An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 7

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 contain more
structural varieties of form than those of any preceding English poet,
not excepting Shelley. His blank verse at its best is more vital in quality
than that of any modern poet. And both in rhymed and in blank verse
he has written passages which for almost every technical quality are
hardly to be surpassed in the language.
That Browning's style should have changed in the course of years is
only natural, and its development has been in the natural (if not always
in the best) direction. "The later manner of a painter or poet," says
F.W.H. Myers in his essay on Virgil, "generally differs from his earlier
manner in much the same way. We observe in him a certain impatience
of the rules which have guided him to excellence, a certain desire to use
his materials more freely, to obtain bolder and newer effects." These
tendencies and others of the kind are specially manifest in Browning, as
they must be in a writer of strongly marked originality; for originality
always strengthens with use, and often hardens to eccentricity, as we
may observe in the somewhat parallel case of Carlyle. We find as a
consequence that a great deal of his later poetry is much less attractive
and much less artistically perfect than his earlier work, while just those
failings to which his principles of poetic art rendered him liable
become more and more frequent and prominent. But, good or bad, it
has grown with his growth, and we can conceive him saying, with
Aurora Leigh,
"So life, in deepening with me, deepened all
The course I took, the
work I did. Indeed
The academic law convinced of sin;
The critics
cried out on the falling off,
Regretting the first manner. But I felt

My heart's life throbbing in my verse to show
It lived, it also--certes
incomplete,
Disordered with all Adam in the blood,
But even its
very tumours, warts and wens,
Still organised by and implying
life."[4]

It has been, as a rule, strangely overlooked, though it is a matter of the
first moment, that Browning's poems are in the most precise sense
works of art, and this in a very high degree, positive and relative, if we
understand by a "work of art" a poem which attains its end and fulfils
its purpose completely, and which has a worthy end and plain purpose
to attain.
Surely this is of far more vital importance than the mere melodiousness
of single lines, or a metre of unvarying sweetness bearing gently along
in its placid course (as a stream the leaf or twig fallen into it from
above) some tiny thought or finikin fragment of emotion. Matthew
Arnold, who was both poet and critic, has told us with emphasis of "the
necessity of accurate construction, and the subordinate character of
expression."[5] His next words, though bearing a slightly different
signification, may very legitimately be applied to Browning. Arnold
tells us "how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral
impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect
produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image."
For "a great action," read "an adequate subject," and the words define
and defend Browning's principle and practice exactly. There is no
characteristic of his work more evident, none more admirable or more
rare, than the unity, the compactness and completeness, the skill and
care in construction and definiteness in impression, of each poem. I do
not know any contemporary of whom this may more truly be said. The
assertion will be startling, no doubt, to those who are accustomed to
think of Browning (as people once thought of Shakespeare) as a poet of
great gifts but little skill; as a giant, but a clumsy giant; as what the
French call a nature, an almost unconscious force, expending itself at
random, without rule or measure. But take, for example, the series of
Men and Women, as originally published, read poem after poem (there
are fifty to choose from) and scrutinise each separately; see what was
the writer's intention, and observe how far he has fulfilled it, how far he
has succeeded in conveying to your mind a distinct and sharply-cut
impression. You will find that whatever be the subject, whatever the
style, whether in your eyes the former be mistaken, the latter perverse,
the poem itself, within its recognised limits, is designed, constructed
and finished with the finest skill of the draughtsman or the architect.

You will find that