It seems probable that if Browning had been able to write more slowly and carefully he might have written with more lucidity. There was a time when he made a point of turning off a poem a day. It is doubtful whether the story of The Ring and the Book gains in clearness by being told by eleven different persons, all of them inclined to volubility.
Yet Browning’s poetry is not verbose. It is singularly condensed in the matter of language. He seems to have made his most arduous effort in this direction. After Paracelsus had been published and pronounced “unintelligible,” he was inclined to think that there might be some fault of too great terseness in the style. But a letter from Miss Caroline Fox was shown to him, in which that lady, (then very young,) took the opposite view and asked “doth he know that Wordsworth will devote a fortnight or more to the discovery of the single word that is the one fit for his sonnet.” Browning appears to have been impressed by this criticism; but he set himself to work upon it, not so much by way of selecting words as by way of compressing them. He put Sordello into a world where many of the parts of speech are lacking and all are crowded. He learned to pack the largest, possible amount of meaning into the smallest possible space, as a hasty traveller packs his portmanteau. Many small articles are crushed and crumpled out of shape. He adopted a system of elisions for the sake of brevity, and loved, as C. S. Calverley said,
“to dock the smaller parts of speech
As we curtail th’ already curtailed cur.”
At the same time he seldom could resist the temptation to put in another thought, another simile, another illustration, although the poem might be already quite full. He called out, like the conductor of a street-car, “Move up in front: room for one more!” He had little tautology of expression, but much of conception. A good critic says “Browning condenses by the phrase, elaborates by the volume.”[15]
One consequence of this system of writing is that a great deal of Browning’s poetry lends itself admirably to translation,—into English. The number of prose paraphrases of his poems is great, and so constantly increasing that it seems as if there must be a real demand for them. But Coleridge, speaking of the qualities of a true poetic style, remarked: “Whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language without diminution of their significance, either in sense, or in association, or in any other feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.”
Another very notable thing in Browning’s poetry is his fertility and fluency of rhyme. He is probably the most rapid, ingenious, and unwearying rhymer among the English poets. There is a story that once, in company with Tennyson, he was challenged to produce a rhyme for “rhinoceros,” and almost instantly accomplished the task with a verse in which the unwieldy quadruped kept time and tune with the phrase “he can toss Eros.”[16] There are other tours de force almost as extraordinary in his serious poems. Who but Browning would have thought of rhyming “syntax” with “tin-tacks,” or “spare-rib” with “Carib,” (Flight of Duchess) or “Fra Angelico’s” with “bellicose,” or “Ghirlandajo” with “heigh-ho,” (Old Pictures in Florence) or “expansive explosive” with “O Danaides, O Sieve!” (Master Hugues). Rhyme, with most poets, acts as a restraint, a brake upon speech. But with Browning it is the other way. His rhymes are like wild, frolicsome horses, leaping over the fences and carrying him into the widest digressions. Many a couplet, many a stanza would not have been written but for the impulse of a daring, suggestive rhyme.
Join to this love of somewhat reckless rhyming, his deep and powerful sense of humour, and you have the secret of his fondness for the grotesque. His poetry abounds in strange contrasts, sudden changes of mood, incongruous comparisons, and odd presentations of well-known subjects. Sometimes the whole poem is written in this manner. The Soliloquy in a Spanish Cloister, Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, and Caliban upon Setebos, are poetic gargoyles. Sometimes he begins seriously enough, as in the poem on Keats, and closes with a bit of fantastic irony:
“Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats:
Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup: