However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas, than Browning’s.  That is natural enough.  For Browning’s dramas were written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed.  Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the Drama was great, and when his intellect had undergone years of careful training.  He studied the composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced songs, like Shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and at the same time strove hard to make his own original.  He laboured at the history, and Becket and Harold are painfully historical.  History should not master a play, but the play the history.  The poet who is betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and Harold and Becket both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of those critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.

Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the imagination, not by dramatic genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative success.  He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott or Byron. Queen Mary, Harold, and Becket get along in one’s mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire.  Some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill.  We cannot forget the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells in the mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in Becket of the mighty and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its own possession the soul of the world.  But the minor characters; the action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action and circumstance together towards the catastrophe—­these things were out of Tennyson’s reach, and still more out of Browning’s.  They could both build up characters, and Browning better than Tennyson; they could both set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king’s palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and Browning more incapable than Tennyson.