An Introduction to the Study of Browning | Page 9

if
you please, obscure; but I must take leave to add that those alone are
judges whether or no, and how far this is a fault, who are judges

whether or no, and how far it might have been avoided--those only who
will be at the trouble to understand what is here said, and to see how far
the things here insisted upon, and not other things, might have been put
in a plainer manner."[7]
There is another popular misconception to which also a word in passing
may as well be devoted. This is the idea that Browning's personality is
apt to get confused with his characters', that his men and women are not
separate creations, projected from his brain into an independent
existence, but mere masks or puppets through whose mouths he speaks.
This fallacy arises from the fact that not a few of his imaginary persons
express themselves in a somewhat similar fashion; or, as people too
rashly say, "talk like Browning." The explanation of this apparent
paradox, so far as it exists, is not far to seek. All art is a compromise,
and all dramatic speech is in fact impossible. No persons in real life
would talk as Shakespeare or any other great dramatist makes them talk.
Nor do the characters of Shakespeare talk like those of any other great
dramatist, except in so far as later playwrights have consciously
imitated Shakespeare. Every dramatic writer has his own style, and in
this style, subject to modification, all his characters speak. Just as a
soul, born out of eternity into time, takes on itself the impress of earth
and the manners of human life, so a dramatic creation, pure essence in
the shaping imagination of the poet, takes on itself, in its passage into
life, something of the impress of its abode. "The poet, in short, endows
his creations with his own attributes; he enables them to utter their
feelings as if they themselves were poets, thus giving a true voice even
to that intensity of passion which in real life often hinders
expression."[8] If this fact is recognised (that dramatic speech is not
real speech, but poetical speech, and poetical speech infused with the
individual style of each individual dramatist, modulated, indeed, but
true to one keynote) then it must be granted that Browning has as much
right to his own style as other dramatists have to theirs, and as little
right as they to be accused on that account of putting his personality
into his work. But as Browning's style is very pronounced and original,
it is more easily recognisable than that of most dramatists (so far, no
doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it has come to seem relatively
more prominent than it really is. This consideration, and not any

confusion of identity, is the cause of whatever similarity of speech
exists between Browning and his characters, or between individual
characters. The similarity is only skin-deep. Take a convenient instance,
The Ring and the Book. I have often seen it stated that the nine tellings
of the story are all told in the same style, that all the speakers, Guido
and Pompilia, the Pope and Tertium Quid alike, speak like Browning. I
cannot see it. On the contrary, I have been astonished, in reading and
re-reading the poem, at the variety, the difference, the wonderful
individuality in each speaker's way of telling the same story; at the
profound art with which the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of
language, no less than the broad distinctions of character and the subtle
indications of bias, are adapted and converted into harmony. A certain
general style, a certain general manner of expression, are common to all,
as is also the case in, let us say, The Tempest. But what distinction,
what variation of tone, what delicacy and expressiveness of modulation!
As a simple matter of fact, few writers have ever had a greater
flexibility of style than Browning.
I am doubtful whether full justice has been done to one section of
Browning's dramatic work, his portraits of women. The presence of
woman is not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as it is in the
work of some other poets; woman is to him neither an exclusive
preoccupation, nor a continual unrest; but as faithful and vital
representations, I do not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite on
a level with his portraits of men, and far beyond those of any other
English poet of the last three centuries. In some of them, notably in
Pompilia, there is a something which always seems to me almost
incredible in a man: an instinct that one would have thought only a
woman could have for women. And his women, good or bad, are
always real women, and