Artist_.




ROBERT BROWNING


Taken as a whole the man was great. He did not belong to the Olympians,
and had all the incompleteness of the Titan. He did not survey, and it
was but rarely that he could sing. His work is marred by struggle,
violence and effort, and he passed not from emotion to form, but from
thought to chaos. Still, he was great. He has been called a thinker,
and was certainly a man who was always thinking, and always thinking
aloud; but it was not thought that fascinated him, but rather the
processes by which thought moves. It was the machine he loved, not what
the machine makes. The method by which the fool arrives at his folly was
as dear to him as the ultimate wisdom of the wise. So much, indeed, did
the subtle mechanism of mind fascinate him that he despised language, or
looked upon it as an incomplete instrument of expression. Rhyme, that
exquisite echo which in the Muse's hollow hill creates and answers its
own voice; rhyme, which in the hands of the real artist becomes not
merely a material element of metrical beauty, but a spiritual element of
thought and passion also, waking a new mood, it may be, or stirring a
fresh train of ideas, or opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of
sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in
vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme,
the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert
Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him
masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with