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 must do) to bring out its
characteristics, to reveal its very nature. Suppose him to be attracted
by some particular soul or by some particular act. The problem occupies
him: the more abstruse and entangled the more attractive to him it is;
he winds his way into the heart of it, or, we might better say, he picks
to pieces the machinery. Presently he begins to reconstruct, before our
eyes, the whole series of events, the whole substance of the soul, but,
so to speak, turned inside out. We watch the workings of the mental
machinery as it is slowly disclosed before us; we note the specialties
of construction, its individual character, the interaction of parts,
every secret of it. We thus come to see that, considered from the
proper point of view, everything is clear, regular and explicable in
however entangled an action, however obscure a soul; we see that what is
external is perfectly natural when we can view its evolution from what
is internal. It must not be supposed that Browning explains this to us
in the manner of an anatomical lecturer; he makes every character
explain itself by its own speech, and very often by speech that is or
seems false and sophistical, so only that