If you are prepared for this, you will have your reward; for the style, though rugged and involved, is throughout, with the exception of the speeches of counsel, eloquent and at times superb; and as for the matter, if your interest in human nature is keen, curious, almost professional--if nothing man, woman, or child has been, done, or suffered, or conceivably can be, do, or suffer, is without interest for you; if you are fond of analysis, and do not shrink from dissection--you will prize 'The Ring and the Book' as the surgeon prizes the last great contribution to comparative anatomy or pathology.
But this sort of work tells upon style. Browning has, I think, fared better than some writers. To me, at all events, the step from 'A Blot in the 'Scutcheon' to 'The Ring and the Book' is not so marked as is the mauvais pas that lies between 'Amos Barton' and 'Daniel Deronda.' But difficulty is not obscurity. One task is more difficult than another. The angles at the base of the isosceles triangles are apt to get mixed, and to confuse us all--man and woman alike. 'Prince Hohenstiel' something or another is a very difficult poem, not only to pronounce but to read; but if a poet chooses as his subject Napoleon III.--in whom the cad, the coward, the idealist, and the sensualist were inextricably mixed--and purports to make him unbosom himself over a bottle of Gladstone claret in a tavern at Leicester Square, you cannot expect that the product should belong to the same class of poetry as Mr. Coventry Patmore's admirable 'Angel in the House.'
It is the method that is difficult. Take the husband in 'The Ring and the Book.' Mr. Browning remorselessly hunts him down, tracks him to the last recesses of his mind, and there bids him stand and deliver. He describes love, not only broken but breaking; hate in its germ; doubt at its birth. These are difficult things to do either in poetry or prose, and people with easy, flowing Addisonian or Tennysonian styles cannot do them.
I seem to overhear a still, small voice asking, But are they worth doing? or at all events, is it the province of art to do them? The question ought not to be asked. It is heretical, being contrary to the whole direction of the latter half of this century. The chains binding us to the rocks of realism are faster riveted every day; and the Perseus who is destined to cut them is, I expect, some mischievous little boy at a Board-school. But as the question has been asked, I will own that sometimes, even when deepest in works of this, the now orthodox school, I have been harassed by distressing doubts whether after all this enormous labor is not in vain; and wearied by the effort, overloaded by the detail, bewildered by the argument, and sickened by the pitiless dissection of character and motive, have been tempted to cry aloud, quoting--or rather, in the agony of the moment, misquoting--Coleridge:--
"Simplicity--thou better name
Than all the family of Fame."
But this ebullition of feeling is childish and even sinful. We must take our poets as we do our meals--as they are served up to us. Indeed, you may, if full of courage, give a cook notice, but not the time-spirit who makes our poets. We may be sure--to appropriate an idea of the late Sir James Stephen--that if Robert Browning had lived in the sixteenth century, he would not have written a poem like 'The Ring and the Book'; and if Edmund Spenser had lived in the nineteenth century he would not have written a poem like the 'Faerie Queene.'
It is therefore idle to arraign Mr. Browning's later method and style for possessing difficulties and intricacies which are inherent to it. The method at all events has an interest of its own, a strength of its own, a grandeur of its own. If you do not like it you must leave it alone. You are fond, you say, of romantic poetry; well, then, take down your Spenser and qualify yourself to join "the small transfigured band" of those who are able to take their Bible-oaths they have read their 'Faerie Queene' all through. The company, though small, is delightful, and you will have plenty to talk about without abusing Browning, who probably knows his Spenser better than you do. Realism will not for ever dominate the world of letters and art--the fashion of all things passeth away--but it has already earned a great place: it has written books, composed poems, painted pictures, all stamped with that "greatness" which, despite fluctuations, nay, even reversals of taste and opinion, means immortality.
But against Mr. Browning's later poems it is sometimes alleged that their meaning is obscure because their grammar is bad. A cynic was once heard to observe with reference to that noble poem 'The Grammarian's Funeral,' that it was a pity the talented author had ever since allowed himself to remain under the delusion that he had not only buried the grammarian, but his grammar also. It is doubtless true that Mr. Browning has some provoking ways, and is something too much of a verbal acrobat. Also, as his witty parodist, the pet poet of six generations of Cambridge undergraduates, reminds us:--
He loves to dock the smaller parts of speech,
As we curtail the already cur-tailed cur."
It is perhaps permissible to weary a little of his i's and o's, but we believe we cannot be corrected when we say that Browning is a poet whose grammar will bear scholastic investigation better than that of most of Apollo's children.