It has always seemed to me a radical mistake to include “Pippa Passes” among Browning’s dramas.  Not only is it absolutely unactable, but essentially undramatic in the conventional sense.  True dramatic writing concerns itself fundamentally with the apt conjunction of events, and the more nearly it approximates to the verity of life the more likely is it to be of immediate appeal.  There is a vraie verite which only the poet, evolving from dramatic concepts rather than attempting to concentrate these in a quick, moving verisimilitude, can attempt.  The passing hither and thither of Pippa, like a beneficent Fate, a wandering chorus from a higher amid the discordant medley of a lower world, changing the circumstances and even the natures of certain more or less heedless listeners by the wild free lilt of her happy song of innocence, is of this vraie verite.  It is so obviously true, spiritually, that it is unreal in the commonplace of ordinary life.  Its very effectiveness is too apt for the dramatist, who can ill afford to tamper further with the indifferent banalities of actual existence.  The poet, unhampered by the exigencies of dramatic realism, can safely, and artistically, achieve an equally exact, even a higher verisimilitude, by means which are, or should be, beyond adoption by the dramatist proper.

But over and above any ‘nice discrimination,’ “Pippa Passes” is simply a poem, a lyrical masque with interspersed dramatic episodes, and subsidiary interludes in prose.  The suggestion recently made that it should be acted is a wholly errant one.  The finest part of it is unrepresentable.  The rest would consist merely of a series of tableaux, with conversational accompaniment.

The opening scene, “the large mean airy chamber,” where Pippa, the little silk-winder from the mills at Asolo, springs from bed, on her New Year’s Day festa, and soliloquises as she dresses, is as true as it is lovely when viewed through the rainbow glow of the poetic atmosphere:  but how could it succeed on the stage?  It is not merely that the monologue is too long:  it is too inapt, in its poetic richness, for its purpose.  It is the poet, not Pippa, who evokes this sweet sunrise-music, this strain of the “long blue solemn hours serenely flowing.”  The dramatic poet may occupy himself with that deeper insight, and the wider expression of it, which is properly altogether beyond the scope of the playwright.  In a word, he may irradiate his theme with the light that never was on sea or land, nor will he thereby sacrifice aught of essential truth:  but his comrade must see to it that he is content with the wide liberal air of the common day.  The poetic alchemist may turn a sword into pure gold:  the playwright will concern himself with the due usage of the weapon as we know it, and attribute to it no transcendent value, no miraculous properties.  What is permissible to Blake, painting Adam and Eve among embowering roses and lilies, while the sun, moon, and stars simultaneously shine, is impermissible to the portrait-painter or the landscapist, who has to idealise actuality to the point only of artistic realism, and not to transmute it at the outset from happily-perceived concrete facts to a glorified abstract concept.