er. He
seeks his heroes in remote sequestered corners of the world,--Sardinia,
Juliers, Lebanon; but actual historic research gradually yields ground
to a free invention which, however, always simulates historic truth.
_King Victor and King Charles_ contains far less poetry than
_Paracelsus_, but it was the fruit of historic studies no less severe.
There was material for genuine tragedy in the story. The old king, who
after fifty years of despotic rule shifts the crown to the head of his
son with the intention of still pulling the wires behind the scenes,
but, finding that Charles means to rule as well as reign, clutches
angrily at his surrendered crown,--this King Victor has something in
him of Lear, something of the dying Henry IV. But history provided more
sober issues, and Browning's temperament habitually inclined him to
stave off the violence of tragic passion which disturbs the subtle
eddyings of thought and feeling. Charles is no Regan, hardly even an
Albany, no weakling either, but a man of sensitive conscience, who
shifts and gyrates responsively to the complex play of motive which
Browning brings to bear upon him. Reluctantly he orders Victor's arrest,
and when the old man, baffled and exasperated, is brought before him and
imperiously demands the crown, he puts it upon his father's head.
Neither character is drawn with the power of Strafford, but the play is
largely built upon the same contrasts between personal devotion and
political expediency, the untutored idealism of youth and the ruses or
rigidity of age. This was a type of dramatic action which Browning
imagined with peculiar power and insight, for it bodied forth a contrast
between contending elements of his own nature. Towards this type all his
drama tended to gravitate. In _The Return of the Druses_ Browning's
native bent can be more freely studied, for history has contributed only
the general situation. His turn for curious and far-fetched incident is
nowhere better illustrated than in this tangled intrigue carried on
between Frankish Hospitallers, Venetians, and Druses of Lebanon in a
lonely island of the Aegean where none of the three are at home. A
political revolution--the revolt of the Druses against their Frankish
lords--provides the outer momentum of the action; but the central
interest is concentrated upon a "Soul's tragedy," in which the conflict
of races goes on within the perplexed and paralysed bosom of a single
man. Djabal, the Druse p