plucked as it were out of the living
organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their
self-revelation.

A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama
proper his free, full, and natural expression. This was not altogether
the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for
drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays. The
drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest. But
it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of
his. Not only did action and outward event--the stuff of drama--interest
Browning chiefly as "incidents in the development of soul," but they
became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and
tinged with its feeling and its thought. Half the value of a story for
him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator's personality; and
he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most
easily and effectively through alien lips. For a like reason he loved to
survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a
given moment, under the conditions of perspective and illusion which it
imposed. Both these conditions were less well satisfied by drama, which
directly "imitates action," than by the dramatic speech or monologue,
which imitates action as focussed in a particular mind. And Browning's
dramatic genius found its most natural and effective outlet in the
wealth of implicit drama which he concentrated in these salient moments
tense with memory and hope. The insuppressible alertness and enterprise
of his own mind tells upon his portrayal of these intense moments. He
sees passion not as a blinding fume, but as a flame, which enlarges the
area, and quickens the acuteness, of vision; the background grows alive
with moving shapes. To the stricken girl in _Ye Banks and Braes_ memory
is torture, and she thrusts convulsively from her, like dagger-points,
the intolerable loveliness of the things that remind her of her love;
whereas the victim of _The Confessional_ pours forth from her frenzied
lips every detail of her tragic story.

So in _The Laboratory_, once more, all the strands of the implicit drama
are seen like incandescent filaments in the glow of a single moment of
fierce impassioned consciousness:--

"He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While t