156 The Future Poetry
characteristic that they are studious artists, — it is significant
that two of them are painters and decorative craftsmen, — who
are concerned to give beauty and finish to the material of poetry
rather than original poets with a large power of inspiration.
Their range is small, but they have brought into English poetry
a turn for fine execution which is likely to be a long-abiding
influence.
Among the Victorians Browning stands next to Tennyson in
the importance of his poetic work and station as a representative
figure of the age and creator. He surpasses him indeed in the mass
and force and abundant variety of his work and the protean
energy of his genius. His inventiveness of form and range and
variety of subject are prodigious; he turns to every quarter of
the world, seizes on every human situation, seems to be trying to
exhaust a study of all possible human personalities and minds
and characters and turn his eye on every age and period of
history and many countries and all possible scenes and extract
from them their meaning and their interest for the satisfaction of
his universal curiosity and his living and inexhaustible interest in
the vividness and abundance of the life of earth and man. He has
an equal interest in the human mind and its turns of thinking of
all kinds and its human aims, ambitions, seekings and wants to
pursue it everywhere in its ramifications, in its starts of individu-
ality, peaks, windings, even all manner of borrowings of thought
and feeling, nothing human is foreign to his research and pursuit,
all enters into this prodigious embrace. This gives to his poetry
a range and unceasing interest and richness of attraction which
surpasses immeasurably all that his contemporaries can give us
in wideness of the call of life, even though in them the poetic
height to which they draw us may be greater than his. In his
mass of creation he can be regarded as the most remarkable in
invention and wideness, if not the most significant builder and
narrator of the drama of human life in his time.
Browning stands apart also from the other contemporary
poets in the character and personality of his work. He is in
many ways the very opposite of them all. He is the one robust
and masculine voice among these artists, sceptics, idealists or