ABSTRACT
Mem.—Too often a want of solid basis for R.B.’s brilliant and astounding cleverness. A Blot in the ’Scutcheon is solid. How try to account for B.’s twists and turns? I cannot. He has been and still is very dear to me. But I can no longer commit myself to his hands in faith and trust. Neither can I allow the faintest shadow of a suspicion to dwell in my mind that his genius may have a leaven of quackery. Yet, alas! he is not solid-which is a very different thing from prosaic. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as solid as anything in literature; has imaginative coherency and consistency in perfection. Looking at forms of poetic expression, there is not a single utterance in Shakespeare, or of Dante as far as I know, enigmatic in the same sense as so many of Browning’s are. If you suspect, and sometimes find out, that riddles presented to you with Sphinxian solemnity have no answers that really fit them, your curiosity is apt to fall towards freezing point, if not below it. Yet I always end by striking my breast in penitential mood and crying out, O rich mind! wonderful Poet! strange great man !’
