conception in accordance with imaginative truth, is lost; and _Harold_
and _Becket_ both suffer from Tennyson falling into the hands of those
critical historians whom Tennyson consulted.

Nevertheless, by dint of laborious intellectual work, but not by the
imagination, not by dramatic genius, Tennyson arrived at a relative
success. He did better in these long dramas than Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Scott or Byron. _Queen Mary_, _Harold_, and _Becket_ get along in one's
mind with some swiftness when one reads them in an armchair by the fire.
Some of the characters are interesting and wrought with painful skill.
We cannot forget the pathetic image of Queen Mary, which dwells in the
mind when the play has disappeared; nor the stately representation in
_Becket_ of the mighty and overshadowing power of Rome, claiming as its
own possession the soul of the world. But the minor characters; the
action; the play of the characters, great and small, and of the action
and circumstance together towards the catastrophe--these things were out
of Tennyson's reach, and still more out of Browning's. They could both
build up characters, and Browning better than Tennyson; they could both
set two people to talk together, and by their talk to reveal their
character to us; but to paint action, and the action of many men and
women moving to a plotted end; to paint human life within the limits of
a chosen subject, changing and tossing and unconscious of its fate, in a
town, on a battlefield, in the forum, in a wild wood, in the king's
palace or a shepherd farm; and to image this upon the stage, so that
nothing done or said should be unmotived, unrelated to the end, or
unnatural; of that they were quite incapable, and Browning more
incapable than Tennyson.

There is another thing to say. The three long dramas of Tennyson are
better as dramas than the long ones of Browning. But the smaller
dramatic pieces of Browning are much better than the smaller ones of
Tennyson. _The Promise of May_ is bad in dialogue, bad in composition,
bad in delineation of character, worst of all in its subject, in its
plot, and in its motives. _The Cup_, and _The Falcon_, a beautiful story
beautifully written by Boccaccio, is strangely dulled, even vulgarised,
by Tennyson. The _Robin Hood_ play has gracious things in it, but as a
drama it is worthless, and it is impossible to forgive Tennyson for his
fairies. All these small plays are dreadful examples of what a great
poet