BROWNING'S "OLIVE."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.') Sin,—The readers of your valuable notice of this "dramatic idyll" may care to know its basis of fact. The story of Olive's boyish quarrel at the gaming-table, as given in his life by Gleig, loses but little of the dramatic meaning which the poet you criticise has found in it. After the failure of his fire, Clive did ask his life of his adversary, who had him, of course, at his mercy ; but on a retractation of the charge of fraud being demanded, as the price of this leniency (the omission of which demand would have put the card-sharper in the position of advantage you so well describe), he answered in the exact words Mr. Browning puts into his month, "Shoot and be damned ! I said you cheated, and I say so still." The exaggeration by which the officer's act in throwing away his pistol is converted into a confession of the trick in which he had been detected, is probably but a slight one, for Olive's passing over the accu- sation is spoken of as an act of magnanimity, and the occurrence seems to have established his reputation for brilliant courage. The duel took place, apparently, soon after his first attempt at suicide, and it seems to me that your interesting review would have been more complete, had you connected the incident with the last. The event, as it is refracted through the rich atmosphere of a subtle but vivid genius, seems to me to express the first beckoning, as it were, of that sombre fate whose summons was at last to be decisive. That backward glance, under the pressure of an actual disgrace in the present, towards a possible disgrace in the past, and a possible escape from it so soon to become actual also, gives a striking dramatic unity to the life which won India for England, and closed under the accusation of what, on a smaller scale, we should call theft. The reminiscence which connects the actual and the possible dishonour is due to the fancy of a poet, but the fancy is of that kind which unveils
the meaning of a life.—I am, Sir, &c., A. L. 0. B.
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