[Footnote 20:  This fine speech of Valence to the greater glory of his rival (Act iv.) is almost too subtle for the stage.  Browning with good reason directed its omission unless “a very good Valence” could be found.]

Berthold, like Blougram, Ogniben, and many another of Browning’s mundane personages, is a subtler piece of psychology than men of the type of Valence, in whom his own idealism flows freely forth.  He comes before us with a weary nonchalance admirably contrasted with the fiery intensity of Valence.  He means to be emperor one day, and his whole life is a process of which that is to be the product; but he finds the process unaffectedly boring.  Without relaxing a whit in the mechanical pursuit of his end, he views life with much mental detachment, and shows a cool and not unsympathetic observation of men who pursue other ideals, as well as an abundance of critical irony towards those who apparently share his own.  An adept in courtly arts, and owing all his successes to courtly favour, he meets the assiduities of other courtiers with open contempt.  His ends are those of Laertes or Fortinbras, and he is quite capable of the methods of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but he regards ends and methods alike with the sated distaste of Hamlet.  By birth and principle a man of action, he has, even more than most of Browning’s men of action, the curious introspectiveness of the philosophic onlooker.  He “watches his mind,” and if he does not escape illusions, recognises and exposes them with ironical candour.  Few of Browning’s less right-minded persons attain final insight at less cost to dramatic propriety than Berthold when he pronounces his final verdict:—­

     “All is for the best. 
      Too costly a flower were this, I see it now,
      To pluck and set upon my barren helm
      To wither,—­any garish plume will do.”

Colombe’s Birthday was published in 1844 as No. 6 of the Bells, but had for the present no prospect of the stage.  Nine years later, however, the loyal Phelps, who had so doughtily come to the rescue of its predecessor, put it successfully on the boards of his theatre at Sadler’s Wells.

The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact.  Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing Colombe’s Birthday.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. A Soul’s Tragedy exhibits the inverse process:  the triumph of mundane policy and genial savoir faire in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal “poetry” of Chiappino.  Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the