But, by this time, what has happened to the second brother?  It is easy to believe that Beddoes was always ready to begin a new play rather than finish an old one.  But it is not so certain that his method was quite as inexcusable as his critics assert.  To the reader, doubtless, his faulty construction is glaring enough; but Beddoes wrote his plays to be acted, as a passage in one of his letters very clearly shows.  ’You are, I think,’ he writes to Kelsall, ’disinclined to the stage:  now I confess that I think this is the highest aim of the dramatist, and should be very desirous to get on it.  To look down on it is a piece of impertinence, as long as one chooses to write in the form of a play, and is generally the result of one’s own inability to produce anything striking and affecting in that way.’  And it is precisely upon the stage that such faults of construction as those which disfigure Beddoes’ tragedies matter least.  An audience, whose attention is held and delighted by a succession of striking incidents clothed in splendid speech, neither cares nor knows whether the effect of the whole, as a whole, is worthy of the separate parts.  It would be foolish, in the present melancholy condition of the art of dramatic declamation, to wish for the public performance of Death’s Jest Book; but it is impossible not to hope that the time may come when an adequate representation of that strange and great work may be something more than ’a possibility more thin than air.’  Then, and then only, shall we be able to take the true measure of Beddoes’ genius.

Perhaps, however, the ordinary reader finds Beddoes’ lack of construction a less distasteful quality than his disregard of the common realities of existence.  Not only is the subject-matter of the greater part of his poetry remote and dubious; his very characters themselves seem to be infected by their creator’s delight in the mysterious, the strange, and the unreal.  They have no healthy activity; or, if they have, they invariably lose it in the second act; in the end, they are all hypochondriac philosophers, puzzling over eternity and dissecting the attributes of Death.  The central idea of Death’s Jest Book—­the resurrection of a ghost—­fails to be truly effective, because it is difficult to see any clear distinction between the phantom and the rest of the characters.  The duke, saved from death by the timely arrival of Wolfram, exclaims ‘Blest hour!’ and then, in a moment, begins to ponder, and agonise, and dream: 

    And yet how palely, with what faded lips
    Do we salute this unhoped change of fortune! 
    Thou art so silent, lady; and I utter
    Shadows of words, like to an ancient ghost,
    Arisen out of hoary centuries
    Where none can speak his language.

Orazio, in his brilliant palace, is overcome with the same feelings: 

    Methinks, these fellows, with their ready jests,
    Are like to tedious bells, that ring alike
    Marriage or death.