same Robert Browning whose first writings were received with little praise and much scoffing, and were pronounced harsh, uncouth, affected, and obscure.

[From a Review of "The Ring and the Book," by John Morley.*] We have this long while been so debilitated by pastorals, by graceful presentation of the Arthurian legend for drawingrooms, by idyls, not robust and Theocritean, but such little pictures as might adorn a ladies' school, by verse directly didactic, that a rude inburst of air from the outside welter of human realities is apt to spread a shock which might show in what simpleton's paradise we have been living. The little ethics of the rectory-parlor set to sweet music, the respectable aspirations of the sentimental curate married to exquisite verse, the everlasting glorification of domestic sentiment in blameless princes and others, as if that were the poet's single province and the divinely appointed end of all art, as if domestic sentiment included and summed up the whole throng of passions, emotions, strife, and desire; all this would seem to be turning us into flat valetudinarians. Our public is beginning to measure the right and possible in art by the superficial probabilities of life and manners within a ten-mile radius of Charing Cross. Is it likely, asks the critic, that Duke Silva would have done this, that Fedalma would have done that? Who shall suppose it possible that Caponsacchi acted thus, that Count Guido was possessed by devils so? The poser is triumphant, because the critic is tacitly appealing to the normal standard of probabilities at Bayswater or Clapham; as a man who, having never thought of anything mightier or more turbulent than the village brook or horse

*Fortnightly Review, March, 1869. This powerful review by Mr. Morley is based upon The Ring and the Book, but the general introduction characterizes so well Browning's work as a whole, that I insert it here. It might be applied almost verbatim to Men and Women or to Pippa Passes.

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.

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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.

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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