ABSTRACT
If these volumes, which Mr. Robert Browning offers to the public under the title of Men and Women, were the production of a young and unknown poet, no hesitation need be felt in pronouncing the work to be of the highest promise, dashed only by symptoms of perversity, carelessness, and bad taste, which study, matured judgment, and the criticism of kindly warning tempered with genial admiration, might be expected to eradicate or at least materially soften. Unfortunately, Mr. Browning is no untried aspirant for poetical fame, in whose case hopes may be reasonably indulged and warnings be supposed of any avail. His vices of style are stereotyped, and belong to him as inseparably as his powerful imagination and acute intellect. He can hardly be unconscious of the imperfections which continually mar the reader’s enjoyment of poems among the most remarkable literary productions of our time; and the only possible conclusion is, now that twenty years have elapsed since his first appearance as a poet, that he either cannot mend or will not. In either case, criticism ceases to be of much avail, as few persons are likely to be seduced into imitation or admiration of his defects from any cause but a perversity of judgment and a silly affectation of originality, upon which the lessons of criticism would be wasted. So, as he is beyond cure, let us leave him alone, regretting in him a fine mind enfeebled by caprice and want of discipline, and a true poet defrauding himself of fame, and the public of pleasure and improvement, by affectations, and puerilities, and awkwardnesses, that too often quite overgrow and hide the genuine power of his natural gifts. Only, that the standard of poetic excellence may not through condonation of his lapse be lowered, we must enter a passing protest against his fashion of presenting incidents so allusively as to baffle ordinary penetration to discover what he means —of printing poems having reference to some facts or conversation not given and needed to explain them-of continually running into absurd phrases and ridiculous rhymes in the midst of serious and impassioned poems, and in poems intentionally grotesque descending to a recklessness of expression and meaning, devoid alike of wit, humour, and sense —his fashion of perpetual obscurity where lucid statement is necessary, of oddity where a grave or tender tone befits his subject, of folly and unmeaning gabble where his intention is to be sparkling and clever. All these faults seem to us attributable either to the low vanity of attaining the praise of
that venerable title. There are, indeed, few of the poems that are altogether contemptible: the majority at once delight us by their evidences of power and distress us by their incompleteness of conception and their faults of execution. Some few are sufficiently perfect to become abiding favourites. The general characteristic which pervades the collection is the large amount and high quality of thought, as distinguished from fancy, painting-power, or even passion; thought, however, not abstract and scientific, but real, embodied in persons and things, learnt from life or from living study of books.
