The author, having shown himself capable of being pathetic, sarcastic, sentimental, comical, and sublime, we would be tempted to think that he had written these plays to show, what no one before suspected, that he could also be dull, were it not for his own exorbitant estimation of them.  Lord Byron had few of the powers of a great dramatist; he had little architectural imagination, or capacity to conceive and build up a whole.  His works are mainly masses of fine, splendid, or humorous writing, heaped together; the parts are seldom forged into one, or connected by any indissoluble link.  His so-called Dramas are only poems divided into chapters.  Further, he had little of what Mr. Ruskin calls penetrative imagination.  So it has been plausibly said that he made his men after his own image, his women after his own heart.  The former are, indeed, rather types of what he wished to be than what he was.  They are better, and worse, than himself.  They have stronger wills, more definite purposes, but less genial and less versatile natures.  But it remains true, that when he tried to represent a character totally different from himself, the result is either unreal or uninteresting. Marino Faliero, begun April, finished July, 1820, and prefixed by a humorous dedication to Goethe—­which was, however, suppressed—­was brought on the stage of Drury Lane Theatre early in 1821, badly mangled, appointed, and acted—­and damned.

Byron seems to have been sincere in saying he did not intend any of his plays to be represented.  We are more inclined to accuse him of self-deception when he asserts that he did not mean them to be popular; but he took sure means to prevent them from being so. Marino Faliero, in particular, was pronounced by Dr. John Watkins—­old Grobius himself—­“to be the dullest of dull plays;” and even the warmest admirers of the poet had to confess that the style was cumbrous.  The story may be true, but it is none the less unnatural.  The characters are comparatively commonplace, the women especially being mere shadows; the motion is slow; and the inevitable passages of fine writing are, as the extolled soliloquy of Lioni, rather rhetorical than imaginative.  The speeches of the Doge are solemn, but prolix, if not ostentatious, and—­perhaps the vital defect—­his cause fails to enlist our sympathies.  Artistically, this play was Byron’s most elaborate attempt to revive the unities and other restrictions of the severe style, which, when he wrote, had been “vanquished in literature.”  “I am persuaded,” he writes in the preface, “that a great tragedy is not to be produced by following the old dramatists, who are full of faults, but by producing regular dramas like the Greeks.”  He forgets that the statement in the mouth of a Greek dramatist that his play was not intended for the stage, would have been a confession of failure; and that Aristotle had admitted that even the Deity could not make the Past present.  The ethical motives of Faliero are, first, the cry for vengeance—­the feeling of affronted or unsatiated pride,—­that runs through so much of the author’s writing, and second, the enthusiasm for public ends, which was beginning to possess him.  The following lines have been pointed out as embodying some of Byron’s spirit of protest against the more selfish “greasy domesticity” of the Georgian era:—­