Essays from 'The Guardian'

Study of Browning. By A

t in literature-in intellectual problems; always quiet and sane, praising Mr. Browning with tact, with a real refinement and grace; saying well many [42] things which every competent reader of the great poet must feel to be true; devoting to the subject he loves a critical gift so considerable as to make us wish for work from his hands of larger scope than this small volume. His book is, according to his intention, before all things a useful one. Appreciating Mr. Browning fairly, as we think, in all his various efforts, his aim is to point his readers to

at we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have come near to exhausting them." Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning has been a multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful

nd dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers

icular soul-the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test-in which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of the interior, a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello, Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else

in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These extraordinary l

conceiving subtle mental complexities with clearness and of expressing them in a picturesque f

diosyncrasy, the true and native colour of his multitudinous dramatis personae, or monologists, Mr. Symons is right in [46] laying emphasis on the grace, the finished skill, the music, native and ever ready to the poet himself-tender, manly, humorous,

s most original verse is that which speaks the language of painter and musician as it had never before been spoken. No English poet before him has ever excelled his utterances on music, none has so much as rivalled his utterances on art. 'Abt Vogler' is the richest, deepest, fullest poem on music in the language. It is not the theories of the poet, but the instinct

o intellectual a poet (and only the intellectual poet, as we have pointed out, can be adequate to modern demands

leisure for the hour of the poet-as indeed he has himself said, to much the same effect, in a letter printed many years a

h Bishop Butler, in answer to a similar complaint: 'It must be acknowledged that some of the following discourses are very abstruse and difficult, or, if you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are judges whether or no, and how far this

Browning's most delightful volumes. It is only to be regretted [49] that in the later collected edition of the works those two magical old volumes are broken up and scattered under other headings. We think also that Mr. Symons in his high praise does no more than justice to The Rin

d intellectual depth of certain pieces as its characteristic, or, equally, to the traces here and there of an apparent carelessness of workmansh

ny earlier work); notwithstanding all that, we think the change here indicated matter of regret. After all, we have to conjure up ideal poets for ourselves out of those who st

our age-record of so much that is richest in the world of things, and men, and their works-all so much the richer by

art. Like the lovers of his lyric, Mr. Browning has renounced the selfish serenities of wild-wood and dream-palace; he has fared up and down among men, listening to the music of h

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e the soul of

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