Certainly we shall not quarrel with Mr. Symons for reckoning Mr.
Browning, among English poets, second to Shakespeare alone--"He comes
very near the gigantic total of [43] Shakespeare." The quantity of
his work? Yes! that too, in spite of a considerable unevenness, is a
sign of genius. "So large, indeed, appear to be his natural
endowments that we cannot feel as if even thirty volumes would have
come near to exhausting them." Imaginatively, indeed, Mr. Browning
has been a multitude of persons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried
style was the simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he
has controlled them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by
his own powerful personality. The world and all its action, as a
show of thought, that is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-
eminently a modern poet--a poet of the self-pondering, perfectly
educated, modern world, which, having come to the end of all direct
and purely external experiences, must necessarily turn for its
entertainment to the world within:--
"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his
creation are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars,
saints and lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians,
priests and Popes, Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls,
princesses, dancers with the wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of
Herodias, wives with the devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls
and malevolent grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of
humanity, tyrants and bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists,
heretics, scholars, scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality
and men of low estate--men and women as multiform as nature or
society has made them.
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