s. Alone among
the greater poets of the time Browning was in genius and temperament a
true kinsman to these great romantic realists; his poetry, as it emerged
in the rich dramatic harvest of the 'Forties, is the nearest counterpart
and analogue of their prose.

I.

Browning's first drama, as is well known, was the result of a direct
application from Macready. Introduced in November 1835 by his "literary
father" Fox, Browning immediately interested the actor. A reading of
_Paracelsus_ convinced him that Browning could write, if not a good
play, yet one with an effective tragic _role_ for himself. Strained
relations with his company presently made him eager to procure this
service. Browning, suddenly appealed to (in May 1836), promptly
suggested _Strafford_. He was full of the subject, having recently
assisted his friend Forster in compiling his life. The actor closed with
the suggestion, and a year later (May 1, 1837) the play was performed
at Covent Garden. The fine acting of Macready, and of Helen Faucit, who
was now associated with him, procured the piece a moderate success. It
went through five performances.

Browning's _Strafford_, like his _Paracelsus_, was a serious attempt to
interpret a historic character; and historic experts like Gardiner have,
as regards the central figure, emphatically indorsed his judgment. The
other persons, and the action itself, he treated more freely, with
evident regard to their value as secondary elements in the portrayal of
Stafford; and it is easy to trace in the whole manner of his innovations
the well-marked ply of his mind. The harsh and rugged fanaticisms, the
splendid frivolities, of the seventeenth century, fade and lose
substance in an atmosphere charged with idealism and self-consciousness.
Generous self-devotion is not the universal note, but it is the
prevailing key, that in which the writer most naturally thinks and most
readily invents. Strafford's devotion to Charles and Pym's to his
country were historical; but Browning accentuates Pym's heroism by
making the man he sends to the scaffold his old friend; and devotion is
the single trait of the beautiful but imaginary character of Lucy
Carlisle. "Give me your notion of a thorough self-devotement,
self-forgetting," he wrote a few years later to Miss Flower: the idea
seems to have been already busy moulding his still embryonic invention
of character. Something of the visionary exaltation of the dying
Paracelsus thu