ABSTRACT
Mr. Browning’s is a style which is beset with temptations. It is confessedly analytical and apologetic. Now, the passion for analysis tends to grow by what it feeds on, and needs-greatly needs-the corrective of frank presentation of healthy human interests; whilst the experiment of apology, as we all know, sometimes even overbalances self respect in the determination to justify itself in justifying its object. Mr. Browning has very nearly passed the legitimate line in this new work, which may be designated as an endeavour, ‘dramatically,’ to deal with purely morbid elements in human life, and to find relief or justification in nothing else than the mode of treatment. Any other writer of our day would have hopelessly failed in the effort. Mr. Tennyson would have too plainly shown a personal shrinking from some points raised here, as from proud flesh-for some such shrinking is perceptible in his dealing with the ‘Arthurian Legends’. Mr. Swinburne, we fear, would have now and again displayed too much warmth of sympathy. Mr. Browning saves himself by the curious, self-removed, halfquizzical habit of analysis, which sometimes becomes almost grotesque, but never wholly so. Fifine is the proper passage-way from The Ring and the Book, with its sweet Pompilia, to this French law-tragedy wrought up with its adventuress of a heroine, who has been mistress to several men before meeting the hero. Our interest in this story is maintained by our being led perforce to trace the process by which the poet finds in what seem the most perverted elements the dim reflex of high possibilities, ruined by admixture of incompatible qualities of temperament; and, as a tinge of that fatefulness which somehow will intrude into the dramatic art, and move especially into every form of it which is obviously apologetic, thus communicates itself, in spite of the grotesquerie of manner, something of tragic ‘pity and terror’ returns to the work, if we only try to view it faithfully as a whole. But only so; and in this lies a fair criticism, inasmuch as few readers seek, or can be expected to dwell on such works till the underlying idea of the whole reveals itself completely.
