BROWNING[1]
I begin with some of the difficulties; it might be more prudent to suppress them. But it would be unjust and unlucky if I were to come here promising to say anything marvellously new or anything thoroughly satisfactory about the poetry of Browning. In the art of criticism, as in other dangerous trades, there are workmen's diseases, and one of the commonest is for the speaker to believe that he can 'do' a subject in an essay of thirty-two pages, or a discourse not longer than two ordinary sermons. This illusion is sometimes pleasant in the young; it is pleasantly described by Stevenson in the preface to his Familiar Studies: 'So, by insensible degrees, a young man of our generation acquires, in his own eyes, a kind of roving judicial commission through the ages.' But this happy confidence should not be allowed to settle down into a mere steady, secure opinion, a fixed belief that the speaker, living in the cool element of prose, can interpret all the translunary spheres of poetry, and put all the tears of the universe into his bottle. It is well to know the limits, and to understand that poetry is its own interpretation. The best one can do, and it is no dishonourable office, is to get to the right point of view, to praise in the right way.
Here is another difficulty, or at any rate, a scruple. I never met Mr. Browning to speak to, yet I cannot help thinking of him as I saw him when he was still on this side of the picture, when he might be passed, any day, in London, walking in the crowd, perhaps quicker and more observant than most, yet one of the crowd of mortal men. Somehow, this makes him different from the poets one has never seen.
- ↑ The Queen's Lecture, given at Queen's College, London, March 2, 1910.
