation--for Browning loved to pile complexity
on complexity--that it makes the play unfit for public representation
but all the more interesting for private reading. But, even in the quiet
of our room, we ask why Browning put his subject into a form which did
not fit it; why he overloaded the story of two souls with a host of
characters who have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are
extremely wearisome? It might have been far more successfully done in
the form of _In a Balcony_, which Browning himself does not class as a
drama.

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_Luria_, the last of the dramas in date of composit