Berthold, the weary and unsatisfied conqueror, is a singularly unconventional figure.  He is a man of action, with some of the sympathies of the scholar and the lover; resolute in the attainment of ends which he sees to be, in themselves, vulgar; his ambition rather an instinct than something to be pursued for itself, and his soul too keenly aware of the joys and interests he foregoes, to be quite satisfied or content with his lot and conduct.  The grave courtesy of his speech to Colombe, his somewhat condescending but not unfriendly tone with Valence, his rough home-truths with the parasitical courtiers, and his frank confidence with Melchior, are admirably discriminated.  Melchior himself, little as he speaks, is a fine sketch of the contemplative, bookish man who finds no more congenial companion and study than a successful man of action.  His attitude of detachment, a mere spectator in the background, is well in keeping with the calm and thoughtful character of the play.  Valence, the true hero of the piece, the “pale fiery man” who can speak with so moving an eloquence, whether he is pleading the wrongs of his townsmen or of Colombe, the rights of Berthold or of himself, is no less masterly a portrait than the Prince, though perhaps less wholly unconventional a character.  His grave earnestness, his honour as a man and passion as a lover, move our instinctive sympathy, and he never forfeits it.  Were it for nothing else, he would deserve remembrance from the fact that he is one of the speakers in that most delightful of love-duets, the incomparable scene at the close of the fourth act.  “I remember well to have seen,” wrote Moncure D. Conway in 1854, “a vast miscellaneous crowd in an American theatre hanging with breathless attention upon every word of this interview, down to the splendid climax when, in obedience to the Duchess’s direction to Valence how he should reveal his love to the lady she so little suspects herself to be herself, he kneels—­every heart evidently feeling each word as an electric touch, and all giving vent at last to their emotion in round after round of hearty applause.”

All the minor characters are good and life-like, particularly Guibert, the shrewd, hesitating, talkative, cynical, really good-hearted old courtier, whom not even a court had deprived of a heart, though the dangerous influence of the conscienceless Gaucelme, his fellow, has in its time played sad pranks with it.  He is one of the best of Browning’s minor characters.

The performance, in 1885, of Colombe’s Birthday, under the direction of the Browning Society, has brought to light unsuspected acting qualities in what is certainly not the most “dramatic” of Browning’s plays. “Colombe’s Birthday,” it was said on the occasion, “is charming on the boards, clearer, more direct in action, more full of delicate surprises than one imagines it in print.  With a very little cutting it could be made an excellent acting play."[23]