Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/109

Rh With Mr. Browning the case is somewhat similar. His is the preciosity of a genius formed in semi-isolation, an original mind communing much with itself, and too little with vigorous and expert contemporary minds at the time when the friction of free comradeship has most disciplinary value. Such an elliptic style as his could not well have been formed at Oxford or Cambridge: even Carlyle did not write Carlylese till he went to dwell in the wilderness at Craigenputtock. Browning's style was substantially formed or hardened abroad, where the society of Mrs. Browning, herself magnetised by it and so on the way to a preciosity of her own, had no corrective influence. The poet in his prime was aloof from present-day English problems as well as from present-day English life; his poems, whether written at home or abroad, deal for the most part with either foreign or unlocalised and ideal life; and he finally impresses a reader as writing rather for himself than for any public. Public indifference and critical disrespect had for a time the effect of making him consciously antagonistic to his public witness the apostrophes in The Ring and the Book — and in Pacchiarotto he has put on record how he felt towards some of his critics. His preciosity is thus that of an energetic, self-poised, self-absorbed, self-exiled artist, defiant of the general verdict even while obscurely craving it, and able to be so defiant by reason or financial independence; and it followed the usual course of becoming exaggerated with age. It thus falls readily in its place as a form among others. And here as usual we can trace good indirect results, while, as in the case of Carlyle, the activity of modern criticism and the modern prevalence of the common interest in speech over egoisms and cliqueisms have prevented any direct contagion of the faults. While preparing for himself the penalty of future neglect, as regards not a little of his over-abundant output, Browning has pushed contemporary English poetry Rh