y face!"

27. DRAMATIC IDYLS.

[Published in May 1879 (_Poetical Works_, 1889, Vol. XV. pp.
1-80).]

In the _Dramatic Idyls_ Browning may almost be said to have broken new
ground. His idyls are short poems of passionate action, presenting in a
graphic and concentrated way a single episode or tragic crisis. Not only
by their concreteness and popular effectiveness, their extraordinary
vigour of conception and expression, are they distinguished from much of
Browning's later writing: they have in addition this significant novelty
of interest, that here for the first time Browning has found subjects
for his poetry among the poor, that here for the first time he has
painted, with all his close and imaginative realism, the human comedy of
the lower classes. That he has never done so before, though rather
surprising, comes, I suppose, from his preponderating interest in
intellectual problems, and from the difficulty of finding such among
what Leon Cladel has called _tragiques histoires plebeiennes_. But the
happy instinct has at last come to him, and we are permitted to watch
the humours of that delicious pair of sinners saved, "Publican Black Ned
Bratts and Tabby his big wife too," as a relief to the less pleasant and
profitable spectacle of His Majesty Napoleon III., or of even the two
poets of Croisic. All the poems in the volume (with the exception of a
notable and noble protest against vivisection, in the form of a touching
little true tale of a dog) are connected together by a single motive, on
which every poem plays a new variation. The motto of the book might
be:--

"There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of his life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries."

This idea of a turning-point or testing-time in the lives of men is more
or less expressed or implied in very much of Browning's poetry, but
nowhere is it expressed so completely, so concisely, or so
consecutively, as here. In _Martin Relph_ (which "embodies," says Mrs.
Orr, "a vague remembrance of something read by Mr. Browning when he was
himself a boy") we have an instance of the tide "omitted," and a
terrible picture of the remorse which follows. Martin Relph has the
chance presented to him of saving two lives, that of the girl he loves
and of his rival whom she loves. The chance is but of an instant's
duration. He hesitates, and the moment is for ever