ABSTRACT
If the shades of Jeffrey and of Gifford were to appear among us and to survey the poetic literature of the present generation, they would feel a stern satisfaction and a self-gratulatory delight at the remembrance of the hard-handed castigations which they had inflicted on the young poets of the commencement of this century. For a style of poetry more at variance with the canons of criticism then recognised than that in which it is now the ambition of most of our poets to express themselves, is hardly conceivable. Even the chief offenders of those days would refuse to recognise their own offspring in many of the most belauded poetic flights of the present time, which frequently unite an affected simplicity with such tortured, artificial, and foppish vagueness of expression and fantastic flimsiness of ideas, that it is generally a labour of infinite pain to extract from them the little meaning they possess. Indeed, the age now appears to be ripe for
inexhaustible mine of examples, and the last volume which he has published is, perhaps, richer than any that have preceded it in materials for such a purpose. Yet much as we may lament the great defects of expression which enshroud his thoughts and distort his compositions, it were vain to deny that his steady perseverance in the course which he has chosen has won at length for himself an influence among readers of poetry second only to that of the Laureate, and no one pretending to be at all conversant with the literature of our time can forbear from making acquaintance with and forming some estimate of his labours. Every reader who glances at Mr. Browning’s volumes however cursorily, must perceive that he is a man of rare accomplishments, with a singularly original mind capable of sympathising with a multiplicity of tastes and characters very far removed from every-day experience. We may regret that he has omitted to draw from those sources of the sublime, the tender, and the pathetic which will ever be the most potent means of touching and purifying the heart, refining the feelings, and elevating the imagination. We may regret also the habitual neglect of the ordinary canons of taste and judgment which lamentably diminishes the effectiveness of his poetry; but Mr. Browning now lays the work of thirty years before us, and we have but to take it to ourselves and to enjoy it and understand it as well as we can. For it is clear that he has so wedded himself to what is quaint and obscure in his forms of expression and choice of subject, that no change in these is to be hoped for from him; far different in this respect from Mr. Tennyson, whose last volume shows a power of adaptation and a pliability of invention which even his strongest admirers hardly anticipated. His two rustic sketches, ‘The ‘Grandmother’ and ‘The Northern Farmer’ have enriched the language with two scenes of homely and rural life scarcely to be surpassed in truthfulness and simplicity of expression; while his two tales, ‘Enoch Arden’ and ‘Aylmer’s Field’, although open to some objection as to the character and construction of the stories, are yet rare triumphs of poetic diction, and in their chastened strength form a very striking contrast with the highly-wrought and fastidious execution of ‘Locksley Hall’ and ‘Œnone.’ On the other hand, there is hardly a fault with which Mr. Browning has ever been charged which is not, in the Dramatis Personae, intensified to an extravagant degree. It was said of an eminent lawyer that he wrote his opinions in three different kinds of handwriting —one which he and his clerk could read, another which only he himself could decypher, and a third which neither he or anybody could make out; and into similar categories we are compelled to parcel out the poems of the Dramatis Personae. To form, however, a proper estimate of Mr. Browning as a poet, it would not be fair to dwell exclusively upon this volume, and we shall proceed therefore to pass in review the collected edition of his works as last given to the public.
