ΤΟ GEORGE MEREDITH, NOVELIST AND POET, THIS LITTLE BOOK ON AN ILLUSTRIOUS CONTEMPORARY IS WITH DEEP RESPECT AND ADMIRATION INSCRIBED. PREFACE. I HAVE ever held that the rod with which popular fancy invests criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazelswitch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch-twig for the castigation of offenders. It has therefore been my aim in the following pages to direct attention to the best, not to forage for the worst-the small faults which acquire prominence only by isolation--of the poet with whose writings I am concerned. I wish also to give information, more or less detailed, about each of Mr. Browning's works; information sufficient to the purpose I have in view, which is to induce those who have hitherto deprived themselves of a stimulating pleasure to deprive themselves of it no longer. Further, my aim is in no sense controversial. In a book whose sole purpose is to serve as an introduction to the study of a single one of our contemporary poets, I have consciously and carefully refrained from instituting comparisons which I deprecate as, to say the least, unnecessary -between the poet in question and any of the other eminent poets in whose time we have the honour of living. I have to thank Mr. Browning for permission to reprint the interesting and now almost inaccessible prefaces to some of his earlier works, which will be found in Appendix II. |