Page:Literary studies by Joseph Jacobs.djvu/131

 This interest in characterisation led him to one of the most original of his themes—the self-portrayal of the humbug, religious (Blougram), political (Schwangau), or social (Sludge). These are, undoubtedly, tours de force of a remarkable kind—so remarkable, indeed, that they condemn themselves as unfit topics for poetry. To be poetical about the very antithesis of poetry; to present the humbug and the materialist—and sympathetically, for that is one of the conditions of the problem—in a medium which presupposes sincerity and idealism as essentials,—such was the task Browning set himself in these studies. The failure was magnificent, but it was a failure; the pieces are rhetoric, ingenious and subtle rhetoric, not poetry in any sense of the term that regards its essence as well as its form.

Akin to these studies of problematische Naturen—'humours' Ben Jonson called them—is his portrait-gallery of historical celebrities, or rather obscurities, his Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, a title of one of his works that would cover a large section of them. It is characteristic of his method that his subjects are, in almost every case, nonentities. No literary artist who has had anything like his power of projecting himself into the past has refrained so rigidly from dealing with the great ones, the successes of