AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF BROWNING

The first and perhaps the final impression we receive from the work of Robert Browning is that of a great nature, an immense personality.  The poet in him is made up of many men.  He is dramatist, humorist, lyrist, painter, musician, philosopher and scholar, each in full measure, and he includes and dominates them all.  In richness of nature, in scope and penetration of mind and vision, in energy of passion and emotion, he is probably second among English poets to Shakespeare alone.  In art, in the power or the patience of working his native ore, he is surpassed by many; but few have ever held so rich a mine in fee.  So large, indeed, appear to be his natural endowments, that we cannot feel as if the whole vast extent of his work has come near to exhausting them.

As it is, he has written more than any other English poet with the exception of Shakespeare, and he comes very near the gigantic total of Shakespeare.  Mass of work is of course in itself worth nothing without due quality; but there is no surer test nor any more fortunate concomitant of greatness than the union of the two.  The highest genius is splendidly spendthrift; it is only the second order that needs to be niggardly.  Browning’s works are not a mere collection of poems, they are a literature.  And his literature is the richest of modern times.  If “the best poetry is that which reproduces the most of life,” his place is among the great poets of the world.  In the vast extent of his work he has dealt with or touched on nearly every phase and feature of humanity, and his scope is bounded only by the soul’s limits and the last reaches of life.  But of all “Poetical Works,” small or great, his is the most consistent in its unity.  The manner has varied not a little, the comparative worth of individual poems is widely different, but from the first word to the last the attitude is the same, the outlook on life the same, the conception of God and man, of the world and nature, always the same.  This unity, though it may be deduced from, or at least accommodated to, a system of philosophical thought, is much more the outcome of a natural and inevitable bent.  No great poet ever constructed his poems upon a theory, but a theory may often be very legitimately discovered in them.  Browning, in his essay on Shelley, divides all poets into two classes, subjective and objective, the Seer and the Maker.  His own genius includes a large measure of them both; for it is equally strong on the dramatic and the metaphysical side.  There are for him but two realities; and but two subjects, Life and Thought.  On these are expended all his imagination and all his intellect, more consistently and in a higher degree than can be said of any English poet since the age of Elizabeth.  Life and thought, the dramatic and the metaphysical, are not considered apart, but woven into one seamless tissue; and in regard to both he has one point of view and one manner of treatment.  It is this that causes the unity which subsists throughout his work; and it is this, too, which distinguishes him among poets, and makes that originality by virtue of which he has been described as the most striking figure in our poetic literature.