The poetry of Robert BrowningBrooke, Stopford A. (Stopford Augustus)
General
The poetry of Robert Browning
Brooke, Stopford A. (Stopford Augustus)
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889 -- Criticism and interpretation
A great many of the poems in which the natural loveliness of melody is
thus sacrificed or maimed will last, on account of the closely-woven
work of the intellect in them, and on account of their vivid
presentation of the travail of the soul; that is, they will last for
qualities which might belong to prose; but they will not last as poetry.
And other poems, in which the melody is only interrupted here and there,
will lose a great deal of the continuity of pleasure they would have
given to man had they been more careful to obey those laws of fine
melody which Tennyson never disobeys.
It is fortunate that neither of these injuries can be attributed to the
whole of his work; and I am equally far from saying that his faults of
style and composition belong to all his poetry.
There are a number of poems the melody of which is beautiful, in which,
if there are discords, they are resolved into a happy concord at their
close. There are others the melody of which is so strange, brilliant,
and capturing that their sound is never forgotten. There are others the
subtle, minor harmonies of which belong to and represent remote pathetic
phases of human passion, and they, too, are heard by us in lonely hours
of pitiful feeling, and enchant the ear and heart. And these will endure
for the noble pleasure of man.
There are also poems the style of which is fitted most happily to the
subject, like the Letter of Karshish to his Friend, in which Browning
has been so seized by his subject, and yet has so mastered it, that he
has forgotten to intercalate his own fancies; and in which, if the style
is broken, it is broken in full harmony with the situation, and in
obedience to the unity of impression he desired to make. There are
others, like _Abt Vogler_, in which the style is extraordinarily noble,
clear, and uplifted; and there are long passages in the more important
poems, like _Paracelsus_, where the joy and glory of the thought and
passion of Browning inform the verse with dignity, and make its march
stately with solemn and beautiful music. Where the style and melody are
thus fine the composition is also good. The parts, in their variety,
belong to one another and to the unity of the whole. Style, melody and
composition are always in the closest relation. And this nobleness of
composition, style, and melody is chiefly found in those poems of his
which have to do with the great matter of poetry--the representation of
the universal and simple passions of human nature with their attendant
and necessary thoughts. And there, in that part of his work, not in that
other part for which he is unduly praised, and which belongs to the
over-subtilised and over-intellectual time in which our self-conscious
culture now is striving to resist its decay, and to prove that its
disease is health, is the lasting power of Browning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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