An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 5

he has developed it more skilfully and employed it more
consistently than any other writer. Even in works like Sordello and Red
Cotton Night-cap Country, which are thrown into the narrative form,
many of the finest and most characteristic parts are in monologue; and
The Inn Album is a series of slightly-linked dialogues which are only
monologues in disguise. Nearly all the lyrics, romances, idyls, nearly
all the miscellaneous poems, long and short, are monologues. And even
in the dramas, as will be seen later, there is visible a growing tendency
toward the monologue with its mental and individual, in place of the
dialogue with its active and outer interest.
Browning's aim, then, being to see how each soul conceives of itself,
and to exhibit its essential qualities, yet without complication of
incident, it is his frequent practice to reveal the soul to itself by the
application of a sudden test, which shall condense the long trial of
years into a single moment, and so "flash the truth out by one blow."
To this practice we owe his most vivid and notable work. "The poetry
of Robert Browning," says Pater, "is pre-eminently the poetry of
situations." He selects a character, no matter how uninteresting in itself,
and places it in some situation where its vital essence may become
apparent, in some crisis of conflict or opportunity. The choice of good
or evil is open to it, and in perhaps a single moment its fate will be
decided. When a soul plays dice with the devil there is only a second in
which to win or lose; but the second may be worth an eternity. These
moments of intense significance, these tremendous spiritual crises, are
struck out in Browning's poetry with a clearness and sharpness of
outline that no other poet has achieved. "To realise such a situation, to
define in a chill and empty atmosphere the focus where rays, in
themselves pale and impotent, unite and begin to burn, the artist has to
employ the most cunning detail, to complicate and refine upon thought

and passion a thousand fold.... Yet, in spite of this intricacy, the poem
has the clear ring of a central motive; we receive from it the impression
of one imaginative tone, of a single creative act."[3]
It is as a result of this purpose, in consonance with this practice, that we
get in Browning's works so large a number of distinct human types, and
so great a variety of surroundings in which they are placed. Only in
Shakespeare can we find anything like the same variety of distinct
human characters, vital creations endowed with thoughtful life; and not
even, perhaps, in Shakespeare, such novelty and variety of milieu.
There is scarcely a salient epoch in the history of the modern world
which he has not touched, always with the same vital and instinctive
sympathy based on profound and accurate knowledge. Passing by the
legendary and remote ages and civilisations of East and West, he has
painted the first dawn of the modern spirit in the Athens of Socrates
and Euripides, revealed the whole temper and tendency of the twilight
age between Paganism and Christianity, and recorded the last utterance
of the last apostle of the now-conquering creed; he has distilled the
very essence of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the very essence
of the modern world. The men and women who live and move in that
new world of his creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and
beggars, saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
priests and popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses,
dancers with the wicked witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives
with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
greybeards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low estate,
men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them. He
has found and studied humanity, not only in English towns and villages,
in the glare of gaslight and under the open sky, but on the Roman
Campagna, in Venetian gondolas, in Florentine streets, on the
Boulevards of Paris and in the Prado of Madrid, in the snow-bound
forests of Russia, beneath the palms of Persia and upon Egyptian sands,
on the coasts of Normandy and the salt plains of Brittany, among
Druses and Arabs and Syrians, in brand-new Boston and amidst the
ruins of Thebes. But this infinite variety has little in it of mere historic

or social curiosity. I do not think Browning has ever set himself the
task of recording the legend of the ages, though to some extent he has
done it. The instinct of the poet seizes on a type of