R370507C. Strafford.
The Examiner, 7 May 1837, pp. 294–295.
As reprinted in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 3, 400–402.
This is the work of a writer who is capable of achieving the highest objects and triumphs of dramatic literature. They are not achieved here, but here they lie, “in the rough,” before every reader. Strafford suggests the most brilliant career of dramatic authorship that has been known in our time. We are not sure that it will be realized, because we should have predicted the same, some five and twenty years ago, of the author of Inez de Castro and Ippolito D’Este,*—but we are not without reasons for strong hope, since we were the first to hazard a prediction on the publication of Paracelsus, which has already been fulfilled,—being then doubtful whether that great poem was the work of mature age or of extreme youth, whereas now we know the latter supposition to be true.
________
*Walter Savage Landor.
________
We will at once say in what we think the error of the tragedy of Strafford consists. The author has suffered himself to yield too much to the impulses of the pure poetical temperament in delineating the character of Strafford. He has gone too subtily beneath the broad masses of light and shade which hang over the history of that great and unfortunate man. Nothing could have been conceived finer or more effective than this mode of treatment, if Mr Browning had designed to throw the interest of his tragedy upon the domestic life of Strafford. But this is not his design. The Strafford of Mr Browning’s work is the man whose crimes against the rising liberties of England were adjudged, by the greatest and most virtuous statesmen that have ever adorned her annals, expiable by nothing less than death,—and therefore we hold that in a tragedy, where the author places the popular cause in the very front of all our sympathies, the criminality of Strafford should have been made equally prominent with his grandeur. The catastrophe should have been the triumph of patriotism over the antagonist principle of tyranny; and this we do not feel as it stands. We have heard of Strafford’s acts of violence, but have not seen them in the man. We have seen weakness only, in the infirmity of his devotion to a contemptible King, obscuring a nature which is just and noble; and his fall awakens in us rather that deep and subdued emotion which his sublime resignation to an inevitable fate calls forth, than the pity and terror which might have been made to impend over his scaffold, as the awful lesson of a Nation’s Retribution. Let it not be supposed that, in the treatment we hint at, we would have had the more human qualities of Strafford kept utterly out of sight; no one less deserves such injustice than he;—we complain only, as it is, that they are the prominent features of the character, when they should rather have seemed as the “dew drops on the lion’s mane,”—as a few abrupt and rapid gleams of light, gilding the edges of a mass of dark and fearful passions.
Having stated this objection with all the candour which is due to a man of Mr Browning’s genius, we will now say that a more thoroughly dramatic style than that in which Mr Browning has worked out his own conception of Strafford, could not possibly be conceived; that that conception is finished, ad unguem, with unexampled delicacy and precision; and that it is this which causes us to regret that the same extraordinary powers had not been devoted to such a massive handling of the subject, as would have taken deeper and more lasting hold upon the audience of a theatre than it is possible to hope for in the present instance. It seems to us also that nothing could be more masterly than Mr Browning’s sketches of the leaders of the independent party, though they are sketches only. Pym and the younger Vane are wonderfully exact delineations. The very faces of the men are before us as we read; we see the intense and settled features of the one, and the changeful flush and excitement of the other; their words are the expression and not the description of their passions; nay a single word will often serve, with either, to paint a scene, and throw us back upon the youth of Pym or forward into the maturity of Vane; while we never for an instant lose sight of the marked distinction which, with a force and subtlety similar in kind to that with which Shakspeare always distinguishes those of his characters which even approach the nearest to each other, Mr Browning has preserved between these great leaders of the people. The same fire burns in the breasts of both, but in the one it is the sullen heat of the furnace, and in the other the sparkling vivacity of the flame.
The tragedy opens, immediately upon the arrival of Lord Wentworth in London to assist Charles in putting down the Scots’ League and Covenant, with a meeting of the chiefs of the popular party—,“a stealthy gathering of great-hearted men”—in an “obscure small room” near Whitehall. As an opening scene this is probably pitched too high; but the style of the writing, in a dramatic sense, is absolutely perfect. It is the very “stuff of which our life is made.” The fiery eloquence of passion with which we hear Vane throwing off the restraint imposed by Hampden and Hollis—the echo-less sound with which the voices of the weaker men of the party seem to chime in with his—the striking entrance of Pym, and the momentary still it throws over that troubled sea—“Now speak, Vane! Rudyard you had much to say”—and the effect of Pym’s startling announcement of his faith in Wentworth moving once more the angry waters—all strike upon the mind of the reader in, as it were, distinct and tangible collision, and with a local truth and freshness, that we have never felt to the same extent in any scene or any drama we are acquainted with. [p. 295→]
In the second scene of the tragedy there is a meeting between Wentworth and Pym, in which the latter, probing Wentworth to the soul with the mention of certain indignities that had been offered to him by the King, seizes the occasion of the escape from Wentworth’s lips of something like a memory of the past, to strive to win him back to the Old Cause again. This meeting is managed with singular subtlety and power, and closes in a noble burst of impassioned feeling. The scene with the King which succeeds to this, is quite unworthy of the scene that has gone before it. Here what we conceive to be the error of Mr Browning’s conception of Strafford is sensibly felt. A king without a single claim to rescue him from contempt, and a minister whose overruling passion is that of devotion to such a king,—present no front of opposition to the great hearts ranged on the popular side, in the issue of which we can feel anything like a strong sympathy or interest. Yet even here, and also in the scene of the second act, which is finer though dashed by the same essential error,—the style of the writing we hold to be, quasi the feeling sought to be expressed, perfectly lifelike and dramatic. It is not sustained, continuous, massive,—only because the feeling is none of these. The music of true language answers unerringly to the music of the mind, and it is the fault of conception, not of treatment, in these scenes, that Strafford is presented rather as the victim of an extreme and somewhat effeminate sensibility, than as the fearless and heroic champion of arbitrary power. Look at it in this view, and the sudden transitions and elliptical expressions, the eager haste with which thoughts interrupt each other, the anxious pauses, the fond repetitions,—all have their significancy, and point, as with an exactest index, to the depths and shallows of Strafford’s mind. Too little colour, probably, may have been used here and there; but the precision of outline (wavering as the outline is) and the marking of character are beyond all praise.
The third act is the most masterly of the whole in construction; for here is legitimate action, real and sensible dramatic action, which we have not yet felt. Strafford’s first scene, too, is quite as finely written as the first scene of the tragedy, and forces us to regret the inequality of his language—its feeble and desultory management—in the closing scene, when he staggers out of the House of Lords. This last fault we cannot help attributing to the same cause in the author, as leaves in the audience an exhausted and unsatisfied feeling here and elsewhere in the play,—to the want of having placed sufficiently before him the high crimes for which judgment fell on Strafford. He did not suffer because the Scots’ expedition failed, but because he had trampled on the laws and betrayed the liberties of England. Hence, too, the trial,—that grandest spectacle, saving one, of ancient or modern time,—that most solemn arbitration of an issue between the antagonist principles of liberty and despotism, in which every man that took a part either rose or fell as one or other of these principles was established or withdrawn,—that scene which Massinger would have written the whole five acts for the mere purpose of writing,—is, in consequence of Mr Browning’s plan, necessarily not given.
This tragedy was produced at Covent Garden on Monday last, on the occasion of Mr Macready’s benefit, and with all the evidences of a decided success; though we confess, for the reasons we have stated, that we do not think it will take permanent hold of the stage. It should be added, however, that it was most infamously got up; that even Mr Macready himself was not nearly so fine as he is wont to be; and that for the rest of the performers, with the exception of Miss Faucit, they were a barn’s wonder to look at! Mr Vandenhoff was positively nauseous, with his whining, drawling, and slouching, in Pym, and Mr Webster whimpered in somewhat too juvenile a fashion through Young Vane. Some one should have stepped out of the pit and thrust Mr Dale from the stage. Anything should have been done, rather than that such exhibitions should be allowed to disgrace the stage of a “national” theatre.
The most striking thing of the evening was Mr Macready’s first entrance upon the stage. It was the portrait of the great and ill-fated Earl, stepping from the living canvas of Vandyke! The same fixed look, the same severity, the same mournful anxiety, the same eye and brow, the same deep and dauntless resolution, mingled with quiet sweetness, in the mouth! The management of the hair, cut short and thick from off the ample forehead, completed the marvellous resemblance. And let us add, that where this great actor showed himself most worthy of his powers, was in those passages which approached most nearly to what we think the finest dramatic conception of the character of the Earl. But we shall probably have another opportunity of mentioning the performance in detail.
[John Forster]
Reviewed:
Strafford (RB), London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, 1837.
___________________
