Four years before the publication of 'Sordello' he had written one play, 'Strafford,' of which the name sufficiently indicates the subject, which had been put upon the stage with some success by Macready;--the forerunner of a noble series of poems in dramatic form, most conveniently mentioned here together, though not always in chronological order. They were 'The Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' perhaps the finest of those actually fitted for the stage; 'Colombe's Birthday'; 'King Victor and King Charles'; 'The Return of the Druses'; 'Luria'; 'A Soul's Tragedy'; 'In a Balcony'; and,--though less on the conventional lines of a play than the others,--perhaps the finest dramatic poem of them all, 'Pippa Passes,' which, among the earlier (it was published in 1841), is also among the finest of all Browning's works, and touches the very highest level of his powers.
Interspersed with these during the fifteen years between 1840 and 1855, and following them during the next five, appeared the greater number of the single shorter poems which make his most generally recognized, his highest, and his unquestionably permanent title to rank among the first of English poets. Manifestly, it is impossible and needless to recall any number of these here by even the briefest description; and merely to enumerate the chief among them would be to repeat a familiar catalogue, except as they illustrate the points of a later general consideration.
Finally, to complete the list of Browning's works, reference is necessary to the group of books of his later years: the two self-called narrative poems, 'The Ring and the Book,' with its vast length, and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country,' its fellow in method if not in extent. Mr. Birrell (it is worth while to quote him again, as one who has not merged the appreciator in the adulator) calls 'The Ring and the Book' "a huge novel in 20,000 lines--told after the method not of Scott, but of Balzac; it tears the hearts out of a dozen characters; it tells the same story from ten different points of view. It is loaded with detail of every kind and description: you are let off nothing." But he adds later:--"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."
This is the key of the matter: the reader who has learned, through his greater work, to follow with interest the very analytic exercises, and as it were tours de force of Browning's mind, will prize 'The Ring and the Book' and 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country'; even he will prize but little the two 'Adventures of Balaustion,' 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,' 'The Inn Album,' and one or two others of the latest works in the same genre. But he can well do without them, and still have the inexhaustible left.
The attitude of a large part of his own generation toward Browning's poetry will probably be hardly understood by the future, and is not easy to comprehend even now for those who have the whole body of his work before them. It is intelligible enough that the "crude preliminary sketch" 'Pauline' should have given only the bare hint of a poet to the few dozen people who saw that it was out of the common; that 'Paracelsus' should have carried the information,--though then, beyond a doubt, to only a small circle; and especially that 'Sordello,' a clear call to a few, should have sounded to even an intelligent many like an exercise in intricacy, and to the world at large like something to which it is useless to listen. Or, to look at the other end of his career, it is not extraordinary that the work of his last period--'The Ring and the Book,' 'Red Cotton Nightcap Country,'--those wonderful minute studies of human motive, made with the highly specialized skill of the psychical surgeon and with the confidence of another Balzac in the reader's following power--should always remain more or less esoteric literature. But when it is remembered that between these lie the most vivid and intensely dramatic series of short poems in English,--those grouped in the unfortunately diverse editions of his works under the rubrics 'Men and Women,' 'Dramatic Lyrics,' 'Dramatic Romances,' 'Dramatis Personæ,' and the rest, as well as larger masterpieces of the broad appeal of 'Pippa Passes,' 'A Blot on the 'Scutcheon,' or 'In a Balcony,'--it is hard to understand, and will be still harder fifty years hence, why Browning has not become the familiar and inspiring poet of a vastly larger body of readers. Undoubtedly a large number of intelligent persons still suspect a note of affectation in the man who declares his full and intense enjoyment--not only his admiration--of Browning; a suspicion showing not only the persistence of the Sordello-born tradition of "obscurity," but the harm worked by those commentators who approach him as a problem. Not all commentators share this reproach; but as Browning makes Bishop Blougram say:--
"Even your prime men who appraise their kind
Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self--
Confuse themselves--"
and beyond question such persons are largely responsible for the fact that for some time to come, every one who speaks of Browning to a general audience will feel that he has some cant to clear away. If he can make them read this body of intensely human, essentially simple and direct dramatic and lyrical work, he will help to bring about the time when the once popular attitude will seem as unjustifiable as to judge Goethe only by the second part of 'Faust.'
The first great characteristic of Browning's poetry is undoubtedly the essential, elemental quality of its humanity--a trait in which it is surpassed by no other English poetry but that of Shakespeare. It can be subtile to a degree almost fantastic (as can Shakespeare's to an extent that familiarity makes us forget); but this is in method. The stuff of it--the texture of the fabric which the swift and intricate shuttle is weaving--is always something in which the human being is vitally, not merely aesthetically interested. It deals with no shadows, and indeed with few abstractions, except those that form a part of vital problems--a statement which may provoke the scoffer, but will be found to be true.
A second characteristic, which, if not a necessary result of this first, would at least be impossible without it, is the extent to which Browning's poetry produces its effect by suggestion rather than by elaboration; by stimulating thought, emotion, and the aesthetic sense, instead of seeking to satisfy any one of these--especially instead of contenting itself with only soothing the last. The comparison of his poetry with--for instance--Tennyson's, in this respect, is instructive; if it is possibly unjust to both.
And a third trait in Browning--to make an end of a dangerously categorical attempt to characterize him--follows logically from this second; its extreme compactness and concentration. Browning sometimes dwells long--even dallies--over an idea, as does Shakespeare; turns it, shows its every facet; and even then it is noticeable, as with the greater master, that every individual phrase with which he does so is practically exhaustive of the suggestiveness of that particular aspect. But commonly he crowds idea upon idea even in his lyrics, and--strangely enough--without losing the lyric quality; each thought pressed down to its very essence, and each with that germinal power that makes the reading of him one of the most stimulating things to be had from literature. His figures especially are apt and telling in the very minimum of words; they say it all, like the unsurpassable Shakespearean example of "the dyer's hand"; and the more you think of them, the more you see that not a word could be added or taken away.