W. P. Ker

“ The nineteenth century is much nearer to us than the eighteenth century to our ancestors a hundred years ago. We think of Fielding and Gray as very far back in time, far separated from the age of Scott and Byron. Yet they are as near that time, in dates, as Thackeray to us, and nearer than the early poems of Tennyson and Browning, which are still read by many young people, without compulsion or any sense of duty, or any uncomfortable feeling that the poems are antiquated now. For poetry, we have still to live in the nineteenth century. ”

“ Possibly the lapse of time may have made Browning easier; perhaps the poetry of George Meredith may have made Browning's verse less difficult in comparison. One does not hear so much now of the protests against Browning's obscurity, of grievances like those of Gilead Beck in the Golden Butterfly. Sordello may be spoken of without a groan, and Paracelsus can be read at a sitting. Yet the difficulties are there—difficulties which are not the same thing as obscurity. The charge of obscurity has been repelled by Mr. Swinburne in his essay on George Chapman. Obscurity is not the right word. ”

“ The poet's gloss to Sordello may be taken as a justification of the work of commentators, an acknowledgement that the matter of poetry can be partly translated into prose. A book like Mr. Henry Jones's, on the Philosophy of Browning, if it needed an apology, might find one in this device of the author, where he provides an analysis of the story. There is nothing in sound poetry that need be afraid of the prose interpreter. The example of Dante, too, might be alleged if it were necessary to prove that poetry and criticism may go together and be used in turn by one and the same author. ”

“ That simultaneously take snuff,
For each to have pretext enough,
And kerchief-wise unfold his sash,
Which, softness' self, is yet the stuff
To hold fast when a steel chain snaps,
And leave the grand white neck no gash. ”

“ But that means that the poet himself is growing impatient of his prose commentator, and is taking the business into his own hands. It is time to stop. The poet may be left to do his work; to prove, even against his own argument in Pacchiarotto, that what he has to give is not knowledge only, nor strength only, but beauty. The simplest and most satisfactory name for it is poetry. ”

“ One might quote from Sordello the head-line 'Analyst who turns in due course synthetist', or compare that extraordinary poem Pacchiarotto, which was written as a travesty of Sordello, and flung in the face of the reviewers: 'harsh analytics' is Browning's phrase there for the kind of minute work which many reviewers condemned in Browning.
The analytical mind is the critical mind, and its work is commonly thought to be the opposite of creation, of imaginative art, of poetry. ”

“ Many people doubtless have amused themselves with thinking of the great rival authors—Tennyson and Browning, Thackeray and Dickens, Macaulay and Carlyle—who seem, in that age, to represent in pairs the two opposite kinds of literature. ”

“ It is easier and less invidious to talk about a row of volumes than a living man. I think of Mr. Browning as one who has stopped to speak to many of my friends, and I am more doubtful than ever about the beginning of this essay. ”

“ But neither Chaucer nor Tennyson has the passion of a collector, like Browning; he goes far further than they in his chase after the varieties. No corner is left untried, no problem is too old or too modern for him. Ixion is for him a character, not an ornament out of the mythology. The Queen of Sheba is there, and Queen Christina by her side; Jochanan Hakkadosh, and Bubb Dodington. In the year after Sedan there appeared the revelation of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society.
The form of those studies is generally the same; the monologue in blank verse. ”

“ But it would be unjust and unlucky if I were to come here promising to say anything marvellously new or anything thoroughly satisfactory about the poetry of Browning. In the art of criticism, as in other dangerous trades, there are workmen's diseases, and one of the commonest is for the speaker to believe that he can 'do' a subject in an essay of thirty-two pages, or a discourse not longer than two ordinary sermons. This illusion is sometimes pleasant in the young ”