Wild Duck.  Chiappino is Browning’s Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of Pippa Passes.  Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn.  His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it.  “For The Soul’s Tragedy,” he wrote (Feb. 11)—­“that will surprise you, I think.  There is no trace of you there,—­you have not put out the black face of it—­it is all sneering and disillusion—­and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word.”  This word his correspondent, needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more impressive than its successor Luria.  This was, however, no tribute to its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more openly ignored.  The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the great portrait studies of Men and Women; it might be called Ogniben with about as good right as they are called Lippo Lippi or Blougram; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind.  The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben’s Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram’s Gigadibs.  His “tragedy” is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt.  All real stress of circumstance is excluded.  Both sides fight with blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain.  The prefect who is “assassinated” does not die, and the rebellious city is genially bantered into submission.  The “soul” of Chiappino is, in fact, not the stuff of which tragedy is made.  Even in his instant acceptance of Luitolfo’s bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines of his character into a piece of heroism which properly belongs to the man he would like to be thought, but has not the strength to be.  On the whole, Browning’s scorn must be considered to have injured his art.  Tragedy, in the deepest sense, lay beyond his sphere; and this “tragedy” of mere degeneration and helpless collapse left untouched all the springs from which his poetry drew its life.

[Footnote 21:  Browning’s letter to Elizabeth Barrett, Feb. 13, 1846, which does not seem to have been adequately noticed.  The piece is ignored by Mrs Orr.  He speaks of suspending the publication of the “unlucky play” until a second edition of the Bells—­an “apparition” which Moxon, he says, seems to think possible; and then inserting it before Luria:  it will then be “in its place, for it was written two or three years ago.”  In other words, The Soul’s Tragedy was written in 1843-44, between Colombe’s Birthday and Luria.]