ABSTRACT
Some questions may be raised as to points in the execution of Mr Browning’s poem, but there can be none as to the high poetic power displayed in it. There are, as it appears to us, some marks of haste in the composition, and we should have been better pleased with the absence both of the statement in the preface, that the poem had not been imagined six months before its publication, and of any ground for making such a statement; for we cannot doubt that the same genius which, in the space of time mentioned, produced the work as it now appears, would not have spent six months longer in brooding over its conceptions and their first rapid embodiment, without making the finished whole something still finer than it is.… In its chief constituent qualities Mr Browning’s style and manner of writing is, like that of every man of cultivated powers, a sufficiently true representative of his manner of thinking; even its peculiarities, whether they might, in the abstract, be accounted commendable, or the reverse, must be held to be indispensable to its perfection, because they are a reflection of mental habits which have contributed to make his poetry what it is. We do not therefore object generally to his long and often somewhat intricately involved sentences, or to forms of phraseology and construction, of occasional occurrence, which are apt for a moment to perplex or startle on the first reading, or to any other deviations of a similar kind from ordinary usage or the beaten highway prescribed by our books of authority in grammar, rhetoric, and prosody, in so far as such unusual forms are the natural and unaffected product of the writer’s genius, working its purposes in its own way. Such distinctive characteristics, when we have become familiar with them, and they have lost any slight repulsiveness with which they may have at first acted upon us, even acquire a power of enhancing the pleasure we receive from a composition otherwise eminently beautiful, and of rivetting our love for it. We do not doubt that there are, in Paradise Lost for instance, many peculiar forms of phraseology which the national ear has now learned not only to tolerate but to
suppose that true art has really been present and at work, although (nothing uncommon or wonderful) the effect may have been too new and too exquisite to be all at once understood and appreciated. The result will be very different where the peculiarity is not a real excellence, but a mere trick or whim. Then the disapproval which it may expect to meet with when the blinding influences of novelty operate no longer,—the condemnatory and decisive verdict of posteritywill be still more severe than that which may have been at first passed upon it. It may then operate as powerfully to scare away the regards of men from the genuine beauties with which it may happen to be associated, as it would help in the other case to attract and fix their admiration.
