In Browning’s treatment of the subject there is something more than a trace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing.  It is one of the very earliest of the really important works in English literature which are based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the time of Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is the opposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, so lucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of the friendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance.  The two men love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at the same time completely.  This is a great thing of which even to attempt the description.  It is easy to have the impartiality which can speak judicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that larger and higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of both parties.  Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there is in the play a definite trace of Browning’s Puritan education and Puritan historical outlook.

For Strafford is, of course, an example of that most difficult of all literary works—­a political play.  The thing has been achieved once at least admirably in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and something like it, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has been done excellently in L’Aiglon.  But the difficulties of such a play are obvious on the face of the matter.  In a political play the principal characters are not merely men.  They are symbols, arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside.  It is, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mob upon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but a floating atom of the people; and the people of which the politician has to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, but of some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in his own breakfast room reading his own morning paper.  To give even the faintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in this sense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible.  That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathos and dignity upon such persons as Charles I. and Mary Queen of Scots, the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of a stage there is room for their small virtues and no room for their enormous crimes.  It would be impossible to find a stronger example than the case of Strafford.  It is clear that no one could possibly tell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, politically considered, in a play.  Strafford was one of the greatest men ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great English official despotism.  That is to say, he attempted to found something which is so different from what has actually come about that we can in reality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether it would be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter