owning's less right-minded
persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than
Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:--

"All is for the best.
Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
To pluck and set upon my barren helm
To wither,--any garish plume will do."

_Colombe's Birthday_ was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the _Bells_, but
had for the present no prospect of the stage. Nine years later, however,
the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its
predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at
Sadler's Wells.

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the
hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom
and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic
sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after
finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of
poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A
Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane
policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the
sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have
thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that
in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild
Duck_. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which
he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of _Pippa Passes_.
Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high
and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with
regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was
far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it.
"For _The Soul's_ _Tragedy_," he wrote (Feb. 11)--"that will surprise
you, I think. There is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the
black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be
printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent,
needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more
impressive than its successor _Luria_. This was, however, no tribute to
its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more
openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly
towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the
great portrait studies of _Men