Chapter IV: On Robert Browning

The fashion of this world passed away, but the fashion
of those things which belonged to the world of
imagination--and it was most emphatically in that world
that Mr. Browning had worked--endured and never passed. In
1848 Mr. Browning said in a preface to a collection of his
poems that many of them were out of print and of the rest
a great number had been withdrawn from circulation, which
implied that even at that time the size of his public was
very small. But he had fully demonstrated that he stood
in no need of a Browning Society to reinforce his native
vigor, for, in spite of the indifference of the public, he
had constantly gone on, from that time to this, producing
and deepening the impression which he had made upon all
thinking minds. It had been said that he had no sense of
form, but this question depended upon the meaning to be
attached to that word. One thing he thought was certain,
and that was that men who had discussed form most, as for
instance Goethe, had not always been the most successful in
producing examples of it. Certainly no one with any sense
of form could call “Faust” other than formless. If form
meant the use of adequate and harmonious means to produce
a certain artistic end, then he knew no one who had given
truer examples of it than the great poet after whom that
society took its name. He thought there was one danger in
a Browning Society, which was that it might lead them to
be partisans, and he thought he had seen some symptoms of
it. They might be apt to insist upon people admiring the
inferior work of the artist with his better work, and this
he thought would be an evil. Every one who read Browning
with attention, and who loved him, must at the same time
admit that he was occasionally whirled away by the sweep
and torrent of his own abundance. But after making these
deductions, there was no poet who had given us a greater
variety or who had shown more originality. Mr. Browning
abided with them. He was not a fashion, nor did he belong
to any one period of their lives. What they felt more
clearly than anything else was his strength. He was of all
others a masculine, a virile poet.

✠