Yet the question, as asked, does her a heavy historical injustice; we
remember all the lines in her work which were weak enough to be called
"womanly," we forget the multitude of strong lines that are strong
enough to be called "manly"; lines that Kingsley or Henley would have
jumped for joy to print in proof of their manliness. She had one of the
peculiar talents of true rhetoric, that of a powerful concentration. As
to the critic who thinks her poetry owed anything to the great poet who
was her husband, he can go and live in the same hotel with the man who
can believe that George Eliot owed anything to the extravagant
imagination of Mr. George Henry Lewes. So far from Browning inspiring or
interfering, he did not in one sense interfere enough. Her real
inferiority to him in literature is that he was consciously while she
was unconsciously absurd.
It is natural, in the matter of Victorian moral change, to take
Swinburne as the next name here. He is the only poet who was also, in
the European sense, on the spot; even if, in the sense of the Gilbertian
song, the spot was barred. He also knew that something rather crucial
was happening to Christendom; he thought it was getting unchristened.
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