Browning's policy is disclosed in the head-line 'Analyst who turns in due course synthetist'. Let analysis do its best or its worst; if the mind be made of prose the results of analysis will be prose; if there be poetry in the mind the analysis may end in poetry. This is Browning's hope, and his Sordello note on the analyst-synthetist might serve as a label for The Ring and the Book, and for much else.
He begins often with an abstract instance, a case, a problem, instead of a character. But the poetic end need not be abstract or merely intellectual. Mr. Sludge the Medium may begin, abstractly, as a case: 'How understand the self-justification of a humbug? ' And this problem is partly thought out in general terms. But the result is not abstract, and the proof is that it is amusing. The character embodies itself, like Chaucer's Pardoner, whose monologue or dramatic idyll (and the Wife of Bath's also) is in method very near Browning. Not far from Tennyson, either, we may say, remembering the Northern Farmer and the Village Wife, and others. But neither Chaucer nor Tennyson has the passion of a collector, like Browning; he goes far further than they in his chase after the varieties. No corner is left untried, no problem is too old or too modern for him. Ixion is for him a character, not an ornament out of the mythology. The Queen of Sheba is there, and Queen Christina by her side; Jochanan Hakkadosh, and Bubb Dodington. In the year after Sedan there appeared the revelation of Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society.
The form of those studies is generally the same; the monologue in blank verse. Some readers have been inclined to take this (as Browning himself no doubt very often did), simply for a convenient instrument, not too poetical, not very different from prose, a thing to be accepted as part of the author's humour. If this be the right view to take, then all Browning's value is in his matter, and there is nothing in his poetic form; which would mean that he is not a poet
