In Thorold, Earl Tresham, we have an admirable picture of the head of a great house, proud above all things of the honour of the family and its yet stainless ’scutcheon, and proud, with a deep brotherly tenderness of his sister Mildred:  a strong and fine nature, one whom men instinctively cite as “the perfect spirit of honour.”  Mertoun, the apparent hero of the play, is a much less prominent and masterly figure than Tresham, not so much from any lack of skill in his delineation, as from the essential ineffectualness of his nature.  Guendolen Tresham, the Beatrice of the play (her lover Austin is certainly no Benedick) is one of the most pleasantly humorous characters in Browning.  Her gay, light-hearted talk brightens the sombre action like a gleam of sunlight.  And like her prototype, she is a true woman.  As Beatrice stands by the calumniated Hero, so Guendolen stands by Mildred, and by her quick woman’s heart and wit, her instinct of things, sees and seizes the missing clue, though too late, as it proves, to avert the impending disaster.

The play contains one of Browning’s most delicate and musical lyrics, the serenade beginning, “There’s a woman like a dew-drop.”  This is the first of the love-songs in long lines which Browning wrote so often at the end of his life, and so seldom earlier.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 21:  A contemporary account, written by Joseph Arnould to Alfred Domett, says:  “The first night was magnificent ... there could be no mistake at all about the honest enthusiasm of the audience.  The gallery (and this, of course, was very gratifying, because not to be expected at a play of Browning) took all the points quite as quickly as the pit, and entered into the general feeling and interest of the action far more than the boxes....  Altogether the first night was a triumph.”—­Robert Browning and Alfred Domett, 1906, p. 65.]

[Footnote 22:  Forster’s Life of Dickens, vol. ii., p. 24.]

10.  COLOMBE’S BIRTHDAY:  A Play in Five Acts.

[Published in 1844 as No.  VI. of Bells and Pomegranates (Poetical Works, 1889, Vol.  IV., pp. 71-169).  Played at the Haymarket Theatre, April 25, 1853, Miss Helen Faucit taking the part of Colombe; also, with Miss Alma Murray as Colombe, at St. George’s Hall, November 19, 1885, under the direction of the Browning Society.  The action takes place from morning to night of one day].

Colombe’s Birthday, a drama founded on an imaginary episode in the history of a German duchy of the seventeenth century, is the first play which is mainly concerned with inward rather than outward action; in which the characters themselves, what they are in their own souls, what they think of themselves, and what others think of them, constitute the chief interest, the interest of the characters as they influence one another or external events being secondary.