Robert Browning by Oscar Wilde — Read

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 / his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by / monstrous music.

Nay, if he can only get his music by breaking the / strings of his lute, he breaks them, and they snap in discord, and no / Athenian tettix, making melody from tremulous wings, lights on the ivory / horn to make the movement perfect, or the interval less harsh. Yet, he / was great: and though he turned language into ignoble clay, he made from / it men and women that live. He is the most Shakespearian creature since / Shakespeare. If Shakespeare could sing with myriad lips, Browning could / stammer through a thousand mouths. Even now, as I am speaking, and / speaking not against him but for him, there glides through the room the / pageant of his persons. There, creeps Fra Lippo Lippi with his cheeks / still burning from some girl's hot kiss. There, stands dread Saul with / the lordly male-sapphires gleaming in his turban. Mildred Tresham is / there, and the Spanish monk, yellow with hatred, and Blougram, and Ben / Ezra, and the Bishop of St. Praxed's. The spawn of Setebos gibbers in / the corner, and Sebald, hearing Pippa pass by, looks on Ottima's haggard / face, and loathes her and his own sin, and himself. Pale as the white / satin of his doublet, the melancholy king watches with dreamy treacherous / eyes too loyal Strafford pass forth to his doom, and Andrea shudders as / he hears the cousins whistle in the garden, and bids his perfect wife go / down.