The dramatic poet, in the ordinary sense, in the sense in which we apply it to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, aims at showing, by means of action, the development of character as it manifests itself to the world in deeds.  His study is character, but it is character in action, considered only in connection with a particular grouping of events, and only so far as it produces or operates upon these.  The processes are concealed from us, we see the result.  In the very highest realisations of this dramatic power, and always in intention, we are presented with a perfect picture, in which every actor lives, and every word is audible; perfect, complete in itself, without explanation, without comment; a dogma incarnate, which we must accept as it is given us, and explain and illustrate for ourselves.  If we wish to know what this character or that thought or felt in his very soul, we may perhaps have data from which to construct a more or less probable hypothesis; but that is all.  We are told nothing, we care to know nothing of what is going on in the thought; of the infinitely subtle meshes of motive or emotion which will perhaps find no direct outcome in speech, no direct manifestation in action, but by which the soul’s life in reality subsists.  This is not the intention:  it is a spectacle of life we are beholding; and life is action.

But is there no other sense in which a poet may be dramatic, besides this sense of the acting drama? no new form possible, which

               “Peradventure may outgrow,
      The simulation of the painted scene,
      Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume,
      And take for a nobler stage the soul itself,
      In shifting fancies and celestial lights,
      With all its grand orchestral silences,
      To keep the pauses of the rhythmic sounds."[2]

This new form of drama is the drama as we see it in Browning, a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul.  Instead of a grouping of characters which shall act on one another to produce a certain result in action, we have a grouping of events useful or important only as they influence the character or the mind.  This is very clearly explained in the original Advertisement to Paracelsus, where Browning tells us that his poem is an attempt

“to reverse the method usually adopted by writers whose aim it is to set forth any phenomenon of the mind or the passions, by the operation of persons and events; and that, instead of having recourse to an external machinery of incidents to create and evolve the crisis I desire to produce, I have ventured to display somewhat minutely the mood itself in its rise and progress, and have suffered the agency by which it is influenced and determined, to be generally discernible in its effects alone, and subordinate throughout, if not altogether excluded.”

In this way, by making the soul the centre of action, he is enabled (thinking himself into it, as all dramatists