solution.  “Soul” is still his fundamental preoccupation; but the continued play of an eager intellect and vivacious senses upon life has immensely multiplied the points of concrete experience which it vivifies and transfigures to his eyes.  It is as if a painter trained in the school of Raphael or Lionardo had discovered that he could use the minute and fearless brush of the Flemings in the service of their ideals.  He pursues soul in all its rich multiplicity, in the tortuosities and dark abysses of character; he forces crowds of sordid, grotesque, or commonplace facts to become its expressive speech; he watches its thought and passion projected into the tide of affairs, caught up in the clash and tangle of plot.  In all these three ways the Dramas and Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, which were to be his poetic occupation during the Forties, detach themselves sharply from Paracelsus and the early books of Sordello.  A poem like The Laboratory (1844), for instance, stands at almost the opposite pole of art to these.  All that Browning neglected or veiled in Paracelsus he here thrusts into stern relief.  The passion and crime there faintly discerned in the background of ideally beautiful figures are here his absorbing theme.  The curious technicalities of the chemist’s workshop, taken for granted in Paracelsus, are now painted with a realism reminiscent of Romeo’s Apothecary and The Alchemist.  And the outward drama of intrigue, completely effaced in Paracelsus by the inward drama of soul, sounds delusive scorn and laughter in the background, the more sinister because it is not seen.  These lyrics and romances are “dramatic” not only in the sense that the speakers express, as Browning insisted, other minds and sentiments than his own, but in the more legitimate sense that they are plucked as it were out of the living organism of a drama, all the vital issues of which can be read in their self-revelation.

A poet whose lyrics were of this type might be expected to find in drama proper his free, full, and natural expression.  This was not altogether the case with Browning, who, despite an unquenchable appetency for drama, did better work in his dramatic monologues than in his plays.  The drama alone allowed full scope for the development of plot-interest.  But it was less favourable to another yet more deeply rooted interest of his.  Not only did action and outward event—­the stuff of drama—­interest Browning chiefly as “incidents in the development of soul,” but they became congenial to his art only as projected upon some other mind, and tinged with its feeling and its thought.  Half the value of a story for him lay in the colours it derived from the narrator’s personality; and he told his own experience, as he uttered his own convictions, most easily and effectively through alien lips.  For a like reason he loved to survey the slow continuities of actual events from the standpoint of a given moment,