A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) | Page 4

TO FIRST LINES OF POEMS 411
INDEX 417
HANDBOOK TO BROWNING'S WORKS
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.
THE NATURE OF MR. BROWNING'S GENIUS.
If we were called upon to describe Mr. Browning's poetic genius in one
phrase, we should say it consisted of an almost unlimited power of
imagination exerted upon real things; but we should have to explain
that with Mr. Browning the real includes everything which a human
being can think or feel, and that he is realistic only in the sense of being
never visionary; he never deals with those vague and incoherent fancies,
so attractive to some minds, which we speak of as coming only from
the poet's brain. He imagines vividly because he observes keenly and
also feels strongly; and this vividness of his nature puts him in equal
sympathy with the real and the ideal--with the seen and the unseen. The
one is as living to him as the other.

His treatment of visible and of invisible realities constitutes him
respectively a dramatic and a metaphysical poet; but, as the two kinds
of reality are inseparable in human life, so are the corresponding
qualities inseparable in Mr. Browning's work. The dramatic activity of
his genius always includes the metaphysical. His genius always shows
itself as dramatic and metaphysical at the same time.
Mr. Browning's genius is dramatic because it always expresses itself in
the forms of real life, in the supposed experiences of men and women.
These men and women are usually in a state of mental disturbance or
conflict; indeed, they think much more than they act. But their thinking
tends habitually to a practical result; and it keeps up our sense of their
reality by clothing itself always in the most practical and picturesque
language which thought can assume. It has been urged that he does not
sink himself in his characters as a completely dramatic writer should;
and this argument must stand for what it is worth. His personality may
in some degree be constructed from his works: it is, I think, generally
admitted, that that of Shakespeare cannot; and in so far as this is the
test of a complete dramatist, Mr. Browning fails of being one. He does
not sink himself in his men and women, for his sympathy with them is
too active to admit of it. He not only describes their different modes of
being, but defends them from their own point of view; and it is natural
that he should often select for this treatment characters with which he is
already disposed to sympathize. But his women are no less living and
no less distinctive than his men; and he sinks his individuality at all
times enough to interest us in the characters which are not akin to his
own as much as in those which are. Even if it were otherwise, if his
men and women were all variations of himself, as imagined under
differences of sex, of age, of training, or of condition, he would still be
dramatic in this essential quality, the only one which bears on our
contention: that everything which, as a poet, he thinks or feels, comes
from him in a dramatic, that is to say, a completely living form.
It is in this way also that his dramatic genius includes the metaphysical.
The abstract, no less than the practical questions which shape
themselves in his mind, are put before us in the thoughts and words, in
the character and conduct of his men and women. This does not mean

that human experience solves for him all the questions which it can be
made to state, or that everything he believes can be verified by it: for in
that case his mode of thought would be scientific, and not metaphysical;
it simply means, that so much of abstract truth as cannot be given in a
picture of human life, lies outside his philosophy of it. He accepts this
residue as the ultimate mystery of what must be called Divine Thought.
Thought or spirit is with him the ultimate fact of existence; the one
thing about which it is vain to theorize, and which we can never get
behind. His gospel would begin, "In the beginning was the Thought;"
and since he can only conceive this as self-conscious, his "Alpha and
Omega" is a Divine intelligence from which all the ideas of the human
intellect are derived, and which stamps them as true. These religious
conceptions are the meeting-ground of the dramatic and the
metaphysical activity of his poetic genius. The two are blended in the
vision of a Supreme Being not to be invested with human emotions, but
only to be reached through them.
To show that Mr. Browning is a metaphysical poet, is to show that he is
not a metaphysical _thinker_, though he