ABSTRACT
An author’s influence upon other authors may be expressed in terms of either attraction or repulsion; and the one who repels is often found to be the one whose influence is deepest although it be more tardily acknowledged. Today Robert Browning exhibits the most sharply accented personality among writers of English poetry; and his latest publication proves that he is not likely to lose the distinction with advancing age.… Beauty and ugliness, the lovely and the grotesque, must according to his practice be treated with a commanding impartiality, which shall leave chiefly with the reader the task of striking the balance. Hence proceed his many deficiencies of form; and the same cause may be assigned for the result that his eminence as a dramatist (not for the modern stage) is hardly surpassed by his power as a writer of lyrical and meditative verse. Such a man must be equally capable in the management of several dissimilar modes of imparting thought. It is not surprising, either that his impartiality should issue in something allied to a buoyant indifference, which might be said fitly to terminate with a collection like Jocoseria; because we find in its contents a mingling of sober and even tragic elements with others of a facetious or half-cynical cast, and there runs through the whole a vein of mildly contemptuous pity for the lot of mankind, their illusions, their meannesses, aspirations, and self-deceits.
