This mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs to Browning as an artist.  He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the unity of their personality.  This is a weakness in his work when he has to create characters in a drama who may be said, like Shakespeare’s, to have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the poet.  His spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of Browning more than the individuality of the characters.  We follow him at this work with keen intellectual pleasure, but we do not always follow him with a passionate humanity.

On the contrary, this habit, which was one cause of his weakness as an artist in the drama, increased his strength as an artist when he made single pictures of men and women at isolated crises in their lives; or when he pictured them as they seemed at the moment to one, two, or three differently tempered persons—­pictorial sketches and studies which we may hang up in the chambers of the mind for meditation or discussion.  Their intellectual power and the emotional interest they awaken, the vivid imaginative lightning which illuminates them in flashes, arise out of that part of his nature which made him a weak dramatist.

Had he chosen, for example, to paint Lady Carlisle as he conceived her, in an isolated portrait, and in the same circumstances as in his drama of Strafford, we should have had a clear and intimate picture of her moving, alive at every point, amidst the decay and shipwreck of the Court.  But in the play she is a shade who comes and goes, unoutlined, confused and confusing, scarcely a woman at all.  The only clear hints of what Browning meant her to be are given in the asides of Strafford.

Browning may have been content with Strafford as a whole, but, with his passion for vitality, he could not have been content with either Lady Carlisle or the Queen as representatives of women.  Indeed, up to this point, when he had written Pauline, Paracelsus and Strafford, he must have felt that he had left out of his poetry one half of the human race; and his ambition was to represent both men and women.  Pauline’s chief appearance is in French prose.  Michel, in Paracelsus, is a mere silhouette of the sentimental German Frau, a soft sympathiser with her husband and with the young eagle Paracelsus, who longs to leave the home she would not leave for the world—­an excellent and fruitful mother.  She is set in a pleasant