ABSTRACT
Some ten or twelve years have passed since Mr. Browning’s first poetic attempts appeared, to be followed at intervals by fresh productions, constituting altogether two volumes, more than double the size of those with which Mr. Tennyson has presented the world, as the outcome of a much longer poetic life. Such an amount of verse, one would have expected, must contain materials for a clear and definite judgment on the writer’s powers; Mr. Browning’s niche in the Temple of the Muses should be by now a settled point. On the contrary, his poems are still caviare to the multitude; those who greedily devour, and indiscriminately worship, anything in the shape of verse, still differ widely in their verdicts; even those who possess, or fancy that they possess, canons of scientific criticism, are very much at a loss how to apply them to his case. These phœnomena, whether or not they prove genius in an author, prove at least originality; and all will allow this merit to Mr. Browning. No one can have perused Sordello and Paracelsus without acknowledging in them the work of a poet distinguished from the herd of scribblers, by vigorous and manful, often profound, thoughts, raciness of expression, and an amount of learning on the subjects which he handles, which is becoming more and more rare in these days. Of Sordello, perhaps, we have hardly a right to speak; for Mr. Browning has not republished it in the last edition of his Poems. And certainly, those peculiar defects of his, to which we must be allowed hereafter to allude, had marred Sordello more than any other of his writings, even so far as to leave the reader in doubt as to both the story and the moral; as to whether a passage was dialogue or description, jest or earnest, different speeches, by different characters or one by the same. We should not have said so much, if we had not intended to qualify an accusation to which the poet seems already to have pleaded guilty, by most earnest praise, not of the book as a whole, but of such passages as the two which
compliments; for had we not felt certain that Mr. Browning was worthy of better things, we should have left the matter to clear itself, as all poems do pretty accurately in ‘the righteous sieve of Time.’ But there are fine ballads in the second volume, healthy and English, clear of all that Italianesque pedantry, that crambe repetita1 of olives and lizards, artists and monks, with which the English public, for its sins, has been spoon-fed for the last half-century, ever since Childe Harold, in a luckless hour, thought a warmer climate might make him a better man, and that the way to raise one’s own spirit was to escape to a country where humanity has sunk below the beasts. When will poets, as some of our most promising artists are beginning to do, discover that the Italian mine is well-nigh worked out, and that those who go thither for teaching are likely to find swine bad lecturers on the pearls before them?
