passion.  There are only four characters.  D’Ormea, the minister, is a mere stick in a prime-minister’s robes and serves Victor and Charles with equal ease, in order to keep his place.  He is not even subtle in his role.  When we think what Browning would have made of him in a single poem, and contrast it with what he has made of him here, we are again impressed with Browning’s strange loss of power when he is writing drama.  Victor and Charles are better drawn than any characters in Strafford; and Polyxena is a great advance on Lady Carlisle.  But this piece is not a drama; it is a study of soul-situations, and none of them are of any vital importance.  There is far too great an improbability in the conception of Charles.  A weak man in private becomes a strong man in public life.  To represent him, having known and felt his strength, as relapsing into his previous weakness when it endangers all his work, is quite too foolish.  He did not do it in history.  Browning, with astonishing want of insight, makes him do it here, and adds to it a foolish anger with his wife because she advises him against it.  And the reason he does it and is angry with his wife, is a merely sentimental one—­a private, unreasoning, childish love of his father, such a love as Strafford is supposed to have for Charles I.—­the kind of love which intruded into public affairs ruins them, and which, being feeble and for an unworthy object, injures him who gives it and him who receives it.  Even as a study of characters, much more as a drama, this piece is a failure, and the absence of poetry in it is amazing.

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The Return of the Druses approaches more nearly to a true drama than its predecessors; it is far better written; it has several fine motives which are intelligently, but not dramatically, worked out; and it is with great joy that one emerges at last into a little poetry.  Browning, having more or less invented his subject, is not seduced, by the desire to be historical, to follow apparent instead of imaginative truth; nor are we wearied by his unhappy efforts to analyse, in disconnected conversations, political intrigue.  Things are in this play as the logic of imaginative passion wills, as Browning’s conception drove him.  But, unfortunately for its success as a true drama, Browning doubles and redoubles the motives which impel his characters.  Djabal, Anael, Loys, have all of them, two different and sometimes opposite aims working in them.  They are driven now by one, now by the other, and the changes of speech and action made by the different motives surging up, alternately or together, within their will, are so swift and baffling that an audience would be utterly bewildered.  It is amusing to follow the prestidigitation of Browning’s intellect creating this confused battle in souls as long as one reads the play at home, though even then we wonder why he cannot, at least in a drama, make a simple situation.  If he loved difficult work,