n early
experience. If so, he had escaped from this youthful error before he had
finished the poem, and despised it, perhaps too much. It is excusable
and natural in the young. His contempt for this kind of love is embodied
in the second Pauline. She is not the woman her lover imagines her to
be, but far older and more experienced than her lover; who has known
long ago what love was; who always liked to be loved, who therefore
suffers her lover to expatiate as wildly as he pleases; but whose life
is quite apart from him, enduring him with pleasurable patience,
criticising him, wondering how he can be so excited. There is a dim
perception in the lover's phrases of these elements in his mistress'
character; and that they are in her character is quite plain from the
patronising piece of criticism in French which Browning has put into her
mouth. The first touch of his humour appears in the contrast of the
gentle and lofty boredom of the letter with the torrents of love in the
poem. And if we may imagine that the lover is partly an image of what
Browning once felt in a youthful love, we may also think that the
making of the second and critical Pauline was his record, when his love
had passed, of what he thought about it all.

This mode of treatment, so much more analytic than imaginative, belongs
to Browning as an artist. He seems, while he wrote, as if half of him
sat apart from the personages he was making, contemplating them in his
observant fashion, discussing them coolly in his mind while the other
half of him wrote about them with emotion; placing them in different
situations and imagining what they would then do; inventing trials for
them and recombining, through these trials, the elements of their
characters; arguing about and around them, till he sometimes loses the
unity of their personality. This is a weakness in his work when he has
to create characters in a drama who may be said, like Shakespeare's, to
have, once he has created them, a life of their own independent of the
poet. His spinning of his own thoughts about their characters makes us
often realise, in his dramas, the individuality of Browning more than
the individuality of the characters. We follow him at this work with
keen intellectual pleasure, but we do not always follow him with a
passionate humanity.

On the contrary, this habit, which was one cause of his weakness as an
artist in the drama, increased his strength as an artist when he made
single