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Colombe’s Birthday is of all these plays the nearest to a true drama.  It has been represented in America as well as in England, and its skilful characterisation of Valence, Colombe, and Berthold has won deserved praise; but it could not hold the stage.  The subject is too thin.  Colombe finds out on her birthday that she is not the rightful heir to the Duchy; but as there is some doubt, she resolves to fight the question.  In her perplexities she is helped and supported by Valence, an advocate from one of the cities of the Duchy, who loves her, but whom she believes to serve her from loyalty alone.  Berthold, the true heir, to avoid a quarrel, offers to marry Colombe, not because he loves her, but as a good piece of policy.  She then finds out that she loves Valence, and refusing the splendid alliance, leaves the court a private person, with love and her lover.  This slight thing is spun out into five acts by Browning’s metaphysics of love and friendship.  There is but little action, or pressure of the characters into one another.  The intriguing courtiers are dull, and their talk is not knit together.  The only thing alive in them is their universal meanness.  That meanness, it is true, enhances the magnanimity of Valence and Berthold, but its dead level in so many commonplace persons lowers the dramatic interest of the piece.  The play is rather an interesting conversational poem about the up-growing of love between two persons of different but equally noble character; who think love is of more worth than power or wealth, and who are finally brought together by a bold, rough warrior who despises love in comparison with policy.  Its real action takes place in the hearts of Valence and Colombe, not in the world of human life; and what takes place in their hearts is at times so quaintly metaphysical, so curiously apart from the simplicities of human love, so complicated, even beyond the complexity of the situation—­for Browning loved to pile complexity on complexity—­that it makes the play unfit for public representation but all the more interesting for private reading.  But, even in the quiet of our room, we ask why Browning put his subject into a form which did not fit it; why he overloaded the story of two souls with a host of characters who have no vital relation to it, and, having none, are extremely wearisome?  It might have been far more successfully done in the form of In a Balcony, which Browning himself does not class as a drama.

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Luria, the last of the dramas in date of composition, may be said to have no outward action, except in one scene where Tiburzio breaks in suddenly to defend Luria, who, like a wounded stag, stands at bay among the dogs and hunters who suspect his fidelity to Florence.  It is a drama of inward action, of changes in the souls of men.  The full purification of Luria is its one aim, and the motive of Luria himself is a single motive.  The play occupies one day only, and passes in one place.