pond, would most effectively disparage all stories of wreck and storm on the great main. ... [Here] we are taken far from the serene and homely region in which some of our teachers would fain have it that the whole moral universe can be snugly pent up. We see the black passions of men at their blackest; hate, so fierce, undiluted, implacable, passionate, as to be hard of conception by our simpler Northern natures; cruelty so vindictive, subtle, persistent, deadly, as to fill us with a pain almost too great for true art to produce. [But] from what at first was sheer murk, there comes out a long procession of human figures, infinitely various in form and thought, in character and act; a group of men and women, eager, passionate, indifferent; tender and ravenous, mean and noble, humorous and profound, jovial with prosperity, or half-dumb with misery, skirting the central tragedy, or plunged deep into the thick of it, passers-by who put themselves off with a glance at the surface of a thing, and another or two who dive to the heart of it. And they all come out with a certain Shakespearian fulness, vividness, directness. | Above all, they are every one of them frankly men and women, with free play of human life in limb and feature, as in an antique sculpture. So much of modern art, in poetry as in painting, runs to mere drapery. "I grant," says Lessing, "that there is also a beauty in drapery, but can it be compared with that of the human form? And shall he who can attain the greater, rest content with the less? I much fear that the most perfect master in drapery shows by that very talent wherein his weakness lies." This was spoken of plastic art, but it has a yet deeper meaning in poetic criticism. There, too, the master is he who presents the natural shape, the curves, the thews of men, and does not labor and seek praise for faithful reproduction of the mere moral drapery of the hour, this or another; who gives you Hercules at strife with Antaeus, Laocoön writhing in the coils of the divine serpents, the wrestle with circumstance or passion, with out

ward destiny or inner character, in the free outlines of nature and reality, and not in the outlines of a dress-coat either of Victorian or Arthurian time. The capacity which it has for this presentation, at once so varied and so direct, is one reason why the dramatic form ranks as the highest expression and measure of the creative power.of the poet; and the extraordinary grasp with which Mr. Browning has availed himself of this double capacity, is one reason why we should reckon The Ring and the Book as his masterpiece.

[From Ruskin's "Modern Painters."*

Robert Browning is unerring in every sentence he writes of the Middle Ages; always vital, right, and profound; so that in the matter of art. . . there is hardly a principle connected with the mediæval temper that he has not struck upon in those seemingly careless and too rugged rhymes of his. There is a curious instance, by the way, in a short poem referring to this very subject of tomb and image sculpture; and illustrating just one of those phases of local human character which, though belonging to Shakespeare's own age, he never noticed, because it was specially Italian and un-English. . . . I mean the kind of admiration with which a Southern artist regarded the stone he worked in; and the pride which populace or priest took in the possession of precious mountain substance, worked into the pavements of their cathedrals and the shafts of their tombs. Observe, Shakespeare, in the midst of architecture and tombs of wood, or freestone, or brass, naturally thinks of gold as the best enriching and ennobling substance for them; in the midst, also, of the fever of the Renaissance, he writes, as every one else did, in praise of precisely the most vicious master of that school—Giulio Romano; but the modern poet, living in Italy, and quit of the Renaissance influence, is able fully to enter into the

Modern Painters, by John Ruskin (American ed., New York, 1860), vol. iv. p. 359 fol.

Italian feeling, and to see the evil of the Renaissance tendency, not because he is greater than Shakespeare, but because he is in another element, and has seen other things. . . .

I know no other piece of modern English prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines [The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed's Church] of the Renaissance spirit, its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of The Stones of Venice put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work. The worst of it is that this kind of concentrated writing needs so much solution before the reader can fairly get the good of it, that people's patience fails them, and they give up the thing as insoluble; though, truly, it ought to be to the current of common thought like Saladin's talisman, dipped in clear water, not soluble altogether, but making the element medicinal.

[From James Russell Lowell's Essay on Browning's Plays and Poems.*] Browning's Dramas are not made up of a number of beauties, distinct and isolate as pearls, threaded upon the string of the plot. Each has a permeating life and spirit of its own. When we would break off any fragment, we cannot find one which would by itself approach completeness. It is like tearing away a limb from a living body. For these are works of art in the truest sense. They are not aggregations of dissonant beauties, like some modern sculptures, against which the Apollo might bring an action of trover for an arm, and the Antinous for a leg, but pure statues, in which everything superfluous has been sternly chiselled away, and whose won

*North American Review, April, 1848, p. 374. This extract and the following are specially noticeable on account of their date. At least two critics recognized Browning's importance as early as 1848 and 1851.

derful balance might seem tameness to the ordinary observer, who demands strain as an evidence of strength. The characters in them are not bundles of different characteristics, but their gradual development runs through the whole drama, and makes the life of it. We do not learn what they are by what they say of themselves, or by what is said of them, so much as by what they do or leave undone. Nor does any drama seem to be written for the display of some one character which the author has conceived and makes a favorite of. No undue emphasis is laid upon any. Each fills his part, and each, in his higher or lower grade, his greater or less prominence, is equally necessary to the rest. Above all, his personages are not mere mouthpieces for the author's idiosyncrasies.... His men and women are men and women, and not Mr. Browning masquerading in different-colored dominoes. We implied as much when we said he was an artist. For the artist-period begins precisely at the point where the pleasure of expressing self ends, and the poet becomes sensible that his highest duty is to give voice to the myriad forms of nature, which, wanting voice, were dumb. The term art includes many lower faculties of the poet; but this appears to us its highest and most comprehensive definition. Hence Shakespeare, the truest of artists, is also nothing more than a voice. . . .

If we could be sure that our readers would read Mr. Browning's poems with the respect and attentive study they deserve, what should hinder us from saying that we think him a great poet? However, as the world feels uncomfortably somewhere, it can hardly tell how or why, at hearing people called great, before it can claim a share in their greatness by erecting to them a monument with a monk-Latin inscription on it which nine tenths of their countrymen cannot construe, and as Mr. Browning must be as yet comparatively a young man [1848], we will content ourselves with saying that he has in him the elements of greatness. To us he appears to

have a wider range and greater freedom of movement than any other of the younger English poets.

[From F. Milsand's "La Poésie Anglaise depuis Byron." *] What Mr. Browning has produced is great as it stands, but he suggests a power even greater than his achievement. He speaks like a spirit who is able to do that which has been almost impossible in past centuries. The dawning soul of man in antiquity (and I suspect that this is symbolized in Aprile, one of the characters in Paracelsus) saw objects isolated, as forms and as visions; to it, the confused and mingled sounds which nature brings to man, expressed nothing more than the mere physical effect of their action upon the ear; it was limited to distinguishing mere disjoined syllables of nature's language. Above every other, Mr. Browning's poetry is that of a new human species, which can now distinguish words and construe phrases. He has the sort of insight whose peculiar characteristic it is to recognize everywhere, not only forms and facts, but their mutual connections and methods of action. This philosophical power which he possesses of seizing subtle and exact relations is met with in more than one thinker, it is true; but he is one of the first, if not the first, in whom it has reached such development, without becoming the dominant faculty which subordinates all the others. For, strong as it is, it has found in his poetic imagination another faculty still stronger, which has forced it to work as its purveyor and servant. In this lies the essential originality of Mr. Browning.

[From "How the Browning Society Came into Being," by F. J. Furni

vall.t]

But Browning [in his later poems] has evidently made up his mind that we shall eat our mutton without currant jelly, * Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. xi. (1851), p. 661. ↑ Browning Society Papers, Part II., London, 1882.