Browning's "Saul" may be regarded as a soliloquy. David is alone. Browning's words here help us to an appreciation of his peculiar kind of soliloquy.
"Let me tell out my tale to its ending--my voice to my heart Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night I took part, As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my sheep, And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep!"
"My voice to my heart" is very suggestive. Browning always made his speaker, when alone, talk to himself. He divides the personality of the individual much more than did Shakespeare. Shakespeare simply makes a man think aloud, while Browning almost makes consciousness dual.
Some one may ask,--Why not take any story or lyric and give it directly to an imaginary listener, and only indirectly to the audience?
This is exactly what should be done in some cases. Who can declaim as a speech or as if to an audience "John Anderson, my Jo," or "The Lover's Appeal," and not feel the situation to be ludicrous?
Some of the tenderest lyric poems should be given as though to an imaginary auditor somewhat to one side. As the lyric is subjective, the turning to one side is a help to the subjective sympathetic condition, especially in cases where the words of the lyric are supposed to be addressed to some individual character. It is very difficult for readers to speak to an audience directly and not pass into the oratoric attitude of mind. A little turn to the side, when simple, suggests the indirect nature of a poem. It gives power to change attention and suggests degrees of subjectivity, and thus tends to prevent the true spirit of the poem from being destroyed by oratorical or declamatory effects.
Perhaps Charles Lamb's famous saying, that recitation perverts a beautiful poem, would have been qualified had some poem been read to him with full recognition of its artistic character. The poem is not a speech, but a work of art, and the speaker must be clearly conceived, his emotion sympathetically realized, and given, not to an audience, but to an imaginary listener; thus all the delicacy and tenderness may be truthfully revealed and declamation and unnaturalness avoided.
In general, every kind of literature can be adequately rendered aloud. The true spirit of those poems that have been considered unadapted to such rendering can possibly be shown by the voice if we find the real situation, and do not try to give the words the directness of an oration or a lesson, or the objectivity of a play.