ertain extent renewing the old
prejudice in a new form. To those who could discard extraneous
considerations and take Browning simply as he was, he must, from a
period which only very old men can now remember, have always appeared a
very great, though also a very far from perfect poet. His imperfections
were always on the surface, though perhaps they were not always confined
to it; and only uncritical partisanship could at any time have denied
them, while some of them became noticeably worse in the period of rapid
composition or publication from 1870 to 1885. A large license of
unconventionality, and even of defiance of convention, may be claimed
by, and should be allowed to, persons of genius such as Mr. Browning
undoubtedly possessed. But it can hardly be denied that he, like his
older contemporary Carlyle, whose example may not have been without
influence upon him, did set at naught not merely the traditions, but the
sound norms and rules of English phrase to a rather unnecessary extent.
A beginning of deliberate provocation and challenge, passing into an
after-period of more or less involuntary persistence in an exaggeration
of the mannerisms at first more or less deliberately adopted, is apt to
be shown by persons who set themselves in this way to innovate; and it
was shown by Mr. Browning. It is impossible for any intelligent admirer
to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modulations, his
cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional adoption of the
foreshortened language of the telegraph or the comic stage, and many
other peculiarities of his, were not things which a more perfect art
would have either absorbed and transformed, or at least have indulged in
with far less luxuriance. Nor does it seem much more reasonable for
anybody to contend that his fashion of soul-dissection at a hand-gallop,
in drama, in monologue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly,
abused. Sometimes the thing was not worth doing at all--there are at
least half a dozen of the books between _The Ring and the Book_ and
_Asolando_ from the whole of which a judicious lover of poetry would not
care to save more than the bulk of the smallest of them should they be
menaced with entire destruction. Even in the best of these what is good
could generally, if not always, have been put at the length of the
shorter _Men and Women_ with no loss, nay, with great advantage. The
obscurity so much talked of was to some extent from the very