ABSTRACT
The occasional obscurity of Mr. Browning’s style-although there is, we think, less of it in these four volumes than in any poem previously published by himconstitutes a defect of which we mitigate the purely literary importance in expressing our belief that it is avoidable. But we impugn the morality of the artist in presuming his potential skill. There are obscure passages in Mr. Browning’s works where the difficulty resides, not in any complexity of thought, but in sheer slovenliness of ravelled expression; while, to prove such passages needlessly and therefore culpably obscure, the diction of the poet is often as remarkable for lucidity of exposition as the thought which it conveys is distinguished by subtlety of conception. With regard to these latter passages, dealing generally with the most important questions which can engage the attention of men, we hardly care to record our protest against the complaint that it requires a considerable effort of the mind to master them. Those who seek for shells may paddle at their ease in the fringe of the ocean ‘that daily licks the shore’; those who seek for pearls must dive in deep water-and there is no diving without considerable effort. We now pass to a fault in Mr. Browning arising from a combination of intellectual and moral audacity-a kind of temerity which finds its counterpart in M. Victor Hugo, and which particularly distinguishes both these writers when they assume (as they so frequently and successfully assume) the character of mental pathologists .The study of morbid anatomy, whether moral or physical, is not to be prosecuted without contact with the unclean; but what we object to is that the processes of the dissecting-room should be conducted in the public street. It is quite possible to employ in art the valuable results of scientific mental analysis, without making the loathsome details of knowledge the vehicle of its communication. M.Hugo especially permits himself to handle ideas and words which were never meant for artistic manipulation. There is, for example, an incident, a word, connected with one of the decisive battles of the world which,
grow maudlin over it, and show you with what dexterity a consummate artist can do what in your simplicity you deemed impossible. ‘Cette bête de mot, impossible!’1 We confess that this manifestation of an intellectual capacity to pirouette on a pin-head without falling into circumjacent filth, and the execution of similar literary gymnastics, betray a vanity alto gether alien from Mr. Browning, but he rivals his illustrious contemporary in the essentially French quality of ‘audace.’ In the present work he ventures with Pompilia upon ground of perilous lubricity-we freely admit without lapse; but there is both lapse and collapse of all that preserves the self-respect of art in the occasional outrages of thought and language-in one instance, the mental and verbal garbage —which he assigns to male characters in the drama. No reader who is familiar with Mr. Browning’s works can for a moment doubt the essential purity of his mind. Indeed the whole conception of The Ring and the Book bears the impress of a mind pre-eminently pure, and we apprehend that Mr. Browning’s temerity is inspired solely by the desire to be true to Nature. But to hold that, because human beings of a given temperament will, under given circumstances, say a given thing, therefore the artist is justified in putting the same thing into the mouth of corresponding personages in his drama, is to commit the radical mistake of assigning to art a reflective instead of a representative function.
