Chapter III

“Love is best!” That is one of the cardinal points of Browning’s creed. He repeats it in a hundred ways: tragically in _A Blot in the ’Scutcheon_; sentimentally in _A Lover’s Quarrel_, _Two in the Campagna_, _The Last Ride Together_; heroically in _Colombe’s Birthday_; in the form of a paradox in _The Statue and the Bust_; as a personal experience in _By the Fireside_, _One Word More_, and at the end of the prelude to _The Ring and the Book_.

“For life, with all it yields of joy and woe
And hope and fear, ...
Is just our chance o’ the prize of learning love.”

But it must be confessed that he does not often say it as clearly, as quietly, as beautifully as in _Love Among the Ruins_. For his chosen method is dramatic and his natural manner is psychological. So ardently does he follow this method, so entirely does he give himself up to this manner that his style

“is subdued
To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.”

In the dedicatory note to _Sordello_, written in 1863, he says “My stress lay in the incidents in the development of a _soul_; little else is worth study.” He felt intensely

“How the world is made for each of us!
How all we perceive and know in it
Tends to some moment’s product thus,
When a soul declares itself—to wit,
By its fruit, the thing it does!”

In _One Word More_ he describes his own poetry with keen insight:

“Love, you saw me gather men and women,
Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all and use their service,
Speak from every mouth,—the speech a poem.”

It is a mistake to say that Browning is a metaphysical poet: he is a psychological poet. His interest does not lie in the abstract problems of time and space, mind and matter, divinity and humanity. It lies in the concrete problems of opportunity and crisis, flesh and spirit, man the individual and God the person. He is an anatomist of souls.

“Take the least man of all mankind, as I;
Look at his head and heart, find how and why
He differs from his fellows utterly.”[14]

But his way of finding out this personal equation is not by observation and reflection. It is by throwing himself into the character and making it reveal itself by intricate self-analysis or by impulsive action. What his poetry lacks is the temperate zone. He has the arctic circle of intellect and the tropics of passion. But he seldom enters the intermediate region of sentiment, reflection, sympathy, equable and prolonged feeling. Therefore it is that few of his poems have the power of “sinking inward from thought to thought” as Wordsworth’s do. They surprise us, rouse us, stimulate us, more than they rest us. He does not penetrate with a mild and steady light through the portals of the human heart, making them transparent. He flings them wide open suddenly, and often the gates creak on their hinges. He is forever tying Gordian knots in the skein of human life and cutting them with the sword of swift action or intense passion. His psychological curiosity creates the difficulties, his intuitive optimism solves them.