Where one had fancied that he had something to conceal,they have proved that he had but little to reveal.But I speak merely of his incoherent work.Taken as a whole the man was great.He did not belong to the Olympians,and had all the incompleteness of the Titan.He did not survey,and it was but rarely that he could sing.His work is marred by struggle,violence and effort,and he passed not from emotion to form,but from thought to chaos.Still,he was great.He has been called a thinker,and was certainly a man who was always thinking,and always thinking aloud;but it was not thought that fascinated him,but rather the processes by which thought moves.It was the machine he loved,not what the machine makes.The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise.So much,indeed,did the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language,or looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression.Rhyme,that exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its own voice;rhyme,which in the hands of the real artist becomes not merely a material element of metrical beauty,but a spiritual element of thought and passion also,waking a new mood,it may be,or stirring a fresh train of ideas,or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain;rhyme,which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods;rhyme,the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre,became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque,misshapen thing,which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian,and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek.There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music.Nay,if he can only get his music by breaking the strings of his lute,he breaks them,and they snap in discord,and no Athenian tettix,making melody from tremulous wings,lights on the ivory horn to make the movement perfect,or the interval less harsh.Yet,he was great:and though he turned language into ignoble clay,he made from it men and women that live.He is the most Shakespearian creature since Shakespeare.If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips,Browning could stammer through a thousand mouths.Even now,as I am speaking,and speaking not against him but for him,there glides through the room the pageant of his persons.There,creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks still burning from some girl's hot kiss.There,stands dread Saul with the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban.
Mildred Tresham is there,and the Spanish monk,yellow with hatred,and Blougram,and Ben Ezra,and the Bishop of St.Praxed's.The spawn of Setebos gibbers in the corner,and Sebald,hearing Pippa pass by,looks on Ottima's haggard face,and loathes her and his own sin,and himself.Pale as the white satin of his doublet,the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom,and Andrea shudders as he hears the cousins whistle in the garden,and bids his perfect wife go down.Yes,Browning was great.And as what will he be remembered?
As a poet?Ah,not as a poet!He will be remembered as a writer of fiction,as the most supreme writer of fiction,it may be,that we have ever had.His sense of dramatic situation was unrivalled,and,if he could not answer his own problems,he could at least put problems forth,and what more should an artist do?Considered from the point of view of a creator of character he ranks next to him who made Hamlet.Had he been articulate,he might have sat beside him.The only man who can touch the hem of his garment is George Meredith.Meredith is a prose Browning,and so is Browning.He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.
ERNEST.There is something in what you say,but there is not everything in what you say.In many points you are unjust.
GILBERT.It is difficult not to be unjust to what one loves.But let us return to the particular point at issue.What was it that you said?
ERNEST.Simply this:that in the best days of art there were no art-critics.
GILBERT.I seem to have heard that observation before,Ernest.It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend.
ERNEST.It is true.Yes:there is no use your tossing your head in that petulant manner.It is quite true.In the best days of art there were no art-critics.The sculptor hewed from the marble block the great white-limbed Hermes that slept within it.The waxers and gilders of images gave tone and texture to the statue,and the world,when it saw it,worshipped and was dumb.He poured the glowing bronze into the mould of sand,and the river of red metal cooled into noble curves and took the impress of the body of a god.With enamel or polished jewels he gave sight to the sightless eyes.The hyacinth-like curls grew crisp beneath his graver.And when,in some dim frescoed fane,or pillared sunlit portico,the child of Leto stood upon his pedestal,those who passed by,[Greek text which cannot be reproduced],became conscious of a new influence that had come across their lives,and dreamily,or with a sense of strange and quickening joy,went to their homes or daily labour,or wandered,it may be,through the city gates to that nymph-haunted meadow where young Phaedrus bathed his feet,and,lying there on the soft grass,beneath the tall wind -whispering planes and flowering AGNUS CASTUS,began to think of the wonder of beauty,and grew silent with unaccustomed awe.In those days the artist was free.From the river valley he took the fine clay in his fingers,and with a little tool of wood or bone,fashioned it into forms so exquisite that the people gave them to the dead as their playthings,and we find them still in the dusty tombs on the yellow hillside by Tanagra,with the faint gold and the fading crimson still lingering about hair and lips and raiment.
