but true to one keynote) then it must be granted that
Browning has as much right to his own style as other
dramatists have to theirs, and as little right as
they to be accused on that account of putting his
personality into his work. But as Browning’s
style is very pronounced and original, it is more
easily recognisable than that of most dramatists (so
far, no doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it
has come to seem relatively more prominent than it
really is. This consideration, and not any confusion
of identity, is the cause of whatever similarity of
speech exists between Browning and his characters,
or between individual characters. The similarity
is only skin-deep. Take a convenient instance,
The Ring and the Book. I have often seen
it stated that the nine tellings of the story are all
told in the same style, that all the speakers, Guido
and Pompilia, the Pope and Tertium Quid alike, speak
like Browning. I cannot see it. On the contrary,
I have been astonished, in reading and re-reading the
poem, at the variety, the difference, the wonderful
individuality in each speaker’s way of telling
the same story; at the profound art with which the
rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language,
no less than the broad distinctions of character and
the subtle indications of bias, are adapted and converted
into harmony. A certain general style, a certain
general manner of expression, are common to all, as
is also the case in, let us say,
The Tempest.
But what distinction, what variation of tone, what
delicacy and expressiveness of modulation! As
a simple matter of fact, few writers have ever had
a greater flexibility of style than Browning.
I am doubtful whether full justice has been done to
one section of Browning’s dramatic work, his
portraits of women. The presence of woman is
not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as
it is in the work of some other poets; woman is to
him neither an exclusive preoccupation, nor a continual
unrest; but as faithful and vital representations,
I do not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite
on a level with his portraits of men, and far beyond
those of any other English poet of the last three
centuries. In some of them, notably in Pompilia,
there is a something which always seems to me almost
incredible in a man: an instinct that one would
have thought only a woman could have for women.
And his women, good or bad, are always real women,
and they are represented without bias. Browning
is one of the very few men (Mr. Meredith, whose women
are, perhaps, the consummate flower of his work, is
his only other English contemporary) who can paint
women without idealisation or degradation, not from
the man’s side, but from their own; as living
equals, not as goddesses or as toys. His women
live, act, and suffer, even think; not assertively,
mannishly (for the loveliest of them have a very delicate
charm of girlishness) but with natural volition, on
equal rights with men. Any one who has thought