Even so, it is only after conflict and fluctuation that he decides to allow Luria’s trial to take its course.  Puccio, again, the former general of Florence, superseded by Luria, and now serving under his command, turns out not quite the “pale discontented man” whom Browning originally designed and whom such a situation was no doubt calculated to produce.  Instead of a Cassius, enviously scowling at the greatness of his former comrade, Caesar, we have one whose generous admiration for the alien set over him struggles hard, and not unsuccessfully, with natural resentment.  In keeping with such company is the noble Pisan general, who vies with Luria in generosity and twice intervenes decisively to save him from the Florentine attack.  Even Domizia, the “panther” lady who comes to the camp burning for vengeance upon Florence for the death of her kinsmen, and hoping to attain it by embroiling him with the city, finally emerges as his lover.  But in Domizia he confessedly failed.  The correspondence with Miss Barrett stole the vitality from all mere imaginary women; “the panther would not be tamed.”  Her hatred and her love alike merely beat the air.  With all her volubility, she is almost as little in place in the economy of the drama as in that of the camp; her “wild mass of rage” has the air of being a valued property which she manages and exhibits, not an impelling and consuming fire.  The more potent passion of Luria and his lieutenant Husain is more adequately rendered, though “the simple Moorish instinct” in them is made to accomplish startling feats in European subtlety.  The East with its gift of “feeling” comes once more, as in the Druses, into tragic contact with the North and its gift of “thought”; but it is to the feeling East and not to thinking North that we owe the clear analysis and exposition of the contrast.  Luria has indeed, like Djabal, assimilated just so much of European culture as makes its infusion fatal to him:  he suffers the doom of the lesser race

     “Which when it apes the greater is forgone.”

But the noblest quality of the lesser race flashes forth at the close when he takes his life, not in defiance, nor in despair, but as a last act of passionate fidelity to Florence.  This is conceived with a refinement of moral imagination too subtle perhaps for appreciation on the stage; but of the tragic power and pathos of the conception there can be no question.  Mrs Browning, whose eager interest accompanied this drama through every stage of its progress, justly dwelt upon its “grandeur.”  The busy exuberance of Browning’s thinking was not favourable to effects which multiplicity of detail tends to destroy; but the fate of this son of the “lone and silent East,” though utterly un-Shakespearean in motive, recalls, more nearly than anything else in Browning’s dramas, the heroic tragedy of Shakespeare.

[Footnote 22:  Browning himself uses this parallel in almost his first reference to Luria while still unwritten:  Letters of R.B. and E.B.B., i. 26.]