A Primer On Browning

passion and the utmost power of Browning are spent in depicting men and women. His poems are full of incidents; he ransacks history and the world for curious and effective stories; but to Browning, unlike Scott or Homer, incident alone is meaningless, valuable only as an opportunity for revealing character. Browning is most at home with complexity, outward and inward. The more exceptional the incident, the more exceptional and interesting the character, according to him. That is why his works are so full, and ever increasingly so, of the out-of-the-way, occasionally the repellent. With every poet matter and manner are wedded, and with none more indissolubly than with Browning. Every thing in Browning, his ideas, especially those which at first seem contradictory, his beliefs, his selection of subjects, his defects and untowardnesses prove on close inspection to be parts of the most immutable, welded whole. His continuous unity of thought and purpose is extraordinary. Browning's penetrative sympathy delights to enter all the various forms of life, to try to look through each man's eyes, and describe in his character how his outside world is affecting the individual within. In Browning's harvesting all ranks afford an equally rich yield of humanity. He shows the husk, only to remove it and present us with the soul. He is as interested in psychologising a Paris jeweller as a queen. The soul in each is his great object of study, the soul testing itself on circumst...