ABSTRACT
This is by far the best book which Mr. Browning has published for many years. Though not reaching the level of his Men and Women, or of the finest portions of The Ring and the Book, it has many passages full of his characteristic power, and except where a rough style gives dramatic force to the sketch, as in the picture of John Bunyan’s penitents, Ned Bratts and his wife, nothing at all of the truculent ugliness, the ostentatious broken-windedness of his latest gasping style of English verse. Of course, his subjects are, as usual with Mr. Browning, startling subjects. He not only loves to flash his weird figures upon the imagination with all the suddenness and abruptness of a magic lanthorn, but to present you with a subject that takes your breath away as much by the singularity of its attitude as by the suddenness of its appearance. He rejects purposely the shading and the moral atmosphere which make the grimmest subjects seem natural when they are given in connection with all the conditions of their history and origin, for his object is to make you see the wonder of the world, rather than its harmony, or the context which, partly at least, explains it. But assuming, as the critic always must assume, the poet’s special bent and genius, there is nothing specially harsh in this volume, and much that is really powerful, while the harshest pictures in it are lent a touch of grandeur by the purpose which penetrates the life portrayed.…
The Russian idyl, Ivàn Ivànovitch, on the old subject of the mother who threw three of her babies to the pursuing wolves in order to save her own life, is also very grim and powerful, especially in its ending,—… This is, on the whole, decidedly the finest of these idyls. It paints a grandeur of unhesitating, calm selfreliance in the village hero, such as is hardly conceivable in our world of doubts and scruples, and paints, too, the clearness and coldness and freedom from all liability to agitation, which would be the only possible conditions of such Draconic rigour of purpose.
