noble melody of verse did not redeem it.
Shelley did better than these brethren of his, and that is curious. One
would say, after reading his previous poems, that he was the least
likely of men to write a true drama. Yet the _Cenci_ approaches that
goal, and the fragment of _Charles the First_ makes so great a grip on
the noble passions and on the intellectual eye, and its few scenes are
so well woven, that it is one of the unfulfilled longings of literature
that it should have been finished. Yet Shelley himself gave it up. He
knew, like the others, that the drama was beyond his power.

Tennyson and Browning did not so easily recognise their limits. They
went on writing dramas, not for the study, which would have been natural
and legitimate, but for the stage. This is a curious psychological
problem, and there is only one man who could have given us, if he had
chosen, a poetic study of it, and that is Browning himself. I wish,
having in his mature age read _Strafford_ over, and then read his other
dramas--all of them full of the same dramatic weaknesses as
_Strafford_--he had analysed himself as "the poet who would be a
dramatist and could not." Indeed, it is a pity he did not do this. He
was capable of smiling benignly at himself, and sketching himself as if
he were another man; a thing of which Tennyson, who took himself with
awful seriousness, and walked with himself as a Druid might have walked
in the sacred grove of Mona, was quite incapable.

However, the three important dramas of Tennyson are better, as dramas,
than Browning's. That is natural enough. For Browning's dramas were
written when he was young, when his knowledge of the dramatic art was
small, and when his intellectual powers were not fully developed.
Tennyson wrote his when his knowledge of the Drama was great, and when
his intellect had undergone years of careful training. He studied the
composition and architecture of the best plays; he worked at the stage
situations; he created a blank verse for his plays quite different from
that he used in his poems, and a disagreeable thing it is; he introduced
songs, like Shakespeare, at happy moments; he imitated the old work, and
at the same time strove hard to make his own original. He laboured at
the history, and _Becket_ and _Harold_ are painfully historical. History
should not master a play, but the play the history. The poet who is
betrayed into historical accuracy so as to injure the development of his