It may be said that this quality of compactness is common to all genius, and of the very essence of all true poetry; but Browning manifested it in a way of his own, such as to suggest that he believed in the subordination of all other qualities to it; even of melody, for instance, as may be said by his critics and admitted in many cases by even his strongest admirers. But all things are not given to one, even among the giants; and Browning's force with its measure of melody (which is often great) has its place among others' melody with its measure of force. Open at random: here are two lines in 'A Toccata of Galuppi's,' not deficient in melody by any means:--
"Dear dead women--with such hair, too: what's become of all the gold
Used to hang and brush their bosoms?--I feel chilly and grown old."
This is not Villon's 'Ballad of Dead Ladies,' nor even Tennyson's 'Dream of Fair Women'; but a master can still say a good deal in two lines.
What is called the "roughness" of Browning's verse is at all events never the roughness that comes from mismanagement or disregard of the form chosen. He has an unerring ear for time and quantity; and his subordination to the laws of his metre is extraordinary in its minuteness. Of ringing lines there are many; of broadly sonorous or softly melodious ones but few; and especially (if one chooses to go into details of technic) he seems curiously without that use of the broad vowels which underlies the melody of so many great passages of English poetry. Except in the one remarkable instance of 'How we Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix,' there is little onomatopoeia, and almost no note of the flute; no "moan of doves in immemorial elms" or "lucent sirops tinct with cinnamon." On the other hand, in his management of metres like that of 'Love Among the Ruins,' for instance, he shows a different side; the pure lyrics in 'Pippa Passes' and elsewhere sing themselves; and there are memorable cadences in some of the more meditative poems, like 'By the Fireside.'
The vividness and vigor and truth of Browning's embodiments of character come, it is needless to say, from the same power that has created all great dramatic work,--the capacity for incarnating not a quality or an ideal, but the mixture and balance of qualities that make up the real human being. There is not a walking phantom among them, or a lay-figure to hang sentiment on. A writer in the New Review said recently that of all the poets he remembered, only Shakespeare and Browning never drew a prig. It is this complete absence of the false note that gives to certain of Browning's poems the finality which is felt in all consummate works of art, great and small; the sense that they convey, if not the last word, at least the last necessary word, on their subject. 'Andrea del Sarto' is in its way the whole problem of the artist-ideal, the weak will and the inner failure, in all times and guises; and at the other end of the gamut, nobody will ever need again to set forth Bishop Blougram's attitude, or even that of Mr. Sludge the Medium. Of the informing, almost exuberant vitality of all the lyric and dramatic poems, it is needless to speak; that fairly leaps to meet the reader at every page of them, and a quality of it is their essential optimism.
"What is he buzzing in my ears?
Now that I come to die.
Do I view the world as a vale of tears?
Ah, reverend sir, not I!"
The world was never a vale of tears to Robert Browning, man or poet; but a world of men and women, with plenty of red corpuscles in their blood.
