The most buoyant of optimists has moments of self-mockery, and the hardiest believer in ideal truth moods in which poetry seems the phantom and prose the fact. Such a mood had its share in colouring the dramatic sketch which, it is now pretty evident, Browning wrote not long after finishing _Colombe's Birthday_.[21] That play is a beautiful triumph of poetry over prose, of soul and heart over calculation and business. _A Soul's Tragedy_ exhibits the inverse process: the triumph of mundane policy and genial _savoir faire_ in the person of Ogniben over the sickly and equivocal "poetry" of Chiappino. Browning seems to have thrown off this bitter parody of his own idealisms in a mood like that in which Ibsen conceived the poor blundering idealist of the _Wild Duck_. Chiappino is Browning's Werle; the reverse side of a type which he had drawn with so much indulgence in the Luigi of _Pippa Passes_. Plainly, it was a passing mood; as plainly, a mood which, from the high and luminous vantage-ground of 1846, he could look back upon with regret, almost with scorn. His intercourse with Elizabeth Barrett was far advanced before she was at length reluctantly allowed to see it. "For _The Soul's_ _Tragedy_," he wrote (Feb. 11)--"that will surprise you, I think. There is no trace of you there,--you have not put out the black face of _it_--it is all sneering and disillusion--and shall not be printed but burned if you say the word." This word his correspondent, needless to add, did not say; on the contrary, she found it even more impressive than its successor _Luria_. This was, however, no tribute to its stage qualities; for in hardly one of his plays is the stage more openly ignored. The dramatic form, though still preserved, sets strongly towards monologue; the entire second act foreshadows unmistakably the great portrait studies of _Men and Women_; it might be called _Ogniben_ with about as good right as they are called _Lippo Lippi_ or _Blougram_; the personality of the supple ecclesiastic floods and takes possession of the entire scene; we see the situation and the persons through the brilliant ironic mirror of his mind. The Chiappino of the second act is Ogniben's Chiappino, as Gigadibs is Blougram's Gigadibs. His "tragedy" is one in which there is no room for terror or pity, only for contempt. All real stress of circumstance is excluded. Both sides fight with blunted weapons; the revolt is like one of those Florentine risings which the Brownings later witnessed with amusement from the windows of Casa Guidi, which were liable to postponement because of rain. The prefect who is "assassinated" does not die, and the rebellious city is genially bantered into submission. The "soul" of Chiappino is, in fact, not the stuff of which tragedy is made. Even in his instant acceptance of Luitolfo's bloodstained cloak when the pursuers are, as he thinks, at the door, he seems to have been casually switched off the proper lines