MR. BROWNING'S DRAMATIC IDYLS.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.')
SIR,—Will you allow a reader who warmly sympathises with your general view of Mr. Browning's last book to record a pro- test against a disparaging mention of what will surely appear to many its finest poem P "The picture of Martin Relph's remorse for his cowardice," you say, "or other motive only half understood by himself, is too vague and unfinished to be interesting." To my mind, it is just this vagueness, or at least this oscillation of memory between two views of the past, which gives the picture its force and truth. Nothing, I should say, could more vividly express remorse than the hunger with which, while another view of his conduct is possible, Martin Relph clutches at the humiliation of the coward. He has been one of a crowd of villagers called together to witness the execution of a farmer's daughter for having, it is supposed, given treasonable information to some Jacobites in the last 'century; a crowd roughly commanded to keep silence on pain of death by the commander of the firing party, ready, in his panic fear, to discover and suppress an opening riot in any sudden cry. That under such circumstances Martin Relph does keep silence when he sees the girl's lover flying breathless towards the place of execution with the reprieve, and lets the bullet which strikes her kill both, is, he longs to think, as he reviews that moment through the vista of long years, the result of a coward's tremor, lasting just the moment during which action was possible. But the revealing power—possibly the exaggerating influence—of memory discovers to him a lack not only of courage, but of desire, to restore the woman he loved to the embrace of another ; he wished, perhaps (for in remembering that moment of terror and confusion, he cannot .distinguish incapacity from will), rather to see her dead, than restored to life by one to whom he was in desire, though till that moment in dim and half-conscious desire, a rival.
The sketch which I have endeavoured to describe seems to me open to criticism. For my part, I should have preferred a dif- ferent costume for the principal figure ; the emotions depicted in his person, it seems to me, belong to that class from which those who have to earn their bread are, for good and for evil,
to a considerable extent protected. Bat I am surprised that
any one should consider the dramatic statement of a moral problem which must, I should think, touch a powerful chord in the heart of many average human beings, as lacking in interest. The main function of dramatic poetry is surely the representa- tion of ordinary emotions in extraordinary circumstances. To be shown what we have all felt, or could have all felt, as it is emphasised and explained by a sudden crisis which thrusts emotion into the world of action, is a chief portion of the moral teaching which such poetry has to bestow. It is not exceptional character which is the material of tragedy. It is ordinary character, in exceptional circumstance. The most common-place men and women have known moments of possible heroism or possible crime. It is not only "mute, inglorious Miltons " whose mortal remains rest in unvisited graves ; inno- cent Macbeths, highly respectable Othellos, are laid by their side; and lives which present to the world an aspect of unblemished dullness have had their own memories—for they may easily be lost—of mighty but transitory impulse, flashing harmlessly on uninflammable surroundings, and finding no outlet. Most rarely does it happen that such memories include more than the hidden history of a human spirit. But the dra- matic sketch I speak of commemorates one of those rare moments when the world of feeling opens into the world of events, and a man's own desires are revealed to him by his own actions. The jealousy thus made manifest is indeed of the com- monest type, for while it is as rare that this passion should be predominant as that it should be wholly absent, that it should mingle in subtle disguise with the most dissimilar mo- tives—that under the Ithuriel's spear of recollection the seeming cowardice, or indolence, or irresolution which has palsied tongue or hand at the moment of action, should start up as a deallier thing—this, I should think, must be a part of the experience of almost all but the best or worst of mankind. And so far as Mr. Browning's description of this state of mind leaves the reader in doubt as to the true proportion of infirmity to crime, so far, I should say, it is a truer picture of a mind under the dominion of remorse. I believe that the first impression of any one who comes in contact with remorse is almost always a sense of disproportion between cause and effect. We may be free from any partiality for the penitent,—we may think that, taking his life as a whole, he even underrated what was due of regret and compunction, still we should find, I believe generally, that in his bitterest self- reproach there is something that looks to us irrational, over- strained, perhaps almost insane. No human judgment can dis- entangle misfortune from guilt. Confusion abides where evil has been, and the guilty impulse must be contemplated through a mist that blurs its outline and expands its proportions. This is to me the lesson of this fine poem,—one of the finest dramatic fragments, I think, which we owe to one who has given us so many. I hope you will add this attempt to set it forth to your own otherwise sympathetic estimate.—I am, Sir, &c., J. W.
[We should have said that Mr. Browning's sketch leaves the reader not only in doubt as to the proportion, in this case, of infirmity to crime, but as to the very existence of a criminal impulse in anything but the morbid imagination of a brooding mind. And if our correspondent's conception of the motive of the sketch is the right one,—which in all probability it is,—surely this is a very grave defect.—Eo. Spectator.]
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