ABSTRACT
Mr. Browning has never been a popular poet, and never can be. Perhaps he does not desire to be. Ceratinly, it is not much to desire just now. There is one thing to be said for Mr. Browning, and that is that if when we have finished one of his dramas, or dramatic soliloquies, we have leisure-I will not say to think it over, for that does not help the matter, but leisure to let his work explain and justify itself, some things that were obscure in reading become tangible in memorytaking, or making shapes out of the clouds in which they were diffused; in short, orbing themselves into stars of greater or lesser brilliancy and distinctness. To be a little more explicit, I must return to Shakespeare, if his scholars will pardon my momentary invasion of their province. Shakespeare’s characters are all actualities, and the passions they exhibit and develop are such as we find in the men and women we know. We understand them when they speak, and when they act. Mr. Browning’s characters are possibilities, perhaps, but we have never met with them. We cannot follow them in their talk, and their actions puzzle us. They are too subtle, too metaphysical, too remote, from mankind. It is wise for a poet to work ‘from within outward,’ but he should not work from so far within as never to come to the surface. There is a world of surfacework in Shakespeare, as in Homer, but how delightful it is! Mr. Browning disdains it, except in his Dramatic Lyrics, which will live when his dramas are forgotten. He excels Shakespeare, I think, in the art-if it be art-with which he makes his characters betray what they really are. They may deceive themselves, but they cannot deceive us. ‘My Last Duchess’ is a fine instance of this art, and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’ another. Nothing in literature is more masterly than the faultless painter’s unconscious betrayal of his unknown shame. I know of nothing like this in Shakespeare-nothing so profound in any poet.
