Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man.  There are many who think this element of conventionality altogether regrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, a convention of the unconventional.  But this hatred of the conventional element in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who do not remember the meaning of words.  Convention means only a coming together, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon an emotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon a convention.  Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, an agreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objections shall not be raised.  The most realistic art in the world is open to realistic objection.  Against the most exact and everyday drama that ever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raise the objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, who runs out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the time behaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doing these things in a room in which one of the four walls has been taken clean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob of strangers.  Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that human imagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws a black line round a man’s nose, and that that line is a lie.  And in precisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, be conventional.  Unless he is describing an emotion which others share with him, his labours will be utterly in vain.  If a poet really had an original emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love with the buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably more time than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate his feelings.

Poetry deals with primal and conventional things—­the hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire for immortal life.  If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not deal with them.  If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him.  If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him.  Poetry can only express what is original in one sense—­the sense in which we speak of original sin.  It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins.