He could not command it. He could only unwind and unwind.
Pan and Luna is a sketch, as luminous as a Correggio, but not finished.
Caliban upon Setebos, on the other hand, shows creative genius, beyond
all modern reach, but flounders and drags on too long. In the poems
which he revised, as, for instance, Herve Riel, which exists in two or
more forms, the corrections are verbal, and were evidently done with the
same fierce haste with which the poems were written.
We must not for an instant imagine that Browning was indolent or
indifferent; it is known that he was a taskmaster to himself. But he
_could_ not write other than he did. When the music came and the verse
caught the flame, and his words became sweeter, and his thought clearer,
then he could sweep down like an archangel bringing new strains of
beauty to the earth. But the occasions when he did this are a handful
of passages in a body of writing as large as the Bible.
Just as Browning could not stop, so he found it hard to begin. His way
of beginning is to seize the end of the thread just where he can, and
write down the first sentence.
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