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.--_The
Critic as Artist_.