An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 6

statue is never dwarfed by the pedestal.
The characteristic of which I have been speaking (the persistent care for the individual and personal, as distinguished from the universal and general) while it is the secret of his finest achievements, and rightly his special charm, is of all things the most alien to the ordinary conceptions of poetry, and the usual preferences for it. The popularity of rare and delicate poetry, which condescends to no cheap bids for it, poetry like Tennyson's, for instance, is largely due to the very quality which Browning's finest characteristic excludes from his. Compare, altogether apart from the worth and workmanship, one of Tennyson's with one of Browning's best lyrics. The perfection of the former consists in the exquisite way in which it expresses feelings common to all. The perfection of the latter consists in the intensity of its expression of a single moment of passion or emotion, one peculiar to a single personality, and to that personality only at a single moment. To appreciate it we must enter keenly and instantaneously into the imaginary character at its imagined crisis; and, even when this is easiest to do, it is evident that there must be more difficulty in doing it (for it requires a certain exertion) than in merely letting the mind lie at rest, accepting and absorbing. And the difficulty is increased when we remember another of Browning's characteristics, closely allied to this, and, indeed, resulting from it: his preference for the unusual and complex rather than the simple and ordinary. People prefer to read about characters which they can understand at first sight, with which they can easily sympathise. A dramatist, who insists on presenting them with complex and exceptional characters, studies of the good in evil and the evil in good, representations of states of mind which are not habitual to them, or which they find it difficult to realise in certain lights, can never obtain so quick or so hearty a recognition as one who deals with great actions, large and clear characters, familiar motives. When the head has to be exercised before the heart, there is chilling of sympathy.
Allied to Browning's originality in temper, topic, treatment and form, is his originality in style; an originality which is again due, in large measure, to the same prevailing cause. His style is vital, his verse moves to the throbbing of an inner organism, not to the pulsations of a machine. He prefers, as indeed all true poets do, but more exclusively than any other poet, sense to sound, thought to expression. In his desire of condensation he employs as few words as are consistent with the right expression of his thought; he rejects superfluous adjectives, and all stop-gap words. He refuses to use words for words' sake: he declines to interrupt conversation with a display of fireworks: and as a result it will be found that his finest effects of versification correspond with his highest achievements in imagination and passion. As a dramatic poet he is obliged to modulate and moderate, sometimes almost to vulgarise, his style and diction for the proper expression of some particular character, in whose mouth exquisite turns of phrase and delicate felicities of rhythm would be inappropriate. He will not _let himself go_ in the way of easy floridity, as writers may whose themes are more "ideal." And where many writers would attempt merely to simplify and sweeten verse, he endeavours to give it fuller expressiveness, to give it strength and newness. It follows that Browning's verse is not so uniformly melodious as that of many other poets. Where it seems to him necessary to sacrifice one of the two, sense or sound, he has never hesitated which to sacrifice. But while he has certainly failed in some of his works, or in some passages of them, to preserve the due balance, while he has at times undoubtedly sacrificed sound too liberally to the claims of sense, the extent of this sacrifice is very much less than is generally supposed. The notion, only too general, expressed by such a phrase as "his habitual rudeness of versification" (used by no unfavourable Edinburgh reviewer in 1869) is one of the most singularly erroneous perversions of popular prejudice that have ever called for correction at the hands of serious criticism.
Browning is far indeed from paying no attention, or little, to metre and versification. Except in some of his later blank verse, and in a few other cases, his very errors are just as often the result of hazardous experiments as of carelessness and inattention. In one very important matter, that of rhyme, he is perhaps the greatest master in our language; in single and double, in simple and grotesque alike, his rhymes are as accurate as they are ingenious. His lyrical poems