An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 6

character, the eye of
the painter perceives the shades and shapes of line and colour and form
required to give it picturesque prominence, and the learning of the
scholar then sets up a fragment of the broken past, or re-fashions a
portion of the living present, as an appropriate and harmonious scene or
background. The 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