A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) | Page 7

portrays.
His treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always
picturesque. It raises a distinct image of the person or action he intends
to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated with thought:
and I shall later have occasion to notice the false impression of Mr.
Browning's genius which this circumstance creates. Details, which with
realists of a narrower kind would give only a physical impression of the
scene described, serve in his case to build up its mental impression.
They create a mental or emotional atmosphere which makes us vaguely
feel the intention of the story as we travel through it, and flashes it
upon us as we look back. In "Red Cotton Night-cap Country" (as we
shall presently see) he dwells so significantly on the peacefulness of the
neighbourhood in which the tragedy has occurred, that we feel in it the
quiet which precedes the storm, and which in some measure invites it.
In one of the Idyls, "Ivàn Ivànovitch," he begins by describing the axe
which will strike off the woman's head, and raising a vague idea of its
fitness for any possible use. In another of them, "Martin Relph," the
same process is carried on in an opposite manner. We see a mental
agony before we know its substantial cause; and we only see the cause
as reflected in it "Ned Bratts," again, conveys in its first lines the
sensation of a tremendously hot day in which Nature seems to reel in a
kind of riotous stupefaction; and the grotesque tragedy on which the

idyl turns, becomes a matter of course. It would be easy to multiply
examples.
Mr. Browning's verse is also subordinate to this intellectual theory of
poetic art. It is uniformly inspired by the principle that sense should not
be sacrificed to sound: and this principle constitutes his chief ground of
divergence from other poets. It is a case of
divergence--nothing more:
since he is too deeply a musician to be indifferent to sound in verse,
and since no other poet deserving the name would willingly sacrifice
sense to it. But while all agree in admitting that sense and sound in
poetry are the natural complement of each other, each will be
practically more susceptible to one than to the other, and will
unconsciously seek it at the expense of the other. With all his love for
music, Mr. Browning is more susceptible to sense than to sound. He
values though more than expression; matter, more than form; and,
judging him from a strictly poetic point of view, he has lost his balance
in this direction, as so many have lost it in the opposite one. He has
never ignored beauty, but he has neglected it in the desire for
significance. He has never meant to be rugged, but he has become so,
in the exercise of strength. He has never intended to be obscure, but he
has become so from the condensation of style which was the excess of
significance and of strength. Habit grows on us by degrees till its slight
invisible links form an iron chain, till it overweights its object, and
even ends in crushing it out of sight; and Mr. Browning has illustrated
this natural law. The self-enslavement was the more inevitable in his
case that he was not only an earnest worker, but a solitary one. His
genius[3] removed him from the first from that sphere of popular
sympathy in which the tendency to excess would have been corrected;
and the distance, like the mental habit which created it, was
self-increasing.
It is thus that Mr. Browning explains the eccentricities of his style; and
his friends know that beyond the point of explaining, he does not
defend them. He has never blamed his public for accusing him of
obscurity or ugliness He has only thought those wrong who taxed him
with being wilfully ugly or obscure. He began early to defy public
opinion because his best endeavours had failed to conciliate it; and he

would never conciliate it at the expense of what he believed to be the
true principles of his art. But his first and greatest failure from a
popular point of view was the result of his willingness to accept any
judgment, however unfavourable, which coincided with this belief.
"Paracelsus," had recently been published, and declared

"unintelligible;" and Mr. Browning was pondering this fact and
concluding that he had failed to be intelligible because he had been too
concise, when an extract from a letter of Miss Caroline Fox was
forwarded to him by the lady to whom it had been addressed. The
writer stated that John Sterling had tried to read the poem and been
repelled by its _verbosity_; and she ended with this question: "_doth he
know that