The writing of the first drama is not to be blamed.  It would be unnatural not to try one’s hand.  It is the writing of the others which is amazing in men like Tennyson and Browning.  They ought to have felt, being wiser than other men in poetry, that they had no true dramatic capacity.  Other poets who also tried the drama did know themselves better.  Byron wrote several dramas, but he made little effort to have them represented on the stage.  He felt they were not fit for that; and, moreover, such scenic poems as Manfred and Cain were not intended for the stage, and do not claim to be dramas in that sense.  To write things of this kind, making no claim to public representation, with the purpose of painting a situation of the soul, is a legitimate part of a poet’s work, and among them, in Browning’s work, might be classed In a Balcony, which I suppose his most devoted worshipper would scarcely call a drama.

Walter Scott, than whom none could conduct a conversation better in a novel, or make more living the clash of various minds in a critical event, whether in a cottage or a palace; whom one would select as most likely to write a drama well—­had self-knowledge enough to understand, after his early attempts, that true dramatic work was beyond his power.  Wordsworth also made one effort, and then said good-bye to drama.  Coleridge tried, and staged Remorse.  It failed and deserved to fail.  To read it is to know that the writer had no sense of an audience in his mind as he wrote it—­a fatal want in a dramatist.  Even its purple patches of fine poetry and its noble melody of verse did not redeem it.  Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious.  One would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least likely of men to write a true drama.  Yet the Cenci approaches that goal, and the fragment of Charles the First makes so great a grip on the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature that it should have been finished.  Yet Shelley himself gave it up.  He knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.

Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits.  They went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural and legitimate, but for the stage.  This is a curious psychological problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself.  I wish, having in his mature age read Strafford over, and then read his other dramas—­all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as Strafford—­he had analysed himself as “the poet who would be a dramatist and could not.”  Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this.  He was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.