most dramatists (so far, no doubt, a defect[9]) and for this reason it
has come to seem relatively more prominent than it really is. This
consideration, and not any confusion of identity, is the cause of
whatever similarity of speech exists between Browning and his
characters, or between individual characters. The similarity is only
skin-deep. Take a convenient instance, _The Ring and the Book_. I have
often seen it stated that the nine tellings of the story are all told in
the same style, that all the speakers, Guido and Pompilia, the Pope and
Tertium Quid alike, speak like Browning. I cannot see it. On the
contrary, I have been astonished, in reading and re-reading the poem, at
the variety, the difference, the wonderful individuality in each
speaker's way of telling the same story; at the profound art with which
the rhythm, the metaphors, the very details of language, no less than
the broad distinctions of character and the subtle indications of bias,
are adapted and converted into harmony. A certain general style, a
certain general manner of expression, are common to all, as is also the
case in, let us say, _The Tempest_. But what distinction, what variation
of tone, what delicacy and expressiveness of modulation! As a simple
matter of fact, few writers have ever had a greater flexibility of style
than Browning.

I am doubtful whether full justice has been done to one section of
Browning's dramatic work, his portraits of women. The presence of woman
is not perhaps relatively so prominent in his work as it is in the work
of some other poets; woman is to him neither an exclusive preoccupation,
nor a continual unrest; but as faithful and vital representations, I do
not hesitate to put his portraits of women quite on a level with his
portraits of men, and far beyond those of any other English poet of the
last three centuries. In some of them, notably in Pompilia, there is a
something which always seems to me almost incredible in a man: an