Browning’s Pym is a figure neither historically true nor dramatically effective; he is self-conscious and sentimental, a patriot armed in paste-board rhetoric.  But the writer, let us remember, was young; this was his first theatrical essay, and he was somewhat showy of fine intentions.  The loyalty of Strafford to the King is too fatuous an instinct to gain our complete sympathy.  He rides gallantly into the quicksand, knowing it to be such, and the quicksand, as certainly as the worm of Nilus, will do its kind.  And yet though this is the vain romance of loyalty, in it, as Browning conceives, lies the test of Strafford.  A self-renouncing passion of any kind is not so common that we can afford to look on his king-worship with scorn.

Over against these devotees of the ideal Browning sets his worldlings, ranging from creatures as despicable as the courtiers of Duchess Colombe to such men of power and inexhaustible resource as the Nuncio who confronts Djabal with his Druses, or the Papal Legate whose easier and half-humorous task is to dismiss to his private affairs at Lugo the four-and-twentieth leader of revolt.  To the same breed with the courtiers of Colombe belong old Vane and Savile of the court of Charles.  To the same breed with the Nuncio and the Legate, belongs Monsignor, who proves himself more than a match for his hireling, the scoundrel Intendant.  In a happy moment Monsignor is startled into indignant wrath; he does not exclaim with the Edmund of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Some good I mean to do before I die;” but his “Gag the villain!” is a substantial contribution to the justice of our world.  Under the ennobling influence of Charles and his Polyxena, the craft of D’Ormea is uplifted to a level of real dignity; if he cannot quite attain the position of a martyr for the truth, he becomes something better than one who serves God at the devil’s bidding.  And Braccio, plotter and betrayer, yet always with a certain fidelity towards his mother-city, is won over to the side of simple truth and righteousness by the overmastering power of Luria’s magnanimity.  So precious, after all—­Browning would say—­is the mere capacity to recognise facts; if only a little grain of virtue remains in the heart, this faculty of vision may make some sudden discovery which shall prove to a worldling that there exist facts, undeniable and of immense potency, hitherto unknown to his philosophy of chicane.  Browning’s vote is given, as has been said, and with no uncertain voice, for his devotees of the ideal; but the men of fine worldly brain-craft have a fascination for him as they have for his Eastern Luria.  In Djabal, at once enthusiast and impostor, Browning may seem, as often afterwards, to offer an apology for the palterer with truth; but in the interests of truth itself, he desires to study the strange phenomenon of the deceiver who would fain half-deceive himself.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 18:  Dr Moncure Conway in “The Nation” vol. i. (an article written on the occasion of Browning’s death) says that he was told by Carlyle of his first meeting with Browning—­as Carlyle rode upon Wimbledon Common a “beautiful youth,” walking there alone, stopped him and asked for his acquaintance.  The incident has a somewhat legendary air.]