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Excerpt from The Ring and the Ts Moral Spirit and Motive
It is characteristic of all of Brownings's longer poems that they cente1 in some thought 01 teaching which interpenehates the whole work. Long poems, composed of detached fragments of thought, each one good in itself, are no part of his genius. Detail never absorbs him to the neglect of his main theme. If there is any general error we feel it to be a carelessness of detail. Now the characteristic of a poem highly polished in every detail is that it can appeal to any grade of mind. For if one fails to make the general synthesis which gives the bearing of the work as a whole, he will at least be pleasantly entertained by the mere succession of pretty things, as a child is more easily entertained with a string of glass buttons than by a building of magnificent architecture. So he will read such a poet as Tennyson for detachable sweetmeats. Now when our authorspeaks of the lily-white soul-vwhich angels fear to touch untenderly, there will immediately arise from such a loud exclamation that that is poetry; because it makes an imme diate appeal to such minds. To these' readers the Ring and the Book would be a scanty field of sweets. And they might travel laboriously and in a great cloud of dust, through the gossip and lawyers' pleadings, with little satisfaction. Yet what dramatic place could such bits have in these speeches? For in spite of Arch angeli's ready belief in his poetic powers, we should consider any poetry, in the sense of such detached hits, as highly improbable pro ducts 'of his loquacity. But if the Ring and the Book does not continually offer these bits in its parts, we still assert that it is a poetic whole, and that all its parts are made to bear on the general structure of the poem. And wheie the synthetic powers are cale fully exercised along with the regular ¿ow of appreciation, we believe that no part of the poem will be pronounced common or worthless.
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