“Rather say
    My transcendental platan!”

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CHAPTER VIII

THE DRAMAS

Of the great poets who, not being born dramatists, have attempted to write dramas in poetry, Browning was the most persevering.  I suppose that, being conscious of his remarkable power in the representation of momentary action and of states of the soul, he thought that he could harmonise into a whole the continuous action of a number of persons, and of their passions in sword-play with one another; and then conduct to a catastrophe their interaction.  But a man may be capable of writing dramatic lyrics and dramatic romances without being capable of writing a drama.  Indeed, so different are the two capabilities that I think the true dramatist could not write such a lyric or romance as Browning calls dramatic; his genius would carry one or the other beyond the just limits of this kind of poetry into his own kind.  And the writer of excellent lyrics and romances of this kind will be almost sure to fail in real drama.  I wish, in order to avoid confusion of thought, that the term “dramatic” were only used of poetry which belongs to drama itself.  I have heard Chaucer called dramatic.  It is a complete misnomer.  His genius would have for ever been unable to produce a good drama.  Had he lived in Elizabeth’s time, he would, no doubt, have tried to write one, but he must have failed.  The genius for story-telling is just the genius which is incapable of being a fine dramatist.  And the opposite is also true.  Shakespeare, great as his genius was, would not have been able to write a single one of the Canterbury Tales.  He would have been driven into dramatising them.

Neither Tennyson nor Browning had dramatic genius—­that is, the power to conceive, build, co-ordinate and finish a drama.  But they thought they had, and we may pardon them for trying their hand.  I can understand the hunger and thirst which beset great poets, who had, like these two men, succeeded in so many different kinds of poetry, to succeed also in the serious drama, written in poetry.  It is a legitimate ambition; but poets should be acquainted with their limitations, and not waste their energies or our patience on work which they cannot do well.  That men like Tennyson and Browning, who were profoundly capable of understanding what a great drama means, and is; who had read what the master-tragedians of Greece have done; who knew their Shakespeare, to say nothing of the other Elizabethan dramatists; who had seen Moliere on the stage; who must have felt how the thing ought to be done, composed, and versed; that they, having written a play like Harold or Strafford, should really wish to stage it, or having heard and seen it on the stage should go on writing more dramas, would seem incomprehensible, were it not that power to do one thing very well is so curiously liable to self-deceit.