ROBERT BROWNING

 BY

 G. K. CHESTERTON

 CONTENTS

 CHAPTER IBROWNING IN EARLY LIFE 1

 CHAPTER IIEARLY WORKS 34

 CHAPTER IIIBROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE 55

 CHAPTER IVBROWNING IN ITALY 81

 CHAPTER VBROWNING IN LATER LIFE 105

 CHAPTER VIBROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST 133

 CHAPTER VII"THE RING AND THE BOOK" 160

 CHAPTER VIIITHE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING 177

INDEX 203

ROBERT BROWNING

CHAPTER I

BROWNING IN EARLY LIFE

On the subject of Browning's work innumerable things have been saidand remain to be said; of his life, considered as a narrative offacts, there is little or nothing to say. It was a lucid and publicand yet quiet life, which culminated in one great dramatic test ofcharacter, and then fell back again into this union of quietude andpublicity. And yet, in spite of this, it is a great deal moredifficult to speak finally about his life than about his work. Hiswork has the mystery which belongs to the complex; his life the muchgreater mystery which belongs to the simple. He was clever enough tounderstand his own poetry; and if he understood it, we can understandit. But he was also entirely unconscious and impulsive, and he wasnever clever enough to understand his own character; consequently wemay be excused if that part of him which was hidden from him is partlyhidden from us. The subtle man is always immeasurably easier tounderstand than the natural man; for the subtle man keeps a diary ofhis moods, he practises the art of self-analysis and self-revelation, and can tell us how he came to feel this or to say that. But a manlike Browning knows no more about the state of his emotions than aboutthe state of his pulse; they are things greater than he, thingsgrowing at will, like forces of Nature. There is an old anecdote, probably apocryphal, which describes how a feminine admirer wrote toBrowning asking him for the meaning of one of his darker poems, andreceived the following reply: "When that poem was written, two peopleknew what it meant--God and Robert Browning. And now God only knowswhat it means. " This story gives, in all probability, an entirelyfalse impression of Browning's attitude towards his work. He was akeen artist, a keen scholar, he could put his finger on anything, andhe had a memory like the British Museum Library. But the story does, in all probability, give a tolerably accurate picture of Browning'sattitude towards his own emotions and his psychological type. If a manhad asked him what some particular allusion to a Persian hero meant hecould in all probability have quoted half the epic; if a man had askedhim which third cousin of Charlemagne was alluded to in _Sordello_, hecould have given an account of the man and an account of his fatherand his grandfather. But if a man had asked him what he thought ofhimself, or what were his emotions an hour before his wedding, hewould have replied with perfect sincerity that God alone knew. 

This mystery of the unconscious man, far deeper than any mystery ofthe conscious one, existing as it does in all men, existed peculiarlyin Browning, because he was a very ordinary and spontaneous man. Thesame thing exists to some extent in all history and all affairs. Anything that is deliberate, twisted, created as a trap and amystery, must be discovered at last; everything that is done naturallyremains mysterious. It may be difficult to discover the principles ofthe Rosicrucians, but it is much easier to discover the principles ofthe Rosicrucians than the principles of the United States: nor has anysecret society kept its aims so quiet as humanity. The way to beinexplicable is to be chaotic, and on the surface this was the qualityof Browning's life; there is the same difference between judging ofhis poetry and judging of his life, that there is between making a mapof a labyrinth and making a map of a mist. The discussion of what someparticular allusion in _Sordello_ means has gone on so far, and may goon still, but it has it in its nature to end. The life of RobertBrowning, who combines the greatest brain with the most simpletemperament known in our annals, would go on for ever if we did notdecide to summarise it in a very brief and simple narrative. 

Robert Browning was born in Camberwell on May 7th 1812. His father andgrandfather had been clerks in the Bank of England, and his wholefamily would appear to have belonged to the solid and educated middleclass--the class which is interested in letters, but not ambitious inthem, the class to which poetry is a luxury, but not a necessity. 

This actual quality and character of the Browning family shows sometendency to be obscured by matters more remote. It is the custom ofall biographers to seek for the earliest traces of a family in distantages and even in distant lands; and Browning, as it happens, has giventhem opportunities which tend to lead away the mind from the mainmatter in hand. There is a tradition, for example, that men of hisname were prominent in the feudal ages; it is based upon little beyonda coincidence of surnames and the fact that Browning used a seal witha coat-of-arms. Thousands of middle-class men use such a seal, merelybecause it is a curiosity or a legacy, without knowing or caringanything about the condition of their ancestors in the Middle Ages. Then, again, there is a theory that he was of Jewish blood; a viewwhich is perfectly conceivable, and which Browning would have been thelast to have thought derogatory, but for which, as a matter of fact, there is exceedingly little evidence. The chief reason assigned by hiscontemporaries for the belief was the fact that he was, without doubt, specially and profoundly interested in Jewish matters. Thissuggestion, worthless in any case, would, if anything, tell the otherway. For while an Englishman may be enthusiastic about England, orindignant against England, it never occurred to any living Englishmanto be interested in England. Browning was, like every otherintelligent Aryan, interested in the Jews; but if he was related toevery people in which he was interested, he must have been ofextraordinarily mixed extraction. Thirdly, there is the yet moresensational theory that there was in Robert Browning a strain of thenegro. The supporters of this hypothesis seem to have little inreality to say, except that Browning's grandmother was certainly aCreole. It is said in support of the view that Browning was singularlydark in early life, and was often mistaken for an Italian. There doesnot, however, seem to be anything particular to be deduced from this, except that if he looked like an Italian, he must have lookedexceedingly unlike a negro. 

There is nothing valid against any of these three theories, just asthere is nothing valid in their favour; they may, any or all of them, be true, but they are still irrelevant. They are something that is inhistory or biography a great deal worse than being false--they aremisleading. We do not want to know about a man like Browning, whetherhe had a right to a shield used in the Wars of the Roses, or whetherthe tenth grandfather of his Creole grandmother had been white orblack: we want to know something about his family, which is quite adifferent thing. We wish to have about Browning not so much the kindof information which would satisfy Clarencieux King-at-Arms, but thesort of information which would satisfy us, if we were advertising fora very confidential secretary, or a very private tutor. We should notbe concerned as to whether the tutor were descended from an Irishking, but we should still be really concerned about his extraction, about what manner of people his had been for the last two or threegenerations. This is the most practical duty of biography, and this isalso the most difficult. It is a great deal easier to hunt a familyfrom tombstone to tombstone back to the time of Henry II. Than tocatch and realise and put upon paper that most nameless and elusive ofall things--social tone. 

It will be said immediately, and must as promptly be admitted, that wecould find a biographical significance in any of these theories if welooked for it. But it is, indeed, the sin and snare of biographersthat they tend to see significance in everything; characteristiccarelessness if their hero drops his pipe, and characteristiccarefulness if he picks it up again. It is true, assuredly, that allthe three races above named could be connected with Browning'spersonality. If we believed, for instance, that he really came of arace of mediæval barons, we should say at once that from them he gothis pre-eminent spirit of battle: we should be right, for every linein his stubborn soul and his erect body did really express thefighter; he was always contending, whether it was with a German theoryabout the Gnostics, or with a stranger who elbowed his wife in acrowd. Again, if we had decided that he was a Jew, we should point outhow absorbed he was in the terrible simplicity of monotheism: weshould be right, for he was so absorbed. Or again, in the case even ofthe negro fancy; it would not be difficult for us to suggest a love ofcolour, a certain mental gaudiness, a pleasure

 "When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, "

as he says in _The Ring and the Book_. We should be right; for therereally was in Browning a tropical violence of taste, an artisticscheme compounded as it were, of orchids and cockatoos, which, amidour cold English poets, seems scarcely European. All this is extremelyfascinating; and it may be true. But, as has above been suggested, here comes in the great temptation of this kind of work, the nobletemptation to see too much in everything. The biographer can easilysee a personal significance in these three hypothetical nationalities. But is there in the world a biographer who could lay his hand upon hisheart and say that he would not have seen as much significance in anythree other nationalities? If Browning's ancestors had been Frenchmen, should we not have said that it was from them doubtless that heinherited that logical agility which marks him among English poets?If his grandfather had been a Swede, should we not have said that theold sea-roving blood broke out in bold speculation and insatiabletravel? If his great-aunt had been a Red Indian, should we not havesaid that only in the Ojibways and the Blackfeet do we find theBrowning fantasticality combined with the Browning stoicism? Thisover-readiness to seize hints is an inevitable part of that secrethero-worship which is the heart of biography. The lover of great mensees signs of them long before they begin to appear on the earth, and, like some old mythological chronicler, claims as their heralds thestorms and the falling stars. 

A certain indulgence must therefore be extended to the present writerif he declines to follow that admirable veteran of Browning study, Dr. Furnivall, into the prodigious investigations which he has beenconducting into the condition of the Browning family since thebeginning of the world. For his last discovery, the descent ofBrowning from a footman in the service of a country magnate, thereseems to be suggestive, though not decisive evidence. But Browning'sdescent from barons, or Jews, or lackeys, or black men, is not themain point touching his family. If the Brownings were of mixed origin, they were so much the more like the great majority of Englishmiddle-class people. It is curious that the romance of race should bespoken of as if it were a thing peculiarly aristocratic; thatadmiration for rank, or interest in family, should mean only interestin one not very interesting type of rank and family. The truth is thataristocrats exhibit less of the romance of pedigree than any otherpeople in the world. For since it is their principle to marry onlywithin their own class and mode of life, there is no opportunity intheir case for any of the more interesting studies in heredity; theyexhibit almost the unbroken uniformity of the lower animals. It is inthe middle classes that we find the poetry of genealogy; it is thesuburban grocer standing at his shop door whom some wild dash ofEastern or Celtic blood may drive suddenly to a whole holiday or acrime. Let us admit then, that it is true that these legends of theBrowning family have every abstract possibility. But it is a far morecogent and apposite truth that if a man had knocked at the door ofevery house in the street where Browning was born, he would have foundsimilar legends in all of them. There is hardly a family in Camberwellthat has not a story or two about foreign marriages a few generationsback; and in all this the Brownings are simply a typical Camberwellfamily. The real truth about Browning and men like him can scarcely bebetter expressed than in the words of that very wise and witty story, Kingsley's _Water Babies_, in which the pedigree of the Professor istreated in a manner which is an excellent example of the wild commonsense of the book. "His mother was a Dutch woman, and therefore shewas born at Curaçoa (of course, you have read your geography andtherefore know why), and his father was a Pole, and therefore he wasbrought up at Petropaulowski (of course, you have learnt your modernpolitics, and therefore know why), but for all that he was as thoroughan Englishman as ever coveted his neighbour's goods. "

It may be well therefore to abandon the task of obtaining a clearaccount of Brownings family, and endeavour to obtain, what is muchmore important, a clear account of his home. For the great centraland solid fact, which these heraldic speculations tend inevitably toveil and confuse, is that Browning was a thoroughly typical Englishmanof the middle class. He may have had alien blood, and that alienblood, by the paradox we have observed, may have made him morecharacteristically a native. A phase, a fancy, a metaphor may or maynot have been born of eastern or southern elements, but he was, without any question at all, an Englishman of the middle class. Neither all his liberality nor all his learning ever made him anythingbut an Englishman of the middle class. He expanded his intellectualtolerance until it included the anarchism of _Fifine at the Fair_ andthe blasphemous theology of Caliban; but he remained himself anEnglishman of the middle class. He pictured all the passions of theearth since the Fall, from the devouring amorousness of _Time'sRevenges_ to the despotic fantasy of _Instans Tyrannus_; but heremained himself an Englishman of the middle class. The moment that hecame in contact with anything that was slovenly, anything that waslawless, in actual life, something rose up in him, older than anyopinions, the blood of generations of good men. He met George Sand andher poetical circle and hated it, with all the hatred of an old citymerchant for the irresponsible life. He met the Spiritualists andhated them, with all the hatred of the middle class for borderlandsand equivocal positions and playing with fire. His intellect went uponbewildering voyages, but his soul walked in a straight road. He piledup the fantastic towers of his imagination until they eclipsed theplanets; but the plan of the foundation on which he built was alwaysthe plan of an honest English house in Camberwell. He abandoned, witha ceaseless intellectual ambition, every one of the convictions of hisclass; but he carried its prejudices into eternity. 

It is then of Browning as a member of the middle class, that we canspeak with the greatest historical certainty; and it is his immediateforebears who present the real interest to us. His father, RobertBrowning, was a man of great delicacy of taste, and to all appearanceof an almost exaggerated delicacy of conscience. Every glimpse we haveof him suggests that earnest and almost worried kindliness which isthe mark of those to whom selfishness, even justifiable selfishness, is really a thing difficult or impossible. In early life RobertBrowning senior was placed by his father (who was apparently a fatherof a somewhat primitive, not to say barbaric, type) in an importantcommercial position in the West Indies. He threw up the positionhowever, because it involved him in some recognition of slavery. Whereupon his unique parent, in a transport of rage, not onlydisinherited him and flung him out of doors, but by a superb stroke ofhumour, which stands alone in the records of parental ingenuity, senthim in a bill for the cost of his education. About the same time thathe was suffering for his moral sensibility he was also disturbed aboutreligious matters, and he completed his severance from his father byjoining a dissenting sect. He was, in short, a very typical example ofthe serious middle-class man of the Wilberforce period, a man to whomduty was all in all, and who would revolutionise an empire or acontinent for the satisfaction of a single moral scruple. Thus, whilehe was Puritan at the core, not the ruthless Puritan of theseventeenth, but the humanitarian Puritan of the eighteenth century, he had upon the surface all the tastes and graces of a man of culture. Numerous accomplishments of the lighter kind, such as drawing andpainting in water colours, he possessed; and his feeling for manykinds of literature was fastidious and exact. But the whole wasabsolutely redolent of the polite severity of the eighteenth century. He lamented his son's early admiration for Byron, and never ceasedadjuring him to model himself upon Pope. 

He was, in short, one of the old-fashioned humanitarians of theeighteenth century, a class which we may or may not have conquered inmoral theory, but which we most certainly have not conquered in moralpractice. Robert Browning senior destroyed all his fortunes in orderto protest against black slavery; white slavery may be, as latereconomists tell us, a thing infinitely worse, but not many men destroytheir fortunes in order to protest against it. The ideals of the menof that period appear to us very unattractive; to them duty was a kindof chilly sentiment. But when we think what they did with those coldideals, we can scarcely feel so superior. They uprooted the enormousUpas of slavery, the tree that was literally as old as the race ofman. They altered the whole face of Europe with their deductivefancies. We have ideals that are really better, ideals of passion, ofmysticism, of a sense of the youth and adventurousness of the earth;but it will be well for us if we achieve as much by our frenzy as theydid by their delicacies. It scarcely seems as if we were as robust inour very robustness as they were robust in their sensibility. 

Robert Browning's mother was the daughter of William Wiedermann, aGerman merchant settled in Dundee, and married to a Scotch wife. Oneof the poet's principal biographers has suggested that from this unionof the German and Scotch, Browning got his metaphysical tendency; itis possible; but here again we must beware of the great biographicaldanger of making mountains out of molehills. What Browning's motherunquestionably did give to him, was in the way of training--a verystrong religious habit, and a great belief in manners. Thomas Carlylecalled her "the type of a Scottish gentlewoman, " and the phrase has avery real significance to those who realise the peculiar condition ofScotland, one of the very few European countries where large sectionsof the aristocracy are Puritans; thus a Scottish gentlewoman combinestwo descriptions of dignity at the same time. Little more is known ofthis lady except the fact that after her death Browning could not bearto look at places where she had walked. 

Browning's education in the formal sense reduces itself to a minimum. In very early boyhood he attended a species of dame-school, which, according to some of his biographers, he had apparently to leavebecause he was too clever to be tolerable. However this may be, heundoubtedly went afterwards to a school kept by Mr. Ready, at whichagain he was marked chiefly by precocity. But the boy's education didnot in truth take place at any systematic seat of education; it tookplace in his own home, where one of the quaintest and most learned andmost absurdly indulgent of fathers poured out in an endless streamfantastic recitals from the Greek epics and mediæval chronicles. If wetest the matter by the test of actual schools and universities, Browning will appear to be almost the least educated man in Englishliterary history. But if we test it by the amount actually learned, weshall think that he was perhaps the most educated man that ever lived;that he was in fact, if anything, overeducated. In a spirited poem hehas himself described how, when he was a small child, his father usedto pile up chairs in the drawing-room and call them the city of Troy. Browning came out of the home crammed with all kinds ofknowledge--knowledge about the Greek poets, knowledge about theProvençal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the MiddleAges. But along with all this knowledge he carried one definite andimportant piece of ignorance, an ignorance of the degree to which suchknowledge was exceptional. He was no spoilt and self-conscious child, taught to regard himself as clever. In the atmosphere in which helived learning was a pleasure, and a natural pleasure, like sport orwine. He had in it the pleasure of some old scholar of the Renascence, when grammar itself was as fresh as the flowers of spring. He had noreason to suppose that every one did not join in so admirable a game. His sagacious destiny, while giving him knowledge of everything else, left him in ignorance of the ignorance of the world. 

Of his boyish days scarcely any important trace remains, except a kindof diary which contains under one date the laconic statement, "Marriedtwo wives this morning. " The insane ingenuity of the biographer wouldbe quite capable of seeing in this a most suggestive foreshadowing ofthe sexual dualism which is so ably defended in _Fifine at the Fair_. A great part of his childhood was passed in the society of his onlysister Sariana; and it is a curious and touching fact that with heralso he passed his last days. From his earliest babyhood he seems tohave lived in a more or less stimulating mental atmosphere; but as heemerged into youth he came under great poetic influences, which madehis father's classical poetic tradition look for the time insipid. Browning began to live in the life of his own age. 

As a young man he attended classes at University College; beyond thisthere is little evidence that he was much in touch with intellectualcircles outside that of his own family. But the forces that weremoving the literary world had long passed beyond the merely literaryarea. About the time of Browning's boyhood a very subtle and profoundchange was beginning in the intellectual atmosphere of such homes asthat of the Brownings. In studying the careers of great men we tendconstantly to forget that their youth was generally passed and theircharacters practically formed in a period long previous to theirappearance in history. We think of Milton, the Restoration Puritan, and forget that he grew up in the living shadow of Shakespeare and thefull summer of the Elizabethan drama. We realise Garibaldi as a suddenand almost miraculous figure rising about fifty years ago to createthe new Kingdom of Italy, and we forget that he must have formed hisfirst ideas of liberty while hearing at his father's dinner-table thatNapoleon was the master of Europe. Similarly, we think of Browning asthe great Victorian poet, who lived long enough to have opinions onMr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill, and forget that as a young man hepassed a bookstall and saw a volume ticketed "Mr. Shelley's AtheisticPoem, " and had to search even in his own really cultivated circle forsome one who could tell him who Mr. Shelley was. Browning was, inshort, born in the afterglow of the great Revolution. 

The French Revolution was at root a thoroughly optimistic thing. Itmay seem strange to attribute optimism to anything so destructive;but, in truth, this particular kind of optimism is inevitably, and byits nature, destructive. The great dominant idea of the whole of thatperiod, the period before, during, and long after the Revolution, isthe idea that man would by his nature live in an Eden of dignity, liberty and love, and that artificial and decrepit systems are keepinghim out of that Eden. No one can do the least justice to the greatJacobins who does not realise that to them breaking the civilisationof ages was like breaking the cords of a treasure-chest. And just asfor more than a century great men had dreamed of this beautifulemancipation, so the dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley tocreep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classesof society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of themiddle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the completeand pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, whichhas been fashionable among the young in more recent times. TheShelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; hethought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strictrepublican orthodoxy. He represented, in short, a revolt of the normalagainst the abnormal; he found himself, so to speak, in the heart of awholly topsy-turvy and blasphemous state of things, in which God wasrebelling against Satan. There began to arise about this time a raceof young men like Keats, members of a not highly cultivated middleclass, and even of classes lower, who felt in a hundred ways thisobscure alliance with eternal things against temporal and practicalones, and who lived on its imaginative delight. They were a kind offurtive universalist; they had discovered the whole cosmos, and theykept the whole cosmos a secret. They climbed up dark stairs to meagregarrets, and shut themselves in with the gods. Numbers of the greatmen, who afterwards illuminated the Victorian era, were at this timeliving in mean streets in magnificent daydreams. Ruskin was solemnlyvisiting his solemn suburban aunts; Dickens was going to and fro in ablacking factory; Carlyle, slightly older, was still lingering on apoor farm in Dumfriesshire; Keats had not long become the assistant ofthe country surgeon when Browning was a boy in Camberwell. On allsides there was the first beginning of the æsthetic stir in the middleclasses which expressed itself in the combination of so many poeticlives with so many prosaic livelihoods. It was the age of inspiredoffice-boys. 

Browning grew up, then, with the growing fame of Shelley and Keats, inthe atmosphere of literary youth, fierce and beautiful, among newpoets who believed in a new world. It is important to remember this, because the real Browning was a quite different person from the grimmoralist and metaphysician who is seen through the spectacles ofBrowning Societies and University Extension Lecturers. Browning wasfirst and foremost a poet, a man made to enjoy all things visible andinvisible, a priest of the higher passions. The misunderstanding thathas supposed him to be other than poetical, because his form was oftenfanciful and abrupt, is really different from the misunderstandingwhich attaches to most other poets. The opponents of Victor Hugocalled him a mere windbag; the opponents of Shakespeare called him abuffoon. But the admirers of Hugo and Shakespeare at least knewbetter. Now the admirers and opponents of Browning alike make him outto be a pedant rather than a poet. The only difference between theBrowningite and the anti-Browningite, is that the second says he wasnot a poet but a mere philosopher, and the first says he was aphilosopher and not a mere poet. The admirer disparages poetry inorder to exalt Browning; the opponent exalts poetry in order todisparage Browning; and all the time Browning himself exalted poetryabove all earthly things, served it with single-hearted intensity, andstands among the few poets who hardly wrote a line of anything else. 

The whole of the boyhood and youth of Robert Browning has as much thequality of pure poetry as the boyhood and youth of Shelley. We do notfind in it any trace of the analytical Browning who is believed in bylearned ladies and gentlemen. How indeed would such sympathisers feelif informed that the first poems that Browning wrote in a volumecalled _Incondita_ were noticed to contain the fault of "too muchsplendour of language and too little wealth of thought"? They wereindeed Byronic in the extreme, and Browning in his earlier appearancesin society presents himself in quite a romantic manner. Macready, theactor, wrote of him: "He looks and speaks more like a young poet thanany one I have ever seen. " A picturesque tradition remains that ThomasCarlyle, riding out upon one of his solitary gallops necessitated byhis physical sufferings, was stopped by one whom he described as astrangely beautiful youth, who poured out to him without preface orapology his admiration for the great philosopher's works. Browning atthis time seems to have left upon many people this impression ofphysical charm. A friend who attended University College with himsays: "He was then a bright handsome youth with long black hairfalling over his shoulders. " Every tale that remains of him inconnection with this period asserts and reasserts the completelyromantic spirit by which he was then possessed. He was fond, forexample, of following in the track of gipsy caravans, far acrosscountry, and a song which he heard with the refrain, "Following theQueen of the Gipsies oh!" rang in his ears long enough to expressitself in his soberer and later days in that splendid poem of thespirit of escape and Bohemianism, _The Flight of the Duchess_. Suchother of these early glimpses of him as remain, depict him as stridingacross Wimbledon Common with his hair blowing in the wind, recitingaloud passages from Isaiah, or climbing up into the elms above Norwoodto look over London by night. It was when looking down from thatsuburban eyrie over the whole confounding labyrinth of London that hewas filled with that great irresponsible benevolence which is the bestof the joys of youth, and conceived the idea of a perfectlyirresponsible benevolence in the first plan of _Pippa Passes_. At theend of his father's garden was a laburnum "heavy with its weight ofgold, " and in the tree two nightingales were in the habit of singingagainst each other, a form of competition which, I imagine, has sincebecome less common in Camberwell. When Browning as a boy wasintoxicated with the poetry of Shelley and Keats, he hypnotisedhimself into something approaching to a positive conviction that thesetwo birds were the spirits of the two great poets who had settled in aCamberwell garden, in order to sing to the only young gentleman whoreally adored and understood them. This last story is perhaps the mosttypical of the tone common to all the rest; it would be difficult tofind a story which across the gulf of nearly eighty years awakens sovividly a sense of the sumptuous folly of an intellectual boyhood. With Browning, as with all true poets, passion came first and madeintellectual expression, the hunger for beauty making literature asthe hunger for bread made a plough. The life he lived in those earlydays was no life of dull application; there was no poet whose youthwas so young. When he was full of years and fame, and delineating ingreat epics the beauty and horror of the romance of southern Europe, ayoung man, thinking to please him, said, "There is no romance nowexcept in Italy. " "Well, " said Browning, "I should make an exceptionof Camberwell. "

Such glimpses will serve to indicate the kind of essential issue thatthere was in the nature of things between the generation of Browningand the generation of his father. Browning was bound in the nature ofthings to become at the outset Byronic, and Byronism was not, ofcourse, in reality so much a pessimism about civilised things as anoptimism about savage things. This great revolt on behalf of theelemental which Keats and Shelley represented was bound first of allto occur. Robert Browning junior had to be a part of it, and RobertBrowning senior had to go back to his water colours and the faultlesscouplets of Pope with the full sense of the greatest pathos that theworld contains, the pathos of the man who has produced something thathe cannot understand. 

The earliest works of Browning bear witness, without exception, tothis ardent and somewhat sentimental evolution. _Pauline_ appearedanonymously in 1833. It exhibits the characteristic mark of a juvenilepoem, the general suggestion that the author is a thousand years old. Browning calls it a fragment of a confession; and Mr. Johnson Fox, anold friend of Browning's father, who reviewed it for _Tait'sMagazine_, said, with truth, that it would be difficult to findanything more purely confessional. It is the typical confession of aboy laying bare all the spiritual crimes of infidelity and moralwaste, in a state of genuine ignorance of the fact that every one elsehas committed them. It is wholesome and natural for youth to go aboutconfessing that the grass is green, and whispering to a priesthoarsely that it has found a sun in heaven. But the records of thatparticular period of development, even when they are as ornate andbeautiful as _Pauline_, are not necessarily or invariably wholesomereading. The chief interest of _Pauline_, with all its beauties, liesin a certain almost humorous singularity, the fact that Browning, ofall people, should have signalised his entrance into the world ofletters with a poem which may fairly be called morbid. But this is amorbidity so general and recurrent that it may be called in acontradictory phrase a healthy morbidity; it is a kind of intellectualmeasles. No one of any degree of maturity in reading _Pauline_ will bequite so horrified at the sins of the young gentleman who tells thestory as he seems to be himself. It is the utterance of that bitterand heartrending period of youth which comes before we realise the onegrand and logical basis of all optimism--the doctrine of original sin. The boy at this stage being an ignorant and inhuman idealist, regardsall his faults as frightful secret malformations, and it is only laterthat he becomes conscious of that large and beautiful and benignantexplanation that the heart of man is deceitful above all things anddesperately wicked. That Browning, whose judgment on his own work wasone of the best in the world, took this view of _Pauline_ in afteryears is quite obvious. He displayed a very manly and unique capacityof really laughing at his own work without being in the least ashamedof it. "This, " he said of _Pauline_, "is the only crab apple thatremains of the shapely tree of life in my fool's paradise. " It wouldbe difficult to express the matter more perfectly. Although _Pauline_was published anonymously, its authorship was known to a certaincircle, and Browning began to form friendships in the literary world. He had already become acquainted with two of the best friends he wasever destined to have, Alfred Domett, celebrated in "The GuardianAngel" and "Waring, " and his cousin Silverthorne, whose death isspoken of in one of the most perfect lyrics in the English language, Browning's "May and Death. " These were men of his own age, and hismanner of speaking of them gives us many glimpses into that splendidworld of comradeship which. Plato and Walt Whitman knew, with itsendless days and its immortal nights. Browning had a third frienddestined to play an even greater part in his life, but who belonged toan older generation and a statelier school of manners andscholarship. Mr. Kenyon was a schoolfellow of Browning's father, andoccupied towards his son something of the position of an irresponsibleuncle. He was a rotund, rosy old gentleman, fond of comfort and thecourtesies of life, but fond of them more for others, though much forhimself. Elizabeth Barrett in after years wrote of "the brightness ofhis carved speech, " which would appear to suggest that he practisedthat urbane and precise order of wit which was even thenold-fashioned. Yet, notwithstanding many talents of this kind, he wasnot so much an able man as the natural friend and equal of able men. 

Browning's circle of friends, however, widened about this time in alldirections. One friend in particular he made, the Comte deRipert-Monclar, a French Royalist with whom he prosecuted with renewedenergy his studies in the mediæval and Renaissance schools ofphilosophy. It was the Count who suggested that Browning should writea poetical play on the subject of Paracelsus. After reflection, indeed, the Count retracted this advice on the ground that the historyof the great mystic gave no room for love. Undismayed by this terribledeficiency, Browning caught up the idea with characteristicenthusiasm, and in 1835 appeared the first of his works which hehimself regarded as representative--_Paracelsus_. The poem shows anenormous advance in technical literary power; but in the history ofBrowning's mind it is chiefly interesting as giving an example of apeculiarity which clung to him during the whole of his literary life, an intense love of the holes and corners of history. Fifty-two yearsafterwards he wrote _Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance intheir Day_, the last poem published in his lifetime; and any readerof that remarkable work will perceive that the common characteristicof all these persons is not so much that they were of importance intheir day as that they are of no importance in ours. The sameeccentric fastidiousness worked in him as a young man when he wrote_Paracelsus_ and _Sordello_. Nowhere in Browning's poetry can we findany very exhaustive study of any of the great men who are thefavourites of the poet and moralist. He has written about philosophyand ambition and music and morals, but he has written nothing aboutSocrates or Cæsar or Napoleon, or Beethoven or Mozart, or Buddha orMahomet. When he wishes to describe a political ambition he selectsthat entirely unknown individual, King Victor of Sardinia. When hewishes to express the most perfect soul of music, he unearths someextraordinary persons called Abt Vogler and Master Hugues ofSaxe-Gotha. When he wishes to express the largest and sublimest schemeof morals and religion which his imagination can conceive, he does notput it into the mouth of any of the great spiritual leaders ofmankind, but into the mouth of an obscure Jewish Rabbi of the name ofBen Ezra. It is fully in accordance with this fascinating craze of histhat when he wishes to study the deification of the intellect and thedisinterested pursuit of the things of the mind, he does not selectany of the great philosophers from Plato to Darwin, whoseinvestigations are still of some importance in the eyes of the world. He selects the figure of all figures most covered with modern satireand pity, the _à priori_ scientist of the Middle Ages and theRenaissance. His supreme type of the human intellect is neither theacademic nor the positivist, but the alchemist. It is difficult toimagine a turn of mind constituting a more complete challenge to theordinary modern point of view. To the intellect of our time the wildinvestigators of the school of Paracelsus seem to be the very crownand flower of futility, they are collectors of straws and carefulmisers of dust. But for all that Browning was right. Any critic whounderstands the true spirit of mediæval science can see that he wasright; no critic can see how right he was unless he understands thespirit of mediæval science as thoroughly as he did. In the characterof Paracelsus, Browning wished to paint the dangers anddisappointments which attend the man who believes merely in theintellect. He wished to depict the fall of the logician; and with aperfect and unerring instinct he selected a man who wrote and spoke inthe tradition of the Middle Ages, the most thoroughly and evenpainfully logical period that the world has ever seen. If he hadchosen an ancient Greek philosopher, it would have been open to thecritic to have said that that philosopher relied to some extent uponthe most sunny and graceful social life that ever flourished. If hehad made him a modern sociological professor, it would have beenpossible to object that his energies were not wholly concerned withtruth, but partly with the solid and material satisfaction of society. But the man truly devoted to the things of the mind was the mediævalmagician. It is a remarkable fact that one civilisation does notsatisfy itself by calling another civilisation wicked--it calls ituncivilised. We call the Chinese barbarians, and they call usbarbarians. The mediæval state, like China, was a foreigncivilisation, and this was its supreme characteristic, that it caredfor the things of the mind for their own sake. To complain of theresearches of its sages on the ground that they were not materiallyfruitful, is to act as we should act in telling a gardener that hisroses were not as digestible as our cabbages. It is not only true thatthe mediæval philosophers never discovered the steam-engine; it isquite equally true that they never tried. The Eden of the Middle Ageswas really a garden, where each of God's flowers--truth and beauty andreason--flourished for its own sake, and with its own name. The Edenof modern progress is a kitchen garden. 

It would have been hard, therefore, for Browning to have chosen abetter example for his study of intellectual egotism than Paracelsus. Modern life accuses the mediæval tradition of crushing the intellect;Browning, with a truer instinct, accuses that tradition ofover-glorifying it. There is, however, another and even more importantdeduction to be made from the moral of _Paracelsus_. The usualaccusation against Browning is that he was consumed with logic; thathe thought all subjects to be the proper pabulum of intellectualdisquisition; that he gloried chiefly in his own power of pluckingknots to pieces and rending fallacies in two; and that to this methodhe sacrificed deliberately, and with complete self-complacency, theelement of poetry and sentiment. To people who imagine Browning tohave been this frigid believer in the intellect there is only oneanswer necessary or sufficient. It is the fact that he wrote a playdesigned to destroy the whole of this intellectualist fallacy at theage of twenty-three. 

_Paracelsus_ was in all likelihood Browning's introduction to theliterary world. It was many years, and even many decades, before hehad anything like a public appreciation, but a very great part of theminority of those who were destined to appreciate him came over to hisstandard upon the publication of _Paracelsus_. The celebrated JohnForster had taken up _Paracelsus_ "as a thing to slate, " and had endedits perusal with the wildest curiosity about the author and his works. John Stuart Mill, never backward in generosity, had already interestedhimself in Browning, and was finally converted by the same poem. Amongother early admirers were Landor, Leigh Hunt, Horne, SerjeantTalfourd, and Monckton-Milnes. One man of even greater literarystature seems to have come into Browning's life about this time, a manfor whom he never ceased to have the warmest affection and trust. Browning was, indeed, one of the very few men of that period who goton perfectly with Thomas Carlyle. It is precisely one of those littlethings which speak volumes for the honesty and unfathomable goodhumour of Browning, that Carlyle, who had a reckless contempt for mostother poets of his day, had something amounting to a real attachmentto him. He would run over to Paris for the mere privilege of diningwith him. Browning, on the other hand, with characteristicimpetuosity, passionately defended and justified Carlyle in allcompanies. "I have just seen dear Carlyle, " he writes on one occasion;"catch me calling people dear in a hurry, except in a letterbeginning. " He sided with Carlyle in the vexed question of the Carlyledomestic relations, and his impression of Mrs. Carlyle was that shewas "a hard unlovable woman. " As, however, it is on record that heonce, while excitedly explaining some point of mystical philosophy, put down Mrs. Carlyle's hot kettle on the hearthrug, any frigiditythat he may have observed in her manner may possibly find a naturalexplanation. His partisanship in the Carlyle affair, which wascharacteristically headlong and human, may not throw much light onthat painful problem itself, but it throws a great deal of light onthe character of Browning, which was pugnaciously proud of itsfriends, and had what may almost be called a lust of loyalty. Browningwas not capable of that most sagacious detachment which enabledTennyson to say that he could not agree that the Carlyles ought neverto have married, since if they had each married elsewhere there wouldhave been four miserable people instead of two. 

Among the motley and brilliant crowd with which Browning had now begunto mingle, there was no figure more eccentric and spontaneous thanthat of Macready the actor. This extraordinary person, a man livingfrom hand to mouth in all things spiritual and pecuniary, a manfeeding upon flying emotions, conceived something like an attractiontowards Browning, spoke of him as the very ideal of a young poet, andin a moment of peculiar excitement suggested to him the writing of agreat play. Browning was a man fundamentally indeed more steadfast andprosaic, but on the surface fully as rapid and easily infected asMacready. He immediately began to plan out a great historical play, and selected for his subject "Strafford. "

In Browning's treatment of the subject there is something more than atrace of his Puritan and Liberal upbringing. It is one of the veryearliest of the really important works in English literature whichare based on the Parliamentarian reading of the incidents of the timeof Charles I. It is true that the finest element in the play is theopposition between Strafford and Pym, an opposition so complete, solucid, so consistent, that it has, so to speak, something of thefriendly openness and agreement which belongs to an alliance. The twomen love each other and fight each other, and do the two things at thesame time completely. This is a great thing of which even to attemptthe description. It is easy to have the impartiality which can speakjudicially of both parties, but it is not so easy to have that largerand higher impartiality which can speak passionately on behalf of bothparties. Nevertheless, it may be permissible to repeat that there isin the play a definite trace of Browning's Puritan education andPuritan historical outlook. 

For _Strafford_ is, of course, an example of that most difficult ofall literary works--a political play. The thing has been achieved onceat least admirably in Shakespeare's _Julius Cæsar_, and something likeit, though from a more one-sided and romantic stand-point, has beendone excellently in _L'Aiglon_. But the difficulties of such a playare obvious on the face of the matter. In a political play theprincipal characters are not merely men. They are symbols, arithmetical figures representing millions of other men outside. Itis, by dint of elaborate stage management, possible to bring a mobupon the boards, but the largest mob ever known is nothing but afloating atom of the people; and the people of which the politicianhas to think does not consist of knots of rioters in the street, butof some million absolutely distinct individuals, each sitting in hisown breakfast room reading his own morning paper. To give even thefaintest suggestion of the strength and size of the people in thissense in the course of a dramatic performance is obviously impossible. That is why it is so easy on the stage to concentrate all the pathosand dignity upon such persons as Charles I. And Mary Queen of Scots, the vampires of their people, because within the minute limits of astage there is room for their small virtues and no room for theirenormous crimes. It would be impossible to find a stronger examplethan the case of _Strafford_. It is clear that no one could possiblytell the whole truth about the life and death of Strafford, politically considered, in a play. Strafford was one of the greatestmen ever born in England, and he attempted to found a great Englishofficial despotism. That is to say, he attempted to found somethingwhich is so different from what has actually come about that we can inreality scarcely judge of it, any more than we can judge whether itwould be better to live in another planet, or pleasanter to have beenborn a dog or an elephant. It would require enormous imagination toreconstruct the political ideals of Strafford. Now Browning, as we allknow, got over the matter in his play, by practically denying thatStrafford had any political ideals at all. That is to say, whilecrediting Strafford with all his real majesty of intellect andcharacter, he makes the whole of his political action dependent uponhis passionate personal attachment to the King. This isunsatisfactory; it is in reality a dodging of the great difficulty ofthe political play. That difficulty, in the case of any politicalproblem, is, as has been said, great. It would be very hard, forexample, to construct a play about Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule Bill. Itwould be almost impossible to get expressed in a drama of some fiveacts and some twenty characters anything so ancient and complicated asthat Irish problem, the roots of which lie in the darkness of the ageof Strongbow, and the branches of which spread out to the remotestcommonwealths of the East and West. But we should scarcely besatisfied if a dramatist overcame the difficulty by ascribing Mr. Gladstone's action in the Home Rule question to an overwhelmingpersonal affection for Mr. Healy. And in thus basing Strafford'saction upon personal and private reasons, Browning certainly does someinjustice to the political greatness, of Strafford. To attribute Mr. Gladstone's conversion to Home Rule to an infatuation such as thatsuggested above, would certainly have the air of implying that thewriter thought the Home Rule doctrine a peculiar or untenable one. Similarly, Browning's choice of a motive for Strafford has very muchthe air of an assumption that there was nothing to be said on publicgrounds for Strafford's political ideal. Now this is certainly not thecase. The Puritans in the great struggles of the reign of Charles I. May have possessed more valuable ideals than the Royalists, but it isa very vulgar error to suppose that they were any more idealistic. InBrowning's play Pym is made almost the incarnation of public spirit, and Strafford of private ties. But not only may an upholder ofdespotism be public-spirited, but in the case of prominent upholdersof it like Strafford he generally is. Despotism indeed, and attemptsat despotism, like that of Strafford, are a kind of disease of publicspirit. They represent, as it were, the drunkenness of responsibility. It is when men begin to grow desperate in their love for the people, when they are overwhelmed with the difficulties and blunders ofhumanity, that they fall back upon a wild desire to manage everythingthemselves. Their faith in themselves is only a disillusionment withmankind. They are in that most dreadful position, dreadful alike inpersonal and public affairs--the position of the man who has lostfaith and not lost love. This belief that all would go right if wecould only get the strings into our own hands is a fallacy almostwithout exception, but nobody can justly say that it is notpublic-spirited. The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it doesnot love men, but that it loves them too much and trusts them toolittle. Therefore from age to age in history arise these greatdespotic dreamers, whether they be Royalists or Imperialists or evenSocialists, who have at root this idea, that the world would enterinto rest if it went their way and forswore altogether the right ofgoing its own way. When a man begins to think that the grass will notgrow at night unless he lies awake to watch it, he generally endseither in an asylum or on the throne of an Emperor. Of these menStrafford was one, and we cannot but feel that Browning somewhatnarrows the significance and tragedy of his place in history by makinghim merely the champion of a personal idiosyncrasy against a greatpublic demand. Strafford was something greater than this; if indeed, when we come to think of it, a man can be anything greater than thefriend of another man. But the whole question is interesting, becauseBrowning, although he never again attacked a political drama of suchpalpable importance as _Strafford_, could never keep politicsaltogether out of his dramatic work. _King Victor and King Charles_, which followed it, is a political play, the study of a despoticinstinct much meaner than that of Strafford. _Colombe's Birthday_, again, is political as well as romantic. Politics in its historicaspect would seem to have had a great fascination for him, as indeedit must have for all ardent intellects, since it is the one thing inthe world that is as intellectual as the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ andas rapid as the Derby. 

One of the favourite subjects among those who like to conduct longcontroversies about Browning (and their name is legion) is thequestion of whether Browning's plays, such as _Strafford_, weresuccesses upon the stage. As they are never agreed about whatconstitutes a success on the stage, it is difficult to adjudge theirquarrels. But the general fact is very simple; such a play as_Strafford_ was not a gigantic theatrical success, and nobody, it isto be presumed, ever imagined that it would be. On the other hand, itwas certainly not a failure, but was enjoyed and applauded as arehundreds of excellent plays which run only for a week or two, as manyexcellent plays do, and as all plays ought to do. Above all, thedefinite success which attended the representation of _Strafford_ fromthe point of view of the more educated and appreciative was quiteenough to establish Browning in a certain definite literary position. As a classical and established personality he did not come into hiskingdom for years and decades afterwards; not, indeed, until he wasnear to entering upon the final rest. But as a detached and eccentricpersonality, as a man who existed and who had arisen on the outskirtsof literature, the world began to be conscious of him at this time. 

Of what he was personally at the period that he thus became personallyapparent, Mrs. Bridell Fox has left a very vivid little sketch. Shedescribes how Browning called at the house (he was acquainted with herfather), and finding that gentleman out, asked with a kind of abruptpoliteness if he might play on the piano. This touch is verycharacteristic of the mingled aplomb and unconsciousness of Browning'ssocial manner. "He was then, " she writes, "slim and dark, and veryhandsome, and--may I hint it?--just a trifle of a dandy, addicted tolemon-coloured kid gloves and such things, quite the glass of fashionand the mould of form. But full of 'ambition, ' eager for success, eager for fame, and, what is more, determined to conquer fame and toachieve success. " That is as good a portrait as we can have of theBrowning of these days--quite self-satisfied, but not self-consciousyoung man; one who had outgrown, but only just outgrown, the pureromanticism of his boyhood, which made him run after gipsy caravansand listen to nightingales in the wood; a man whose incandescentvitality, now that it had abandoned gipsies and not yet immerseditself in casuistical poems, devoted itself excitedly to trifles, suchas lemon-coloured kid gloves and fame. But a man still above allthings perfectly young and natural, professing that foppery whichfollows the fashions, and not that sillier and more demoralisingfoppery which defies them. Just as he walked in coolly and yetimpulsively into a private drawing-room and offered to play, so hewalked at this time into the huge and crowded salon of Europeanliterature and offered to sing. 

CHAPTER II

EARLY WORKS

In 1840 _Sordello_ was published. Its reception by the great majorityof readers, including some of the ablest men of the time, was areception of a kind probably unknown in the rest of literary history, a reception that was neither praise nor blame. It was perhaps bestexpressed by Carlyle, who wrote to say that his wife had read_Sordello_ with great interest, and wished to know whether Sordellowas a man, or a city, or a book. Better known, of course, is the storyof Tennyson, who said that the first line of the poem--

 "Who will, may hear Sordello's story told, "

and the last line--

 "Who would, has heard Sordello's story told, "

were the only two lines in the poem that he understood, and they werelies. 

Perhaps the best story, however, of all the cycle of Sordello legendsis that which is related of Douglas Jerrold. He was recovering from anillness; and having obtained permission for the first time to read alittle during the day, he picked up a book from a pile beside the bedand began _Sordello_. No sooner had he done so than he turned deadlypale, put down the book, and said, "My God! I'm an idiot. My healthis restored, but my mind's gone. I can't understand two consecutivelines of an English poem. " He then summoned his family and silentlygave the book into their hands, asking for their opinion on the poem;and as the shadow of perplexity gradually passed over their faces, heheaved a sigh of relief and went to sleep. These stories, whetheraccurate or no, do undoubtedly represent the very peculiar receptionaccorded to _Sordello_, a reception which, as I have said, bears noresemblance whatever to anything in the way of eulogy or condemnationthat had ever been accorded to a work of art before. There had beenauthors whom it was fashionable to boast of admiring and authors whomit was fashionable to boast of despising; but with _Sordello_ entersinto literary history the Browning of popular badinage, the authorwhom it is fashionable to boast of not understanding. 

Putting aside for the moment the literary qualities which are to befound in the poem, when it becomes intelligible, there is one questionvery relevant to the fame and character of Browning which is raised by_Sordello_ when it is considered, as most people consider it, ashopelessly unintelligible. It really throws some light upon the reasonof Browning's obscurity. The ordinary theory of Browning's obscurityis to the effect that it was a piece of intellectual vanity indulgedin more and more insolently as his years and fame increased. There areat least two very decisive objections to this popular explanation. Inthe first place, it must emphatically be said for Browning that in allthe numerous records and impressions of him throughout his long andvery public life, there is not one iota of evidence that he was a manwho was intellectually vain. The evidence is entirely the other way. He was vain of many things, of his physical health, for example, andeven more of the physical health which he contrived to bestow for acertain period upon his wife. From the records of his early dandyism, his flowing hair and his lemon-coloured gloves, it is probable enoughthat he was vain of his good looks. He was vain of his masculinity, his knowledge of the world, and he was, I fancy, decidedly vain of hisprejudices, even, it might be said, vain of being vain of them. Buteverything is against the idea that he was much in the habit ofthinking of himself in his intellectual aspect. In the matter ofconversation, for example, some people who liked him found him genial, talkative, anecdotal, with a certain strengthening and sanativequality in his mere bodily presence. Some people who did not like himfound him a mere frivolous chatterer, afflicted with bad manners. Onelady, who knew him well, said that, though he only met you in a crowdand made some commonplace remark, you went for the rest of the daywith your head up. Another lady who did not know him, and thereforedisliked him, asked after a dinner party, "Who was that too-exuberantfinancier?" These are the diversities of feeling about him. But theyall agree in one point--that he did not talk cleverly, or try to talkcleverly, as that proceeding is understood in literary circles. Hetalked positively, he talked a great deal, but he never attempted togive that neat and æsthetic character to his speech which is almostinvariable in the case of the man who is vain of his mentalsuperiority. When he did impress people with mental gymnastics, it wasmostly in the form of pouring out, with passionate enthusiasm, wholeepics written by other people, which is the last thing that theliterary egotist would be likely to waste his time over. We havetherefore to start with an enormous psychological improbability thatBrowning made his poems complicated from mere pride in his powers andcontempt of his readers. 

There is, however, another very practical objection to the ordinarytheory that Browning's obscurity was a part of the intoxication offame and intellectual consideration. We constantly hear the statementthat Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his laterpoems, but the statement is simply not true. _Sordello_, to theindescribable density of which he never afterwards even approached, was begun before _Strafford_, and was therefore the third of hisworks, and even if we adopt his own habit of ignoring _Pauline_, thesecond. He wrote the greater part of it when he was twenty-four. Itwas in his youth, at the time when a man is thinking of love andpublicity, of sunshine and singing birds, that he gave birth to thishorror of great darkness; and the more we study the matter with anyknowledge of the nature of youth, the more we shall come to theconclusion that Browning's obscurity had altogether the oppositeorigin to that which is usually assigned to it. He was notunintelligible because he was proud, but unintelligible because he washumble. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, butbecause to him they were obvious. 

A man who is intellectually vain does not make himselfincomprehensible, because he is so enormously impressed with thedifference between his readers' intelligence and his own that hetalks down to them with elaborate repetition and lucidity. What poetwas ever vainer than Byron? What poet was ever so magnificently lucid?But a young man of genius who has a genuine humility in his heart doesnot elaborately explain his discoveries, because he does not thinkthat they are discoveries. He thinks that the whole street is hummingwith his ideas, and that the postman and the tailor are poets likehimself. Browning's impenetrable poetry was the natural expression ofthis beautiful optimism. _Sordello_ was the most glorious complimentthat has ever been paid to the average man. 

In the same manner, of course, outward obscurity is in a young authora mark of inward clarity. A man who is vague in his ideas does notspeak obscurely, because his own dazed and drifting condition leadshim to clutch at phrases like ropes and use the formulæ that every oneunderstands. No one ever found Miss Marie Corelli obscure, because shebelieves only in words. But if a young man really has ideas of hisown, he must be obscure at first, because he lives in a world of hisown in which there are symbols and correspondences and categoriesunknown to the rest of the world. Let us take an imaginary example. Suppose that a young poet had developed by himself a peculiar ideathat all forms of excitement, including religious excitement, were akind of evil intoxication, he might say to himself continually thatchurches were in reality taverns, and this idea would become so fixedin his mind that he would forget that no such association existed inthe minds of others. And suppose that in pursuance of this generalidea, which is a perfectly clear and intellectual idea, though a verysilly one, he were to say that he believed in Puritanism without itstheology, and were to repeat this idea also to himself until it becameinstinctive and familiar, such a man might take up a pen, and underthe impression that he was saying something figurative indeed, butquite clear and suggestive, write some such sentence as this, "Youwill not get the godless Puritan into your white taverns, " and no onein the length and breadth of the country could form the remotestnotion of what he could mean. So it would have been in any example, for instance, of a man who made some philosophical discovery and didnot realise how far the world was from it. If it had been possible fora poet in the sixteenth century to hit upon and learn to regard asobvious the evolutionary theory of Darwin, he might have written downsome such line as "the radiant offspring of the ape, " and the maddestvolumes of mediæval natural history would have been ransacked for themeaning of the allusion. The more fixed and solid and sensible theidea appeared to him, the more dark and fantastic it would haveappeared to the world. Most of us indeed, if we ever say anythingvaluable, say it when we are giving expression to that part of uswhich has become as familiar and invisible as the pattern on our wallpaper. It is only when an idea has become a matter of course to thethinker that it becomes startling to the world. 

It is worth while to dwell upon this preliminary point of the groundof Browning's obscurity, because it involves an important issue abouthim. Our whole view of Browning is bound to be absolutely different, and I think absolutely false, if we start with the conception that hewas what the French call an intellectual. If we see Browning with theeyes of his particular followers, we shall inevitably think this. Forhis followers are pre-eminently intellectuals, and there never livedupon the earth a great man who was so fundamentally different from hisfollowers. Indeed, he felt this heartily and even humorously himself. "Wilkes was no Wilkite, " he said, "and I am very far from being aBrowningite. " We shall, as I say, utterly misunderstand Browning atevery step of his career if we suppose that he was the sort of man whowould be likely to take a pleasure in asserting the subtlety andabstruseness of his message. He took pleasure beyond all question inhimself; in the strictest sense of the word he enjoyed himself. Buthis conception of himself was never that of the intellectual. Heconceived himself rather as a sanguine and strenuous man, a greatfighter. "I was ever, " as he says, "a fighter. " His faults, a certainoccasional fierceness and grossness, were the faults that are countedas virtues among navvies and sailors and most primitive men. Hisvirtues, boyishness and absolute fidelity, and a love of plain wordsand things are the virtues which are counted as vices among theæsthetic prigs who pay him the greatest honour. He had his moreobjectionable side, like other men, but it had nothing to do withliterary egotism. He was not vain of being an extraordinary man. Hewas only somewhat excessively vain of being an ordinary one. 

The Browning then who published _Sordello_ we have to conceive, not asa young pedant anxious to exaggerate his superiority to the public, but as a hot-headed, strong-minded, inexperienced, and essentiallyhumble man, who had more ideas than he knew how to disentangle fromeach other. If we compare, for example, the complexity of Browningwith the clarity of Matthew Arnold, we shall realise that the causelies in the fact that Matthew Arnold was an intellectual aristocrat, and Browning an intellectual democrat. The particular peculiarities of_Sordello_ illustrate the matter very significantly. A very great partof the difficulty of _Sordello_, for instance, is in the fact thatbefore the reader even approaches to tackling the difficulties ofBrowning's actual narrative, he is apparently expected to start withan exhaustive knowledge of that most shadowy and bewildering of allhuman epochs--the period of the Guelph and Ghibelline struggles inmediæval Italy. Here, of course, Browning simply betrays thatimpetuous humility which we have previously observed. His father was astudent of mediæval chronicles, he had himself imbibed that learningin the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to playcricket. Consequently in a literary sense he rushed up to the firstperson he met and began talking about Ecelo and Taurello Salinguerrawith about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when ittalks English to an Italian organ grinder. Beyond this the poem of_Sordello_, powerful as it is, does not present any very significantadvance in Browning's mental development on that already representedby _Pauline_ and _Paracelsus_. _Pauline, Paracelsus_, and _Sordello_stand together in the general fact that they are all, in the excellentphrase used about the first by Mr. Johnson Fox, "confessional. " Allthree are analyses of the weakness which every artistic temperamentfinds in itself. Browning is still writing about himself, a subjectof which he, like all good and brave men, was profoundly ignorant. This kind of self-analysis is always misleading. For we do not see inourselves those dominant traits strong enough to force themselves outin action which our neighbours see. We see only a welter of minutemental experiences which include all the sins that were ever committedby Nero or Sir Willoughby Patterne. When studying ourselves, we arelooking at a fresco with a magnifying glass. Consequently, these earlyimpressions which great men have given of themselves are nearly alwaysslanders upon themselves, for the strongest man is weak to his ownconscience, and Hamlet flourished to a certainty even inside Napoleon. So it was with Browning, who when he was nearly eighty was destined towrite with the hilarity of a schoolboy, but who wrote in his boyhoodpoems devoted to analysing the final break-up of intellect and soul. 

_Sordello_, with all its load of learning, and almost more oppressiveload of beauty, has never had any very important influence even uponBrowningites, and with the rest of the world the name has passed intoa jest. The most truly memorable thing about it was Browning's sayingin answer to all gibes and misconceptions, a saying which expressesbetter than anything else what genuine metal was in him, "I blame noone, least of all myself, who did my best then and since. " This isindeed a model for all men of letters who do not wish to retain onlythe letters and to lose the man. 

When next Browning spoke, it was from a greater height and with a newvoice. His visit to Asolo, "his first love, " as he said, "amongItalian cities, " coincided with the stir and transformation in hisspirit and the breaking up of that splendid palace of mirrors in whicha man like Byron had lived and died. In 1841 _Pippa Passes_ appeared, and with it the real Browning of the modern world. He had made thediscovery which Byron never made, but which almost every young mandoes at last make--the thrilling discovery that he is not RobinsonCrusoe. _Pippa Passes_ is the greatest poem ever written, with theexception of one or two by Walt Whitman, to express the sentiment ofthe pure love of humanity. The phrase has unfortunately a false andpedantic sound. The love of humanity is a thing supposed to beprofessed only by vulgar and officious philanthropists, or by saintsof a superhuman detachment and universality. As a matter of fact, loveof humanity is the commonest and most natural of the feelings of afresh nature, and almost every one has felt it alight capriciouslyupon him when looking at a crowded park or a room full of dancers. Thelove of those whom we do not know is quite as eternal a sentiment asthe love of those whom we do know. In our friends the richness of lifeis proved to us by what we have gained; in the faces in the street therichness of life is proved to us by the hint of what we have lost. Andthis feeling for strange faces and strange lives, when it is feltkeenly by a young man, almost always expresses itself in a desireafter a kind of vagabond beneficence, a desire to go through the worldscattering goodness like a capricious god. It is desired that mankindshould hunt in vain for its best friend as it would hunt for acriminal; that he should be an anonymous Saviour, an unrecordedChrist. Browning, like every one else, when awakened to the beautyand variety of men, dreamed of this arrogant self-effacement. He haswritten of himself that he had long thought vaguely of a being passingthrough the world, obscure and unnameable, but moulding the destiniesof others to mightier and better issues. Then his almost faultlessartistic instinct came in and suggested that this being, whom hedramatised as the work-girl, Pippa, should be even unconscious ofanything but her own happiness, and should sway men's lives with alonely mirth. It was a bold and moving conception to show us thesemature and tragic human groups all at the supreme moment eavesdroppingupon the solitude of a child. And it was an even more precise instinctwhich made Browning make the errant benefactor a woman. A man's goodwork is effected by doing what he does, a woman's by being what sheis. 

There is one other point about _Pippa Passes_ which is worth amoment's attention. The great difficulty with regard to theunderstanding of Browning is the fact that, to all appearance, scarcely any one can be induced to take him seriously as a literaryartist. His adversaries consider his literary vagaries adisqualification for every position among poets; and his admirersregard those vagaries with the affectionate indulgence of a circle ofmaiden aunts towards a boy home for the holidays. Browning is supposedto do as he likes with form, because he had such a profound scheme ofthought. But, as a matter of fact, though few of his followers willtake Browning's literary form seriously, he took his own literary formvery seriously. Now _Pippa Passes_ is, among other things, eminentlyremarkable as a very original artistic form, a series of disconnectedbut dramatic scenes which have only in common the appearance of onefigure. For this admirable literary departure Browning, amid all thelaudations of his "mind" and his "message, " has scarcely ever hadcredit. And just as we should, if we took Browning seriously as apoet, see that he had made many noble literary forms, so we shouldalso see that he did make from time to time certain definite literarymistakes. There is one of them, a glaring one, in _Pippa Passes_; and, as far as I know, no critic has ever thought enough of Browning as anartist to point it out. It is a gross falsification of the wholebeauty of _Pippa Passes_ to make the Monseigneur and his accomplice inthe last act discuss a plan touching the fate of Pippa herself. Thewhole central and splendid idea of the drama is the fact that Pippa isutterly remote from the grand folk whose lives she troubles andtransforms. To make her in the end turn out to be the niece of one ofthem, is like a whiff from an Adelphi melodrama, an excellent thing inits place, but destructive of the entire conception of Pippa. Havingdone that, Browning might just as well have made Sebald turn out to beher long lost brother, and Luigi a husband to whom she was secretlymarried. Browning made this mistake when his own splendid artisticpower was only growing, and its merits and its faults in a tangle. Butits real literary merits and its real literary faults have alikeremained unrecognised under the influence of that unfortunateintellectualism which idolises Browning as a metaphysician andneglects him as a poet. But a better test was coming. Browning'spoetry, in the most strictly poetical sense, reached its flower in_Dramatic Lyrics_, published in 1842. Here he showed himself apicturesque and poignant artist in a wholly original manner. And thetwo main characteristics of the work were the two characteristics mostcommonly denied to Browning, both by his opponents and his followers, passion and beauty; but beauty had enlarged her boundaries in newmodes of dramatic arrangement, and passion had found new voices infantastic and realistic verse. Those who suppose Browning to be awholly philosophic poet, number a great majority of his commentators. But when we come to look at the actual facts, they are strangely andalmost unexpectedly otherwise. 

Let any one who believes in the arrogantly intellectual character ofBrowning's poetry run through the actual repertoire of the _DramaticLyrics_. The first item consists of those splendid war chants called"Cavalier Tunes. " I do not imagine that any one will maintain thatthere is any very mysterious metaphysical aim in them. The second itemis the fine poem "The Lost Leader, " a poem which expresses inperfectly lucid and lyrical verse a perfectly normal and old-fashionedindignation. It is the same, however far we carry the query. Whattheory does the next poem, "How they brought the Good News from Ghentto Aix, " express, except the daring speculation that it is oftenexciting to ride a good horse in Belgium? What theory does the poemafter that, "Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr, " express, except thatit is also frequently exciting to ride a good horse in Africa? Thencomes "Nationality in Drinks, " a mere technical oddity without a gleamof philosophy; and after that those two entirely exquisite "GardenFancies, " the first of which is devoted to the abstruse thesis that awoman may be charming, and the second to the equally abstruse thesisthat a book may be a bore. Then comes "The Soliloquy of the SpanishCloister, " from which the most ingenious "Browning student" cannotextract anything except that people sometimes hate each other inSpain; and then "The Laboratory, " from which he could extract nothingexcept that people sometimes hate each other in France. This is aperfectly honest record of the poems as they stand. And the firsteleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obviouscharacteristics--first, that they contain not even a suggestion ofanything that could be called philosophy; and second, that theycontain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poemsthat Browning ever wrote. It may be repeated that either he wrotethese lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible tohazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them. 

It is permissible to say that the _Dramatic Lyrics_ represent thearrival of the real Browning of literary history. It is true that hehad written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitiousplan--_Paracelsus_ with its splendid version of the faults of theintellectual, _Pippa Passes_ with its beautiful deification ofunconscious influence. But youth is always ambitious and universal;mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special typeand colour of work which a man is destined to do. Youth is universal, but not individual. The genius who begins life with a very genuine andsincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolisedviolinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of moderntimes, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, afterall, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating NurseryRhymes, which he can really do better than any one else. This was whathappened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover firstthe universe, and then humanity, and at last himself. With him, aswith all others, the great paradox and the great definition of lifewas this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands. In _DramaticLyrics_ he discovered the one thing that he could really do betterthan any one else--the dramatic lyric. The form is absolutelyoriginal: he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centreof that field he had found himself. 

The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a littledifficult to describe. But its general characteristic is the fearlessand most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublimeemotions. The best and most characteristic of the poems arelove-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland ofyouth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poetsof love. The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapidsurvey of Browning's love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats. But in this new method he thoroughly expressedthe true essential, the insatiable realism of passion. If any onewished to prove that Browning was not, as he is said to be, the poetof thought, but pre-eminently one of the poets of passion, we couldscarcely find a better evidence of this profoundly passionate elementthan Browning's astonishing realism in love poetry. There is nothingso fiercely realistic as sentiment and emotion. Thought and theintellect are content to accept abstractions, summaries, andgeneralisations; they are content that ten acres of ground should becalled for the sake of argument X, and ten widows' incomes called forthe sake of argument Y; they are content that a thousand awful andmysterious disappearances from the visible universe should be summedup as the mortality of a district, or that ten thousand intoxicationsof the soul should bear the general name of the instinct of sex. Rationalism can live upon air and signs and numbers. But sentimentmust have reality; emotion demands the real fields, the real widows'homes, the real corpse, and the real woman. And therefore Browning'slove poetry is the finest love poetry in the world, because it doesnot talk about raptures and ideals and gates of heaven, but aboutwindow-panes and gloves and garden walls. It does not deal much withabstractions; it is the truest of all love poetry, because it does notspeak much about love. It awakens in every man the memories of thatimmortal instant when common and dead things had a meaning beyond thepower of any dictionary to utter, and a value beyond the power of anymillionaire to compute. He expresses the celestial time when a mandoes not think about heaven, but about a parasol. And therefore he is, first, the greatest of love poets, and, secondly, the only optimisticphilosopher except Whitman. 

The general accusation against Browning in connection with his use ofthe grotesque comes in very definitely here; for in using these homelyand practical images, these allusions, bordering on what many wouldcall the commonplace, he was indeed true to the actual and abidingspirit of love. In that delightful poem "Youth and Art" we have thesinging girl saying to her old lover--

 "No harm! It was not my fault If you never turned your eye's tail up As I shook upon E _in alt_, Or ran the chromatic scale up. "

This is a great deal more like the real chaff that passes betweenthose whose hearts are full of new hope or of old memory than half thegreat poems of the world. Browning never forgets the little detailswhich to a man who has ever really lived may suddenly send an arrowthrough the heart. Take, for example, such a matter as dress, as it istreated in "A Lover's Quarrel. "

 "See, how she looks now, dressed In a sledging cap and vest! 'Tis a huge fur cloak-- Like a reindeer's yoke Falls the lappet along the breast: Sleeves for her arms to rest, Or to hang, as my Love likes best. "

That would almost serve as an order to a dressmaker, and is thereforepoetry, or at least excellent poetry of this order. So great a powerhave these dead things of taking hold on the living spirit, that Iquestion whether any one could read through the catalogue of amiscellaneous auction sale without coming upon things which, ifrealised for a moment, would be near to the elemental tears. And ifany of us or all of us are truly optimists, and believe as Browningdid, that existence has a value wholly inexpressible, we are mosttruly compelled to that sentiment not by any argument or triumphantjustification of the cosmos, but by a few of these momentary andimmortal sights and sounds, a gesture, an old song, a portrait, apiano, an old door. 

In 1843 appeared that marvellous drama _The Return of the Druses_, awork which contains more of Browning's typical qualities exhibited inan exquisite literary shape, than can easily be counted. We have in_The Return of the Druses_ his love of the corners of history, hisinterest in the religious mind of the East, with its almost terrifyingsense of being in the hand of heaven, his love of colour and verballuxury, of gold and green and purple, which made some think he must bean Oriental himself. But, above all, it presents the first rise ofthat great psychological ambition which Browning was thenceforth topursue. In _Pauline_ and the poems that follow it, Browning has onlythe comparatively easy task of giving an account of himself. In _PippaPasses_ he has the only less easy task of giving an account ofhumanity. In _The Return of the Druses_ he has for the first time thetask which is so much harder than giving an account of humanity--thetask of giving an account of a human being. Djabal, the great Orientalimpostor, who is the central character of the play, is a peculiarlysubtle character, a compound of blasphemous and lying assumptions ofGodhead with genuine and stirring patriotic and personal feelings: heis a blend, so to speak, of a base divinity and of a noble humanity. He is supremely important in the history of Browning's mind, for he isthe first of that great series of the apologiæ of apparently evil men, on which the poet was to pour out so much of his imaginativewealth--Djabal, Fra Lippo, Bishop Blougram, Sludge, PrinceHohenstiel-Schwangau, and the hero of _Fifine at the Fair_. 

With this play, so far as any point can be fixed for the matter, heenters for the first time on the most valuable of all his labours--thedefence of the indefensible. It may be noticed that Browning was notin the least content with the fact that certain human frailties hadalways lain more or less under an implied indulgence; that all humansentiment had agreed that a profligate might be generous, or that adrunkard might be high-minded. He was insatiable: he wished to gofurther and show in a character like Djabal that an impostor might begenerous and that a liar might be high-minded. In all his life, itmust constantly be remembered, he tried always the most difficultthings. Just as he tried the queerest metres and attempted to managethem, so he tried the queerest human souls and attempted to stand intheir place. Charity was his basic philosophy; but it was, as it were, a fierce charity, a charity that went man-hunting. He was a kind ofcosmic detective who walked into the foulest of thieves' kitchens andaccused men publicly of virtue. The character of Djabal in _The Returnof the Druses_ is the first of this long series of forlorn hopes forthe relief of long surrendered castles of misconduct. As we shall see, even realising the humanity of a noble impostor like Djabal did notcontent his erratic hunger for goodness. He went further again, andrealised the humanity of a mean impostor like Sludge. But in allthings he retained this essential characteristic, that he was notcontent with seeking sinners--he sought the sinners whom even sinnerscast out. 

Browning's feeling of ambition in the matter of the drama continued togrow at this time. It must be remembered that he had every naturaltendency to be theatrical, though he lacked the essential lucidity. He was not, as a matter of fact, a particularly unsuccessfuldramatist; but in the world of abstract temperaments he was by naturean unsuccessful dramatist. He was, that is to say, a man who lovedabove all things plain and sensational words, open catastrophes, aclear and ringing conclusion to everything. But it so happened, unfortunately, that his own words were not plain; that hiscatastrophes came with a crashing and sudden unintelligibleness whichleft men in doubt whether the thing were a catastrophe or a greatstroke of good luck; that his conclusion, though it rang like atrumpet to the four corners of heaven, was in its actual message quiteinaudible. We are bound to admit, on the authority of all his bestcritics and admirers, that his plays were not failures, but we can allfeel that they should have been. He was, as it were, by nature aneglected dramatist. He was one of those who achieve the reputation, in the literal sense, of eccentricity by their frantic efforts toreach the centre. 

_A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_ followed _The Return of the Druses_. Inconnection with the performance of this very fine play a quarrel arosewhich would not be worth mentioning if it did not happen to illustratethe curious energetic simplicity of Browning's character. Macready, who was in desperately low financial circumstances at this time, triedby every means conceivable to avoid playing the part; he dodged, heshuffled, he tried every evasion that occurred to him, but it neveroccurred to Browning to see what he meant. He pushed off the part uponPhelps, and Browning was contented; he resumed it, and Browning wasonly discontented on behalf of Phelps. The two had a quarrel; theywere both headstrong, passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirelywith the unfortunate condition of Phelps. Browning beat down his ownhat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning's manuscript with a slapupon the floor. But all the time it never occurred to the poet thatMacready's conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as adesire for money. Browning was in fact by his principles and hisideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise. That worldlyease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal. He wasas it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfectsanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair. There was in him aquality which can only be most delicately described; for it was avirtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest ofvices. Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can besaid violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob. Hewas fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth: but there is nosnobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them forthe right reasons. He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them:he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert. He borethe same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to thePharisee: something frightfully close and similar and yet aneverlasting opposite. 

CHAPTER III

BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE

Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of thosefaults has been previously suggested. The chief of his faults, acertain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he wasstrongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet yearsbefore his death. But any one who wishes to understand how deep wasthe elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundlyworthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only studyone most striking and determining element in the question--Browning'ssimple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people. He wasone of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certainpeculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects. Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a verystrenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestnessand air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certainalmost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of otherinfluences. Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently withoutthe least affectation, all the influences of his day. A veryinteresting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasurein a university dinner. "Praise, " he says in effect, "was given verydeservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride ofOxford men, Clough. " The really striking thing about these three namesis the fact that they are united in Browning's praise in a way inwhich they are by no means united in each other's. Matthew Arnold, inone of his extant letters, calls Swinburne "a young pseudo-Shelley, "who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good bymaking them modern. Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarisedClough in a contemptuous rhyme:--

 "There was a bad poet named Clough, Whom his friends all united to puff. But the public, though dull, Has not quite such a skull As belongs to believers in Clough. "

The same general fact will be found through the whole of Browning'slife and critical attitude. He adored Shelley, and also Carlyle whosneered at him. He delighted in Mill, and also in Ruskin who rebelledagainst Mill. He excused Napoleon III. And Landor who hurledinterminable curses against Napoleon. He admired all the cycle ofgreat men who all contemned each other. To say that he had no streakof envy in his nature would be true, but unfair; for there is nojustification for attributing any of these great men's opinions toenvy. But Browning was really unique, in that he had a certainspontaneous and unthinking tendency to the admiration of others. Headmired another poet as he admired a fading sunset or a chance springleaf. He no more thought whether he could be as good as that man inthat department than whether he could be redder than the sunset orgreener than the leaf of spring. He was naturally magnanimous in theliteral sense of that sublime word; his mind was so great that itrejoiced in the triumphs of strangers. In this spirit Browning hadalready cast his eyes round in the literary world of his time, and hadbeen greatly and justifiably struck with the work of a young ladypoet, Miss Barrett. 

That impression was indeed amply justified. In a time when it wasthought necessary for a lady to dilute the wine of poetry to its veryweakest tint, Miss Barrett had contrived to produce poetry which wasopen to literary objection as too heady and too high-coloured. Whenshe erred it was through an Elizabethan audacity and luxuriance, astraining after violent metaphors. With her reappeared in poetry acertain element which had not been present in it since the last daysof Elizabethan literature, the fusion of the most elementary humanpassion with something which can only be described as wit, a certainlove of quaint and sustained similes, of parallels wildly logical, andof brazen paradox and antithesis. We find this hot wit, as distinctfrom the cold wit of the school of Pope, in the puns and buffooneriesof Shakespeare. We find it lingering in _Hudibras_, and we do not findit again until we come to such strange and strong lines as these ofElizabeth Barrett in her poem on Napoleon:--

 "Blood fell like dew beneath his sunrise--sooth, But glittered dew-like in the covenanted And high-rayed light. He was a despot--granted, But the [Greek: autos] of his autocratic mouth Said 'Yea' i' the people's French! He magnified The image of the freedom he denied. "

Her poems are full of quaint things, of such things as the eyes in thepeacock fans of the Vatican, which she describes as winking at theItalian tricolor. She often took the step from the sublime to theridiculous: but to take this step one must reach the sublime. Elizabeth Barrett contrived to assert, what still needs but thenurgently needed assertion, the fact that womanliness, whether in lifeor poetry, was a positive thing, and not the negative of manliness. Her verse at its best was quite as strong as Browning's own, and verynearly as clever. The difference between their natures was adifference between two primary colours, not between dark and lightshades of the same colour. 

Browning had often heard not only of the public, but of the privatelife of this lady from his father's friend Kenyon. The old man, whowas one of those rare and valuable people who have a talent forestablishing definite relationships with people after a comparativelyshort intercourse, had been appointed by Miss Barrett as her "fairygodfather. " He spoke much about her to Browning, and of Browning toher, with a certain courtly garrulity which was one of his talents. And there could be little doubt that the two poets would have met longbefore had it not been for certain peculiarities in the position ofMiss Barrett. She was an invalid, and an invalid of a somewhat uniquekind, and living beyond all question under very unique circumstances. 

Her father, Edward Moulton Barrett, had been a landowner in the WestIndies, and thus, by a somewhat curious coincidence, had borne a partin the same social system which stung Browning's father into revoltand renunciation. The parts played by Edward Barrett, however, thoughlittle or nothing is known of it, was probably very different. He wasa man Conservative by nature, a believer in authority in the nationand the family, and endowed with some faculties for making hisconceptions prevail. He was an able man, capable in his language of acertain bitter felicity of phrase. He was rigidly upright andresponsible, and he had a capacity for profound affection. Butselfishness of the most perilous sort, an unconscious selfishness, waseating away his moral foundations, as it tends to eat away those ofall despots. His most fugitive moods changed and controlled the wholeatmosphere of the house, and the state of things was fully asoppressive in the case of his good moods as in the case of his badones. He had, what is perhaps the subtlest and worst spirit ofegotism, not that spirit merely which thinks that nothing should standin the way of its ill-temper, but that spirit which thinks thatnothing should stand in the way of its amiability. His daughters mustbe absolutely at his beck and call, whether it was to be brow-beatenor caressed. During the early years of Elizabeth Barrett's life, thefamily had lived in the country, and for that brief period she hadknown a more wholesome life than she was destined ever to know againuntil her marriage long afterwards. She was not, as is the generalpopular idea, absolutely a congenital invalid, weak, and almostmoribund from the cradle. In early girlhood she was slight andsensitive indeed, but perfectly active and courageous. She was a goodhorsewoman, and the accident which handicapped her for so many yearsafterwards happened to her when she was riding. The injury to herspine, however, will be found, the more we study her history, to beonly one of the influences which were to darken those bedridden years, and to have among them a far less important place than has hithertobeen attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in WimpoleStreet; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as timewent on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a mannercompounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was notpermitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms toher bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholyglee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. Shewas surrounded by that most poisonous and degrading of allatmospheres--a medical atmosphere. The existence of this atmospherehas nothing to do with the actual nature or prolongation of disease. Aman may pass three hours out of every five in a state of bad health, and yet regard, as Stevenson regarded, the three hours as exceptionaland the two as normal. But the curse that lay on the Barrett householdwas the curse of considering ill-health the natural condition of ahuman being. The truth was that Edward Barrett was living emotionallyand æsthetically, like some detestable decadent poet, upon hisdaughter's decline. He did not know this, but it was so. Scenes, explanations, prayers, fury, and forgiveness had become bread and meatfor which he hungered; and when the cloud was upon his spirit, hewould lash out at all things and every one with the insatiable crueltyof the sentimentalist. 

It is wonderful that Elizabeth Barrett was not made thoroughly morbidand impotent by this intolerable violence and more intolerabletenderness. In her estimate of her own health she did, of course, suffer. It is evident that she practically believed herself to bedying. But she was a high-spirited woman, full of that silent andquite unfathomable kind of courage which is only found in women, andshe took a much more cheerful view of death than her father did oflife. Silent rooms, low voices, lowered blinds, long days ofloneliness, and of the sickliest kind of sympathy, had not tamed aspirit which was swift and headlong to a fault. She could still ownwith truth the magnificent fact that her chief vice was impatience, "tearing open parcels instead of untying them;" looking at the end ofbooks before she had read them was, she said, incurable with her. Itis difficult to imagine anything more genuinely stirring than theachievement of this woman, who thus contrived, while possessing allthe excuses of an invalid, to retain some of the faults of a tomboy. 

Impetuosity, vividness, a certain absoluteness and urgency in herdemands, marked her in the eyes of all who came in contact with her. In after years, when Browning had experimentally shaved his beard off, she told him with emphatic gestures that it must be grown again "thatminute. " There we have very graphically the spirit which tears openparcels. Not in vain, or as a mere phrase, did her husband after herdeath describe her as "all a wonder and a wild desire. "

She had, of course, lived her second and real life in literature andthe things of the mind, and this in a very genuine and strenuoussense. Her mental occupations were not mere mechanical accomplishmentsalmost as colourless as the monotony they relieved, nor were theycoloured in any visible manner by the unwholesome atmosphere in whichshe breathed. She used her brains seriously; she was a good Greekscholar, and read Æschylus and Euripides unceasingly with her blindfriend, Mr. Boyd; and she had, and retained even to the hour of herdeath, a passionate and quite practical interest in great publicquestions. Naturally she was not uninterested in Robert Browning, butit does not appear that she felt at this time the same kind of fieryartistic curiosity that he felt about her. He does appear to have feltan attraction, which may almost be called mystical, for thepersonality which was shrouded from the world by such sombre curtains. In 1845 he addressed a letter to her in which he spoke of a formeroccasion on which they had nearly met, and compared it to thesensation of having once been outside the chapel of some marvellousillumination and found the door barred against him. In that phrase itis easy to see how much of the romantic boyhood of Browning remainedinside the resolute man of the world into which he was to all externalappearance solidifying. Miss Barrett replied to his letters withcharming sincerity and humour, and with much of that leisurelyself-revelation which is possible for an invalid who has nothing elseto do. She herself, with her love of quiet and intellectualcompanionship, would probably have been quite happy for the rest ofher life if their relations had always remained a learned anddelightful correspondence. But she must have known very little ofRobert Browning if she imagined he would be contented with this airyand bloodless tie. At all times of his life he was sufficiently fondof his own way; at this time he was especially prompt and impulsive, and he had always a great love for seeing and hearing and feelingpeople, a love of the physical presence of friends, which made himslap men on the back and hit them in the chest when he was very fondof them. The correspondence between the two poets had not long begunwhen Browning suggested something which was almost a blasphemy in theBarrett household, that he should come and call on her as he would onany one else. This seems to have thrown her into a flutter of fear anddoubt. She alleges all kinds of obstacles, the chief of which were herhealth and the season of the year and the east winds. "If my truestheart's wishes avail, " replied Browning obstinately, "you shall laughat east winds yet as I do. "

Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which haswithin comparatively recent years been placed before the world. It isa correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises manyprofound questions. 

It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in theseremarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of twospirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying atleast a word about the moral question raised by their publication andthe many expressions of disapproval which it entails. To the mind ofthe present writer the whole of such a question should be tested byone perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison. I am notprepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in theworld anything that is too sacred to be known. That spiritual beautyand spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that theyshould be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of everyconceivable religion. Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in acavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as theordinary name of a daily paper. Whenever, therefore, a poet or anysimilar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all menpartakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imaginenothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so. Thus itwas that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl's nod inthe streets of Florence. Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisationby keeping an ethical diary. But the one essential which exists in allsuch cases as these is that the man in question believes that he canmake the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and hechooses his words to that end. Yet when a work contains expressionswhich have one value and significance when read by the people to whomthey were addressed, and an entirely different value and significancewhen read by any one else, then the element of the violation ofsanctity does arise. It is not because there is anything in this worldtoo sacred to tell. It is rather because there are a great many thingsin this world too sacred to parody. If Browning could really convey tothe world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see noreason why he should not. But the objection to letters which begin "Mydear Ba, " is that they do not convey anything of the sort. As far asany third person is concerned, Browning might as well have beenexpressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect ofthe Cherokees. Objection to the publication of such passages as that, in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of theBrownings, but that they do not tell us about it. 

Upon this principle it is obvious that there should have been aselection among the Letters, but not a selection which should excludeanything merely because it was ardent and noble. If Browning or Mrs. Browning had not desired any people to know that they were fond ofeach other, they would not have written and published "One Word More"or "The Sonnets from the Portuguese. " Nay, they would not have beenmarried in a public church, for every one who is married in a churchdoes make a confession of love of absolutely national publicity, andtacitly, therefore, repudiates any idea that such confessions are toosacred for the world to know. The ridiculous theory that men shouldhave no noble passions or sentiments in public may have been designedto make private life holy and undefiled, but it has had very littleactual effect except to make public life cynical and preposterouslyunmeaning. But the words of a poem or the words of the EnglishMarriage Service, which are as fine as many poems, is a languagedignified and deliberately intended to be understood by all. If thebride and bridegroom in church, instead of uttering those words, wereto utter a poem compounded of private allusions to the foibles of AuntMatilda, or of childish secrets which they would tell each other in alane, it would be a parallel case to the publication of some of theBrowning Letters. Why the serious and universal portions of thoseLetters could not be published without those which are to us idle andunmeaning it is difficult to understand. Our wisdom, whether expressedin private or public, belongs to the world, but our folly belongs tothose we love. 

There is at least one peculiarity in the Browning Letters which tendsto make their publication far less open to objection than almost anyother collection of love letters which can be imagined. The ordinarysentimentalist who delights in the most emotional of magazineinterviews, will not be able to get much satisfaction out of them, because he and many persons more acute will be quite unable to makehead or tail of three consecutive sentences. In this respect it is themost extraordinary correspondence in the world. There seem to be onlytwo main rules for this form of letter-writing: the first is, that ifa sentence can begin with a parenthesis it always should; and thesecond is, that if you have written from a third to half of a sentenceyou need never in any case write any more. It would be amusing towatch any one who felt an idle curiosity as to the language andsecrets of lovers opening the Browning Letters. He would probably comeupon some such simple and lucid passage as the following: "I ought towait, say a week at least, having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs. .. . But not being Phoibos Apollon, youare to know further that when I _did_ think I might go modestly on . .. [Greek: ômoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mindwith what dislocated ankles. "

What our imaginary sentimentalist would make of this tender passage itis difficult indeed to imagine. The only plain conclusion whichappears to emerge from the words is the somewhat curious one--thatBrowning was in the habit of taking a gun down to Wimpole Street andof demolishing the live stock on those somewhat unpromising premises. Nor will he be any better enlightened if he turns to the reply ofMiss Barrett, which seems equally dominated with the great centralidea of the Browning correspondence that the most enlighteningpassages in a letter consist of dots. She replies in a letterfollowing the above: "But if it could be possible that you should meanto say you would show me. . . . Can it be? or am I reading this 'Atticcontraction' quite the wrong way. You see I am afraid of thedifference between flattering myself and being flattered . . . Thefatal difference. And now will you understand that I should be toooverjoyed to have revelations from the Portfolio . . . Howeverincarnated with blots and pen scratches . . . To be able to askimpudently of them now? Is that plain?" Most probably she thought itwas. 

With regard to Browning himself this characteristic is comparativelynatural and appropriate. Browning's prose was in any case the mostroundabout affair in the world. Those who knew him say that he wouldoften send an urgent telegram from which it was absolutely impossibleto gather where the appointment was, or when it was, or what was itsobject. This fact is one of the best of all arguments against thetheory of Browning's intellectual conceit. A man would have to besomewhat abnormally conceited in order to spend sixpence for thepleasure of sending an unintelligible communication to the dislocationof his own plans. The fact was, that it was part of the machinery ofhis brain that things came out of it, as it were, backwards. The words"tail foremost" express Browning's style with something more than aconventional accuracy. The tail, the most insignificant part of ananimal, is also often the most animated and fantastic. An utterance ofBrowning is often like a strange animal walking backwards, whoflourishes his tail with such energy that every one takes it for hishead. He was in other words, at least in his prose and practicalutterances, more or less incapable of telling a story without tellingthe least important thing first. If a man who belonged to an Italiansecret society, one local branch of which bore as a badge anolive-green ribbon, had entered his house, and in some sensationalinterview tried to bribe or blackmail him, he would have told thestory with great energy and indignation, but he would have beenincapable of beginning with anything except the question of the colourof olives. His whole method was founded both in literature and lifeupon the principle of the "ex pede Herculem, " and at the beginning ofhis description of Hercules the foot appears some sizes larger thanthe hero. It is, in short, natural enough that Browning should havewritten his love letters obscurely, since he wrote his letters to hispublisher and his solicitor obscurely. In the case of Mrs. Browning itis somewhat more difficult to understand. For she at least had, beyondall question, a quite simple and lucent vein of humour, which does noteasily reconcile itself with this subtlety. But she was partly underthe influence of her own quality of passionate ingenuity or emotionalwit of which we have already taken notice in dealing with her poems, and she was partly also no doubt under the influence of Browning. Whatever was the reason, their correspondence was not of the sortwhich can be pursued very much by the outside public. Their lettersmay be published a hundred times over, they still remain private. Theywrite to each other in a language of their own, an almostexasperatingly impressionist language, a language chiefly consistingof dots and dashes and asterisks and italics, and brackets and notesof interrogation. Wordsworth when he heard afterwards of theireventual elopement said with that slight touch of bitterness he alwaysused in speaking of Browning, "So Robert Browning and Miss Barretthave gone off together. I hope they understand each other--nobody elsewould. " It would be difficult to pay a higher compliment to amarriage. Their common affection for Kenyon was a great element intheir lives and in their correspondence. "I have a convenient theoryto account for Mr. Kenyon, " writes Browning mysteriously, "and hisotherwise unaccountable kindness to me. " "For Mr. Kenyon's kindness, "retorts Elizabeth Barrett, "no theory will account. I class it withmesmerism for that reason. " There is something very dignified andbeautiful about the simplicity of these two poets vying with eachother in giving adequate praise to the old dilettante, of whom theworld would never have heard but for them. Browning's feeling for himwas indeed especially strong and typical. "There, " he said, pointingafter the old man as he left the room, "there goes one of the mostsplendid men living--a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish inhis hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves tobe known all over the world as 'Kenyon the Magnificent. '" There issomething thoroughly worthy of Browning at his best in this feeling, not merely of the use of sociability, or of the charm of sociability, but of the magnificence, the heroic largeness of real sociability. Being himself a warm champion of the pleasures of society, he saw inKenyon a kind of poetic genius for the thing, a mission ofsuperficial philanthropy. He is thoroughly to be congratulated on thefact that he had grasped the great but now neglected truth, that a manmay actually be great, yet not in the least able. 

Browning's desire to meet Miss Barrett was received on her side, ashas been stated, with a variety of objections. The chief of these wasthe strangely feminine and irrational reason that she was not worthseeing, a point on which the seeker for an interview might bepermitted to form his own opinion. "There is nothing to see in me; norto hear in me. --I never learned to talk as you do in London; althoughI can admire that brightness of carved speech in Mr. Kenyon andothers. If my poetry is worth anything to any eye, it is the flower ofme. I have lived most and been most happy in it, and so it has all mycolours; the rest of me is nothing but a root, fit for the ground anddark. " The substance of Browning's reply was to the effect, "I willcall at two on Tuesday. "

They met on May 20, 1845. A short time afterwards he had fallen inlove with her and made her an offer of marriage. To a person in thedomestic atmosphere of the Barretts, the incident would appear to havebeen paralysing. "I will tell you what I once said in jest . .. " shewrites, "If a prince of El Dorado should come with a pedigree oflineal descent from some signory in the moon in one hand and a ticketof good behaviour from the nearest Independent chapel in theother!--'Why, even _then_, ' said my sister Arabel, 'it would not_do_. ' And she was right; we all agreed that she was right. "

This may be taken as a fairly accurate description of the real stateof Mr. Barrett's mind on one subject. It is illustrative of the verybest and breeziest side of Elizabeth Barrett's character that shecould be so genuinely humorous over so tragic a condition of the humanmind. 

Browning's proposals were, of course, as matters stood, of a characterto dismay and repel all those who surrounded Elizabeth Barrett. It wasnot wholly a matter of the fancies of her father. The whole of herfamily, and most probably the majority of her medical advisers, didseriously believe at this time that she was unfit to be moved, to saynothing of being married, and that a life passed between a bed and asofa, and avoiding too frequent and abrupt transitions even from oneto the other, was the only life she could expect on this earth. Almostalone in holding another opinion and in urging her to a more vigorousview of her condition, stood Browning himself. "But you are better, "he would say; "you look so and speak so. " Which of the two opinionswas right is of course a complex medical matter into which a book likethis has neither the right nor the need to enter. But this much may bestated as a mere question of fact. In the summer of 1846 ElizabethBarrett was still living under the great family convention whichprovided her with nothing but an elegant deathbed, forbidden to move, forbidden to see proper daylight, forbidden to receive a friend lestthe shock should destroy her suddenly. A year or two later, in Italy, as Mrs. Browning, she was being dragged up hill in a wine hamper, toiling up to the crests of mountains at four o'clock in the morning, riding for five miles on a donkey to what she calls "an inaccessiblevolcanic ground not far from the stars. " It is perfectly incrediblethat any one so ill as her family believed her to be should havelived this life for twenty-four hours. Something must be allowed forthe intoxication of a new tie and a new interest in life. But suchexaltations can in their nature hardly last a month, and Mrs. Browninglived for fifteen years afterwards in infinitely better health thanshe had ever known before. In the light of modern knowledge it is notvery difficult or very presumptuous, of us to guess that she had beenin her father's house to some extent inoculated with hysteria, thatstrange affliction which some people speak of as if it meant theabsence of disease, but which is in truth the most terrible of alldiseases. It must be remembered that in 1846 little or nothing wasknown of spine complaints such as that from which Elizabeth Barrettsuffered, less still of the nervous conditions they create, and leastof all of hysterical phenomena. In our day she would have been orderedair and sunlight and activity, and all the things the mere idea ofwhich chilled the Barretts with terror. In our day, in short, it wouldhave been recognised that she was in the clutch of a form of neurosiswhich exhibits every fact of a disease except its origin, that strangepossession which makes the body itself a hypocrite. Those whosurrounded Miss Barrett knew nothing of this, and Browning knewnothing of it; and probably if he knew anything, knew less than theydid. Mrs. Orr says, probably with a great deal of truth, that ofill-health and its sensations he remained "pathetically ignorant" tohis dying day. But devoid as he was alike of expert knowledge andpersonal experience, without a shadow of medical authority, almostwithout anything that can be formally called a right to his opinion, he was, and remained, right. He at least saw, he indeed alone saw, tothe practical centre of the situation. He did not know anything abouthysteria or neurosis, or the influence of surroundings, but he knewthat the atmosphere of Mr. Barrett's house was not a fit thing for anyhuman being, alive, dying, or dead. His stand upon this matter hasreally a certain human interest, since it is an example of a thingwhich will from time to time occur, the interposition of the averageman to the confounding of the experts. Experts are undoubtedly rightnine times out of ten, but the tenth time comes, and we find inmilitary matters an Oliver Cromwell who will make every mistake knownto strategy and yet win all his battles, and in medical matters aRobert Browning whose views have not a technical leg to stand on andare entirely correct. 

But while Browning was thus standing alone in his view of the matter, while Edward Barrett had to all appearance on his side a phalanx ofall the sanities and respectabilities, there came suddenly a newdevelopment, destined to bring matters to a crisis indeed, and toweigh at least three souls in the balance. Upon further examination ofMiss Barrett's condition, the physicians had declared that it wasabsolutely necessary that she should be taken to Italy. This may, without any exaggeration, be called the turning-point and the lastgreat earthly opportunity of Barrett's character. He had notoriginally been an evil man, only a man who, being stoical inpractical things, permitted himself, to his great detriment, aself-indulgence in moral things. He had grown to regard his pious anddying daughter as part of the furniture of the house and of theuniverse. And as long as the great mass of authorities were on hisside, his illusion was quite pardonable. His crisis came when theauthorities changed their front, and with one accord asked hispermission to send his daughter abroad. It was his crisis, and herefused. 

He had, if we may judge from what we know of him, his own peculiar andsomewhat detestable way of refusing. Once when his daughter had askeda perfectly simple favour in a matter of expediency, permission, thatis, to keep her favourite brother with her during an illness, hersingular parent remarked that "she might keep him if she liked, butthat he had looked for greater self-sacrifice. " These were the weaponswith which he ruled his people. For the worst tyrant is not the manwho rules by fear; the worst tyrant is he who rules by love and playson it as on a harp. Barrett was one of the oppressors who havediscovered the last secret of oppression, that which is told in thefine verse of Swinburne:--

 "The racks of the earth and the rods Are weak as the foam on the sands; The heart is the prey for the gods, Who crucify hearts, not hands. "

He, with his terrible appeal to the vibrating consciences of women, was, with regard to one of them, very near to the end of his reign. When Browning heard that the Italian journey was forbidden, heproposed definitely that they should marry and go on the journeytogether. 

Many other persons had taken cognisance of the fact, and were activein the matter. Kenyon, the gentlest and most universally complimentaryof mortals, had marched into the house and given Arabella Barrett, the sister of the sick woman, his opinion of her father's conductwith a degree of fire and frankness which must have been perfectlyamazing in a man of his almost antiquated social delicacy. Mrs. Jameson, an old and generous friend of the family, had immediatelystepped in and offered to take Elizabeth to Italy herself, thusremoving all questions of expense or arrangement. She would appear tohave stood to her guns in the matter with splendid persistence andmagnanimity. She called day after day seeking for a change of mind, and delayed her own journey to the continent more than once. Atlength, when it became evident that the extraction of Mr. Barrett'sconsent was hopeless, she reluctantly began her own tour in Europealone. She went to Paris, and had not been there many days, when shereceived a formal call from Robert Browning and Elizabeth BarrettBrowning, who had been married for some days. Her astonishment israther a picturesque thing to think about. 

The manner in which this sensational elopement, which was, of course, the talk of the whole literary world, had been effected, is narrated, as every one knows, in the Browning Letters. Browning had decided thatan immediate marriage was the only solution; and having put his handto the plough, did not decline even when it became obviously necessarythat it should be a secret marriage. To a man of his somewhat stormilycandid and casual disposition this necessity of secrecy was reallyexasperating; but every one with any imagination or chivalry willrejoice that he accepted the evil conditions. He had always had thecourage to tell the truth; and now it was demanded of him to have thegreater courage to tell a lie, and he told it with perfectcheerfulness and lucidity. In thus disappearing surreptitiously withan invalid woman he was doing something against which there wereundoubtedly a hundred things to be said, only it happened that themost cogent and important thing of all was to be said for it. 

It is very amusing, and very significant in the matter of Browning'scharacter, to read the accounts which he writes to Elizabeth Barrettof his attitude towards the approaching _coup de théâtre_. In oneplace he says, suggestively enough, that he does not in the leasttrouble about the disapproval of her father; the man whom he fears asa frustrating influence is Kenyon. Mr. Barrett could only walk intothe room and fly into a passion; and this Browning could have receivedwith perfect equanimity. "But, " he says, "if Kenyon knows of thematter, I shall have the kindest and friendliest of explanations (withhis arm on my shoulder) of how I am ruining your social position, destroying your health, etc. , etc. " This touch is very suggestive ofthe power of the old worldling, who could manoeuvre with young peopleas well as Major Pendennis. Kenyon had indeed long been perfectlyaware of the way in which things were going; and the method he adoptedin order to comment on it is rather entertaining. In a conversationwith Elizabeth Barrett, he asked carelessly whether there was anythingbetween her sister and a certain Captain Cooke. On receiving asurprised reply in the negative, he remarked apologetically that hehad been misled into the idea by the gentleman calling so often at thehouse. Elizabeth Barrett knew perfectly well what he meant; but thelogical allusiveness of the attack reminds one of a fragment of someMeredithian comedy. 

The manner in which Browning bore himself in this acute andnecessarily dubious position is, perhaps, more thoroughly to hiscredit than anything else in his career. He never came out so well inall his long years of sincerity and publicity as he does in this oneact of deception. Having made up his mind to that act, he is notashamed to name it; neither, on the other hand, does he rant about it, and talk about Philistine prejudices and higher laws and brides in thesight of God, after the manner of the cockney decadent. He wasbreaking a social law, but he was not declaring a crusade againstsocial laws. We all feel, whatever may be our opinions on the matter, that the great danger of this kind of social opportunism, this pittingof a private necessity against a public custom, is that men aresomewhat too weak and self-deceptive to be trusted with such a powerof giving dispensations to themselves. We feel that men withoutmeaning to do so might easily begin by breaking a social by-law andend by being thoroughly anti-social. One of the best and most strikingthings to notice about Robert Browning is the fact that he did thisthing considering it as an exception, and that he contrived to leaveit really exceptional. It did not in the least degree break therounded clearness of his loyalty to social custom. It did not in theleast degree weaken the sanctity of the general rule. At a supremecrisis of his life he did an unconventional thing, and he lived anddied conventional. It would be hard to say whether he appears the morethoroughly sane in having performed the act, or in not having allowedit to affect him. 

Elizabeth Barrett gradually gave way under the obstinate and almostmonotonous assertion of Browning that this elopement was the onlypossible course of action. Before she finally agreed, however, she didsomething, which in its curious and impulsive symbolism, belongsalmost to a more primitive age. The sullen system of medical seclusionto which she had long been subjected has already been described. Themost urgent and hygienic changes were opposed by many on the groundthat it was not safe for her to leave her sofa and her sombre room. Onthe day on which it was necessary for her finally to accept or rejectBrowning's proposal, she called her sister to her, and to theamazement and mystification of that lady asked for a carriage. In thisshe drove into Regent's Park, alighted, walked on to the grass, andstood leaning against a tree for some moments, looking round her atthe leaves and the sky. She then entered the cab again, drove home, and agreed to the elopement. This was possibly the best poem that sheever produced. 

Browning arranged the eccentric adventure with a great deal ofprudence and knowledge of human nature. Early one morning in September1846 Miss Barrett walked quietly out of her father's house, becameMrs. Robert Browning in a church in Marylebone, and returned homeagain as if nothing had happened. In this arrangement Browning showedsome of that real insight into the human spirit which ought to make apoet the most practical of all men. The incident was, in the nature ofthings, almost overpoweringly exciting to his wife, in spite of thetruly miraculous courage with which she supported it; and he desired, therefore, to call in the aid of the mysteriously tranquillisingeffect of familiar scenes and faces. One trifling incident is worthmentioning which is almost unfathomably characteristic of Browning. Ithas already been remarked in these pages that he was pre-eminently oneof those men whose expanding opinions never alter by a hairsbreadththe actual ground-plan of their moral sense. Browning would have feltthe same things right and the same things wrong, whatever views he hadheld. During the brief and most trying period between his actualmarriage and his actual elopement, it is most significant that hewould not call at the house in Wimpole Street, because he would havebeen obliged to ask if Miss Barrett was disengaged. He was acting alie; he was deceiving a father; he was putting a sick woman to aterrible risk; and these things he did not disguise from himself for amoment, but he could not bring himself to say two words to amaidservant. Here there may be partly the feeling of the literary manfor the sacredness of the uttered word, but there is far more of acertain rooted traditional morality which it is impossible either todescribe or to justify. Browning's respectability was an older andmore primeval thing than the oldest and most primeval passions ofother men. If we wish to understand him, we must always remember thatin dealing with any of his actions we have not to ask whether theaction contains the highest morality, but whether we should have feltinclined to do it ourselves. 

At length the equivocal and exhausting interregnum was over. Mrs. Browning went for the second time almost on tiptoe out of her father'shouse, accompanied only by her maid and her dog, which was only justsuccessfully prevented from barking. Before the end of the day in allprobability Barrett had discovered that his dying daughter had fledwith Browning to Italy. 

They never saw him again, and hardly more than a faint echo came tothem of the domestic earthquake which they left behind them. They donot appear to have had many hopes, or to have made many attempts at areconciliation. Elizabeth Barrett had discovered at last that herfather was in truth not a man to be treated with; hardly, perhaps, even a man to be blamed. She knew to all intents and purposes that shehad grown up in the house of a madman. 

CHAPTER IV

BROWNING IN ITALY

The married pair went to Pisa in 1846, and moved soon afterwards toFlorence. Of the life of the Brownings in Italy there is much perhapsto be said in the way of description and analysis, little to be saidin the way of actual narrative. Each of them had passed through theone incident of existence. Just as Elizabeth Barrett's life had beforeher marriage been uneventfully sombre, now it was uneventfully happy. A succession of splendid landscapes, a succession of brilliantfriends, a succession of high and ardent intellectual interests, theyexperienced; but their life was of the kind that if it were told atall, would need to be told in a hundred volumes of gorgeousintellectual gossip. How Browning and his wife rode far into thecountry, eating strawberries and drinking milk out of the basins ofthe peasants; how they fell in with the strangest and most picturesquefigures of Italian society; how they climbed mountains and read booksand modelled in clay and played on musical instruments; how Browningwas made a kind of arbiter between two improvising Italian bards; howhe had to escape from a festivity when the sound of Garibaldi's hymnbrought the knocking of the Austrian police; these are the things ofwhich his life is full, trifling and picturesque things, a series ofinterludes, a beautiful and happy story, beginning and ending nowhere. The only incidents, perhaps, were the birth of their son and the deathof Browning's mother in 1849. 

It is well known that Browning loved Italy; that it was his adoptedcountry; that he said in one of the finest of his lyrics that the nameof it would be found written on his heart. But the particularcharacter of this love of Browning for Italy needs to be understood. There are thousands of educated Europeans who love Italy, who live init, who visit it annually, who come across a continent to see it, whohunt out its darkest picture and its most mouldering carving; but theyare all united in this, that they regard Italy as a dead place. It isa branch of their universal museum, a department of dry bones. Thereare rich and cultivated persons, particularly Americans, who seem tothink that they keep Italy, as they might keep an aviary or ahothouse, into which they might walk whenever they wanted a whiff ofbeauty. Browning did not feel at all in this manner; he wasintrinsically incapable of offering such an insult to the soul of anation. If he could not have loved Italy as a nation, he would nothave consented to love it as an old curiosity shop. In everything onearth, from the Middle Ages to the amoeba, who is discussed at suchlength in "Mr. Sludge the Medium, " he is interested in the life inthings. He was interested in the life in Italian art and in the lifein Italian politics. 

Perhaps the first and simplest example that can be given of thismatter is in Browning's interest in art. He was immeasurablyfascinated at all times by painting and sculpture, and his sojourn inItaly gave him, of course, innumerable and perfect opportunities forthe study of painting and sculpture. But his interest in these studieswas not like that of the ordinary cultured visitor to the Italiancities. Thousands of such visitors, for example, study those endlesslines of magnificent Pagan busts which are to be found in nearly allthe Italian galleries and museums, and admire them, and talk aboutthem, and note them in their catalogues, and describe them in theirdiaries. But the way in which they affected Browning is described verysuggestively in a passage in the letters of his wife. She describesherself as longing for her husband to write poems, beseeching him towrite poems, but finding all her petitions useless because her husbandwas engaged all day in modelling busts in clay and breaking them asfast as he made them. This is Browning's interest in art, the interestin a living thing, the interest in a growing thing, the insatiableinterest in how things are done. Every one who knows his admirablepoems on painting--"Fra Lippo Lippi" and "Andrea del Sarto" and"Pictor Ignotus"--will remember how fully they deal withtechnicalities, how they are concerned with canvas, with oil, with amess of colours. Sometimes they are so technical as to be mysteriousto the casual reader. An extreme case may be found in that of a lady Ionce knew who had merely read the title of "Pacchiarotto and how heworked in distemper, " and thought that Pacchiarotto was the name of adog, whom no attacks of canine disease could keep from the fulfilmentof his duty. These Browning poems do not merely deal with painting;they smell of paint. They are the works of a man to whom art is notwhat it is to so many of the non-professional lovers of art, a thingaccomplished, a valley of bones: to him it is a field of cropscontinually growing in a busy and exciting silence. Browning wasinterested, like some scientific man, in the obstetrics of art. Thereis a large army of educated men who can talk art with artists; butBrowning could not merely talk art with artists--he could talk shopwith them. Personally he may not have known enough about painting tobe more than a fifth-rate painter, or enough about the organ to bemore than a sixth-rate organist. But there are, when all is said anddone, some things which a fifth-rate painter knows which a first-rateart critic does not know; there are some things which a sixth-rateorganist knows which a first-rate judge of music does not know. Andthese were the things that Browning knew. 

He was, in other words, what is called an amateur. The word amateurhas come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea oftepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Nor isthis peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actualcharacteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire andreality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practises itwithout any hope of fame or money, but even practises it without anyhope of doing it well. Such a man must love the toils of the work morethan any other man can love the rewards of it. Browning was in thisstrict sense a strenuous amateur. He tried and practised in the courseof his life half a hundred things at which he can never have even fora moment expected to succeed. The story of his life is full of absurdlittle ingenuities, such as the discovery of a way of making picturesby roasting brown paper over a candle. In precisely the same spiritof fruitless vivacity, he made himself to a very considerable extent atechnical expert in painting, a technical expert in sculpture, atechnical expert in music. In his old age, he shows traces of being sobizarre a thing as an abstract police detective, writing at length inletters and diaries his views of certain criminal cases in an Italiantown. Indeed, his own _Ring and the Book_ is merely a sublimedetective story. He was in a hundred things this type of man; he wasprecisely in the position, with a touch of greater technical success, of the admirable figure in Stevenson's story who said, "I can play thefiddle nearly well enough to earn a living in the orchestra of a pennygaff, but not quite. "

The love of Browning for Italian art, therefore, was anything but anantiquarian fancy; it was the love of a living thing. We see the samephenomenon in an even more important matter--the essence andindividuality of the country itself. 

Italy to Browning and his wife was not by any means merely thatsculptured and ornate sepulchre that it is to so many of thosecultivated English men and women who live in Italy and enjoy andadmire and despise it. To them it was a living nation, the type andcentre of the religion and politics of a continent; the ancient andflaming heart of Western history, the very Europe of Europe. And theylived at the time of the most moving and gigantic of all dramas--themaking of a new nation, one of the things that makes men feel thatthey are still in the morning of the earth. Before their eyes, withevery circumstance of energy and mystery, was passing the panorama ofthe unification of Italy, with the bold and romantic militarism ofGaribaldi, the more bold and more romantic diplomacy of Cavour. Theylived in a time when affairs of State had almost the air of works ofart; and it is not strange that these two poets should have becomepoliticians in one of those great creative epochs when even thepoliticians have to be poets. 

Browning was on this question and on all the questions of continentaland English politics a very strong Liberal. This fact is not a meredetail of purely biographical interest, like any view he might take ofthe authorship of the "Eikon Basilike" or the authenticity of theTichborne claimant. Liberalism was so inevitably involved in thepoet's whole view of existence, that even a thoughtful and imaginativeConservative would feel that Browning was bound to be a Liberal. Hismind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth andenergy and in the ultimate utility of error. He held the great centralLiberal doctrine, a belief in a certain destiny of the human spiritbeyond, and perhaps even independent of, our own sincerestconvictions. The world was going right he felt, most probably in hisway, but certainly in its own way. The sonnet which he wrote in lateryears, entitled "Why I am a Liberal, " expresses admirably thisphilosophical root of his politics. It asks in effect how he, who hadfound truth in so many strange forms after so many strange wanderings, can be expected to stifle with horror the eccentricities of others. ALiberal may be defined approximately as a man who, if he could bywaving his hand in a dark room, stop the mouths of all the deceiversof mankind for ever, would not wave his hand. Browning was a Liberalin this sense. 

And just as the great Liberal movement which followed the FrenchRevolution made this claim for the liberty and personality of humanbeings, so it made it for the liberty and personality of nations. Itattached indeed to the independence of a nation something of the samewholly transcendental sanctity which humanity has in all legal systemsattached to the life of a man. The grounds were indeed much the same;no one could say absolutely that a live man was useless, and no onecould say absolutely that a variety of national life was useless ormust remain useless to the world. Men remembered how often barbaroustribes or strange and alien Scriptures had been called in to revivethe blood of decaying empires and civilisations. And this sense of thepersonality of a nation, as distinct from the personalities of allother nations, did not involve in the case of these old Liberalsinternational bitterness; for it is too often forgotten thatfriendship demands independence and equality fully as much as war. Butin them it led to great international partialities, to a great system, as it were, of adopted countries which made so thorough a Scotchman asCarlyle in love with Germany, and so thorough an Englishman asBrowning in love with Italy. 

And while on the one side of the struggle was this great ideal ofenergy and variety, on the other side was something which we now findit difficult to realise or describe. We have seen in our own time agreat reaction in favour of monarchy, aristocracy, andecclesiasticism, a reaction almost entirely noble in its instinct, and dwelling almostentirely on the best periods and the best qualities of the old_régime_. But the modern man, full of admiration for the great virtueof chivalry which is at the heart of aristocracies, and the greatvirtue of reverence which is at the heart of ceremonial religion, isnot in a position to form any idea of how profoundly unchivalrous, howastonishingly irreverent, how utterly mean, and material, and devoidof mystery or sentiment were the despotic systems of Europe whichsurvived, and for a time conquered, the Revolution. The case againstthe Church in Italy in the time of Pio Nono was not the case which arationalist would urge against the Church of the time of St. Louis, but diametrically the opposite case. Against the mediæval Church itmight be said that she was too fantastic, too visionary, too dogmaticabout the destiny of man, too indifferent to all things but thedevotional side of the soul. Against the Church of Pio Nono the mainthing to be said was that it was simply and supremely cynical; that itwas not founded on the unworldly instinct for distorting life, but onthe worldly counsel to leave life as it is; that it was not theinspirer of insane hopes, of reward and miracle, but the enemy, thecool and sceptical enemy, of hope of any kind or description. The samewas true of the monarchical systems of Prussia and Austria and Russiaat this time. Their philosophy was not the philosophy of the cavalierswho rode after Charles I. Or Louis XIII. It was the philosophy of thetypical city uncle, advising every one, and especially the young, toavoid enthusiasm, to avoid beauty, to regard life as a machine, dependent only upon the two forces of comfort and fear. That was, there can be little doubt, the real reason of the fascination of theNapoleon legend--that while Napoleon was a despot like the rest, hewas a despot who went somewhere and did something, and defied thepessimism of Europe, and erased the word "impossible. " One does notneed to be a Bonapartist to rejoice at the way in which the armies ofthe First Empire, shouting their songs and jesting with theircolonels, smote and broke into pieces the armies of Prussia andAustria driven into battle with a cane. 

Browning, as we have said, was in Italy at the time of the break-up ofone part of this frozen continent of the non-possumus, Austria's holdin the north of Italy was part of that elaborate and comfortable andwholly cowardly and unmeaning compromise, which the Holy Alliance hadestablished, and which it believed without doubt in its solid unbeliefwould last until the Day of Judgment, though it is difficult toimagine what the Holy Alliance thought would happen then. But almostof a sudden affairs had begun to move strangely, and the despoticprinces and their chancellors discovered with a great deal ofastonishment that they were not living in the old age of the world, but to all appearance in a very unmanageable period of its boyhood. Inan age of ugliness and routine, in a time when diplomatists andphilosophers alike tended to believe that they had a list of all humantypes, there began to appear men who belonged to the morning of theworld, men whose movements have a national breadth and beauty, who actsymbols and become legends while they are alive. Garibaldi in his redshirt rode in an open carriage along the front of a hostile fortcalling to the coachman to drive slower, and not a man dared fire ashot at him. Mazzini poured out upon Europe a new mysticism ofhumanity and liberty, and was willing, like some passionate Jesuit ofthe sixteenth century, to become in its cause either a philosopher ora criminal. Cavour arose with a diplomacy which was more thrilling andpicturesque than war itself. These men had nothing to do with an ageof the impossible. They have passed, their theories along with them, as all things pass; but since then we have had no men of their typeprecisely, at once large and real and romantic and successful. Gordonwas a possible exception. They were the last of the heroes. 

When Browning was first living in Italy, a telegram which had beensent to him was stopped on the frontier and suppressed on account ofhis known sympathy with the Italian Liberals. It is almost impossiblefor people living in a commonwealth like ours to understand how asmall thing like that will affect a man. It was not so much theobvious fact that a great practical injury was really done to him;that the telegram might have altered all his plans in matters of vitalmoment. It was, over and above that, the sense of a hand laid onsomething personal and essentially free. Tyranny like this is not theworst tyranny, but it is the most intolerable. It interferes with mennot in the most serious matters, but precisely in those matters inwhich they most resent interference. It may be illogical for men toaccept cheerfully unpardonable public scandals, benighted educationalsystems, bad sanitation, bad lighting, a blundering and inefficientsystem of life, and yet to resent the tearing up of a telegram or apost-card; but the fact remains that the sensitiveness of men is astrange and localised thing, and there is hardly a man in the worldwho would not rather be ruled by despots chosen by lot and live in acity like a mediæval Ghetto, than be forbidden by a policeman tosmoke another cigarette, or sit up a quarter of an hour later; hardlya man who would not feel inclined in such a case to raise a rebellionfor a caprice for which he did not really care a straw. Unmeaning andmuddle-headed tyranny in small things, that is the thing which, ifextended over many years, is harder to bear and hope through than themassacres of September. And that was the nightmare of vexatioustriviality which was lying over all the cities of Italy that wereruled by the bureaucratic despotisms of Europe. The history of thetime is full of spiteful and almost childish struggles--strugglesabout the humming of a tune or the wearing of a colour, the arrest ofa journey, or the opening of a letter. And there can be little doubtthat Browning's temperament under these conditions was not of the kindto become more indulgent, and there grew in him a hatred of theImperial and Ducal and Papal systems of Italy, which sometimes passedthe necessities of Liberalism, and sometimes even transgressed itsspirit. The life which he and his wife lived in Italy wasextraordinarily full and varied, when we consider the restrictionsunder which one at least of them had always lain. They met and tookdelight, notwithstanding their exile, in some of the most interestingpeople of their time--Ruskin, Cardinal Manning, and Lord Lytton. Browning, in a most characteristic way, enjoyed the society of all ofthem, arguing with one, agreeing with another, sitting up all night bythe bedside of a third. 

It has frequently been stated that the only difference that everseparated Mr. And Mrs. Browning was upon the question of spiritualism. That statement must, of course, be modified and even contradicted ifit means that they never differed; that Mr. Browning never thought an_Act of Parliament_ good when Mrs. Browning thought it bad; that Mr. Browning never thought bread stale when Mrs. Browning thought it new. Such unanimity is not only inconceivable, it is immoral; and as amatter of fact, there is abundant evidence that their marriageconstituted something like that ideal marriage, an alliance betweentwo strong and independent forces. They differed, in truth, about agreat many things, for example, about Napoleon III. Whom Mrs. Browningregarded with an admiration which would have been somewhat beyond thedeserts of Sir Galahad, and whom Browning with his emphatic Liberalprinciples could never pardon for the _Coup d'État_. If they differedon spiritualism in a somewhat more serious way than this, the reasonmust be sought in qualities which were deeper and more elemental inboth their characters than any mere matter of opinion. Mrs. Orr, inher excellent _Life of Browning_, states that the difficulty arosefrom Mrs. Browning's firm belief in psychical phenomena and Browning'sabsolute refusal to believe even in their possibility. Another writerwho met them at this time says, "Browning cannot believe, and Mrs. Browning cannot help believing. " This theory, that Browning's aversionto the spiritualist circle arose from an absolute denial of thetenability of such a theory of life and death, has in fact often beenrepeated. But it is exceedingly difficult to reconcile it withBrowning's character. He was the last man in the world to beintellectually deaf to a hypothesis merely because it was odd. He hadfriends whose opinions covered every description of madness from theFrench legitimism of De Ripert-Monclar to the Republicanism ofLandor. Intellectually he may be said to have had a zest for heresies. It is difficult to impute an attitude of mere impenetrable negation toa man who had expressed with sympathy the religion of "Caliban" andthe morality of "Time's Revenges. " It is true that at this time of thefirst popular interest in spiritualism a feeling existed among manypeople of a practical turn of mind, which can only be called asuperstition against believing in ghosts. But, intellectuallyspeaking, Browning would probably have been one of the most tolerantand curious in regard to the new theories, whereas the popular versionof the matter makes him unusually intolerant and negligent even forthat time. The fact was in all probability that Browning's aversion tothe spiritualists had little or nothing to do with spiritualism. Itarose from quite a different side of his character--his uncompromisingdislike of what is called Bohemianism, of eccentric or slovenlycliques, of those straggling camp followers of the arts who exhibitdubious manners and dubious morals, of all abnormality and of allirresponsibility. Any one, in fact, who wishes to see what it was thatBrowning disliked need only do two things. First, he should read the_Memoirs_ of David Home, the famous spiritualist medium with whomBrowning came in contact. These _Memoirs_ constitute a more thoroughand artistic self-revelation than any monologue that Browning everwrote. The ghosts, the raps, the flying hands, the phantom voices areinfinitely the most respectable and infinitely the most credible partof the narrative. But the bragging, the sentimentalism, the moral andintellectual foppery of the composition is everywhere, culminatingperhaps in the disgusting passage in which Home describes Mrs. Browning as weeping over him and assuring him that all her husband'sactions in the matter have been adopted against her will. It is inthis kind of thing that we find the roots of the real anger ofBrowning. He did not dislike spiritualism, but spiritualists. Thesecond point on which any one wishing to be just in the matter shouldcast an eye, is the record of the visit which Mrs. Browning insistedon making while on their honeymoon in Paris to the house of GeorgeSand. Browning felt, and to some extent expressed, exactly the sameaversion to his wife mixing with the circle of George Sand which heafterwards felt at her mixing with the circle of Home. The society was"of the ragged red, diluted with the low theatrical, men who worshipGeorge Sand, _à genou bas_ between an oath and an ejection of saliva. "When we find that a man did not object to any number of Jacobites orAtheists, but objected to the French Bohemian poets and to the earlyoccultist mediums as friends for his wife, we shall surely be fairlyright in concluding that he objected not to an opinion, but to asocial tone. The truth was that Browning had a great many admirablyPhilistine feelings, and one of them was a great relish for hisresponsibilities towards his wife. He enjoyed being a husband. This isquite a distinct thing from enjoying being a lover, though it willscarcely be found apart from it. But, like all good feelings, it hasits possible exaggerations, and one of them is this almost morbidhealthiness in the choice of friends for his wife. 

David Home, the medium, came to Florence about 1857. Mrs. Browningundoubtedly threw herself into psychical experiments with great ardourat first, and Browning, equally undoubtedly, opposed, and at lengthforbade, the enterprise. He did not do so however until he hadattended one _séance_ at least, at which a somewhat ridiculous eventoccurred, which is described in Home's _Memoirs_ with a gravity evenmore absurd than the incident. Towards the end of the proceedings awreath was placed in the centre of the table, and the lights beinglowered, it was caused to rise slowly into the air, and after hoveringfor some time, to move towards Mrs. Browning, and at length to alightupon her head. As the wreath was floating in her direction, herhusband was observed abruptly to cross the room and stand beside her. One would think it was a sufficiently natural action on the part of aman whose wife was the centre of a weird and disturbing experiment, genuine or otherwise. But Mr. Home gravely asserts that it wasgenerally believed that Browning had crossed the room in the hope thatthe wreath would alight on his head, and that from the hour of itsdisobliging refusal to do so dated the whole of his goaded andmalignant aversion to spiritualism. The idea of the very conventionaland somewhat bored Robert Browning running about the room after awreath in the hope of putting his head into it, is one of the genuinegleams of humour in this rather foolish affair. Browning could befairly violent, as we know, both in poetry and conversation; but itwould be almost too terrible to conjecture what he would have felt andsaid if Mr. Home's wreath had alighted on his head. 

Next day, according to Home's account, he called on the hostess of theprevious night in what the writer calls "a ridiculous state ofexcitement, " and told her apparently that she must excuse him if heand his wife did not attend any more gatherings of the kind. Whatactually occurred is not, of course, quite easy to ascertain, for theaccount in Home's _Memoirs_ principally consists of noble speechesmade by the medium which would seem either to have reduced Browning toa pulverised silence, or else to have failed to attract his attention. But there can be no doubt that the general upshot of the affair wasthat Browning put his foot down, and the experiments ceased. There canbe little doubt that he was justified in this; indeed, he was probablyeven more justified if the experiments were genuine psychicalmysteries than if they were the _hocus-pocus_ of a charlatan. He knewhis wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but evenposterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted tothe purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either agreat craving for such experiences or a great terror of them. Likemany geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like aborderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had notinterposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have endedin an asylum. 

The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but thereal characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to someextent missed. When some seven years afterwards he produced "Mr. Sludge the Medium, " every one supposed that it was an attack uponspiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena. As we shall seewhen we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation ofit. But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that adislike of Home's investigations implies a theoretic disbelief inspiritualism. It might, of course, imply a very firm and seriousbelief in it. As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admittedthe reasonableness of such things. Home was infinitely less dangerousas a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man inpossession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers. It is surely curiousto think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a fewconjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the looseand nameless energies of the universe. 

Browning's theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in allprobability quite open and unbiassed. His was a peculiarly hospitableintellect. If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, ortheories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect ofGnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, hewould have delighted in those theories, and would very likely haveadopted them. But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round aman's wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoonsand trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific. It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculinefeelings far beyond the reach of argument--things that lie so deepthat if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, there is always pain. Browning did not like spiritualism to bementioned for many years. 

Robert Browning was unquestionably a thoroughly conventional man. There are many who think this element of conventionality altogetherregrettable and disgraceful; they have established, as it were, aconvention of the unconventional. But this hatred of the conventionalelement in the personality of a poet is only possible to those who donot remember the meaning of words. Convention means only a comingtogether, an agreement; and as every poet must base his work upon anemotional agreement among men, so every poet must base his work upon aconvention. Every art is, of course, based upon a convention, anagreement between the speaker and the listener that certain objectionsshall not be raised. The most realistic art in the world is open torealistic objection. Against the most exact and everyday drama thatever came out of Norway it is still possible for the realist to raisethe objection that the hero who starts a subject and drops it, whoruns out of a room and runs back again for his hat, is all the timebehaving in a most eccentric manner, considering that he is doingthese things in a room in which one of the four walls has been takenclean away and been replaced by a line of footlights and a mob ofstrangers. Against the most accurate black-and-white artist that humanimagination can conceive it is still to be admitted that he draws ablack line round a man's nose, and that that line is a lie. And inprecisely the same fashion a poet must, by the nature of things, beconventional. Unless he is describing an emotion which others sharewith him, his labours will be utterly in vain. If a poet really had anoriginal emotion; if, for example, a poet suddenly fell in love withthe buffers of a railway train, it would take him considerably moretime than his allotted three-score years and ten to communicate hisfeelings. 

Poetry deals with primal and conventional things--the hunger forbread, the love of woman, the love of children, the desire forimmortal life. If men really had new sentiments, poetry could not dealwith them. If, let us say, a man did not feel a bitter craving to eatbread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original cravingto eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with afossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can onlyexpress what is original in one sense--the sense in which we speak oforiginal sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it is original in the sense thatit deals with origins. 

All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art. Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as ageneral rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional inmatters of conduct. It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry ofrevolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetryof those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement ofcivilisation. Just as an agreement between the dramatist and theaudience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between thepainter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so anagreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the greatfigures of morality--the hero, the saint, the average man, thegentleman. Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a realpleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions. Hedelighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional. Beingby birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; beingby rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancientscruples and its everlasting boundaries. He was everything that he waswith a definite and conscious pleasure--a man, a Liberal, anEnglishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man. 

This must always be remembered as a general characteristic ofBrowning, this ardent and headlong conventionality. He exhibited itpre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during andafter the escape of himself and his wife to Italy. He seems to haveforgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married. Heshowed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up aresponsibility which had its practical side. He came finally andentirely out of his dreams. Since he had himself enough money to liveon, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writingpoetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his headday and night. But when the problem of the elopement arose he threwhimself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into everykind of scheme for solidifying his position. He wrote to MoncktonMilnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for apost in the British Museum. "I will work like a horse, " he said, withthat boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikesit, is more poetical than all his poems. All his language in thismatter is emphatic; he would be "glad and proud, " he says, "to haveany minor post" his friend could obtain for him. He offered to readfor the Bar, and probably began doing so. But all this vigorous andvery creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by ElizabethBarrett. She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of herhusband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry. Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error whichevery man would desire to have made. 

One of the qualities again which make Browning most charming, is thefact that he felt and expressed so simple and genuine a satisfactionabout his own achievements as a lover and husband, particularly inrelation to his triumph in the hygienic care of his wife. "If he isvain of anything, " writes Mrs. Browning, "it is of my restoredhealth. " Later, she adds with admirable humour and suggestiveness, "and I have to tell him that he really must not go telling everybodyhow his wife walked here with him, or walked there with him, as if awife with two feet were a miracle in Nature. " When a lady in Italysaid, on an occasion when Browning stayed behind with his wife on theday of a picnic, that he was "the only man who behaved like aChristian to his wife, " Browning was elated to an almost infantiledegree. But there could scarcely be a better test of the essentialmanliness and decency of a man than this test of his vanities. Browning boasted of being domesticated; there are half a hundred meneverywhere who would be inclined to boast of not being domesticated. Bad men are almost without exception conceited, but they are commonlyconceited of their defects. 

One picturesque figure who plays a part in this portion of theBrownings' life in Italy is Walter Savage Landor. Browning found himliving with some of his wife's relations, and engaged in a continuousand furious quarrel with them, which was, indeed, not uncommonly thecondition of that remarkable man when living with other human beings. He had the double arrogance which is only possible to that old andstately but almost extinct blend--the aristocratic republican. Like anold Roman senator, or like a gentleman of the Southern States ofAmerica, he had the condescension of a gentleman to those below him, combined with the jealous self-assertiveness of a Jacobin to thoseabove. The only person who appears to have been able to manage him andbring out his more agreeable side was Browning. It is, by the way, oneof the many hints of a certain element in Browning which can only bedescribed by the elementary and old-fashioned word goodness, that healways contrived to make himself acceptable and even lovable to men ofsavage and capricious temperament, of detached and erratic genius, whocould get on with no one else. Carlyle, who could not get a bittertaste off his tongue in talking of most of his contemporaries, wasfond of Browning. Landor, who could hardly conduct an ordinarybusiness interview without beginning to break the furniture, was fondof Browning. These are things which speak more for a man than manypeople will understand. It is easy enough to be agreeable to a circleof admirers, especially feminine admirers, who have a peculiar talentfor discipleship and the absorption of ideas. But when a man is lovedby other men of his own intellectual stature and of a wholly differenttype and order of eminence, we may be certain that there was somethinggenuine about him, and something far more important than anythingintellectual. Men do not like another man because he is a genius, least of all when they happen to be geniuses themselves. This generaltruth about Browning is like hearing of a woman who is the most famousbeauty in a city, and who is at the same time adored and confided inby all the women who live there. 

Browning came to the rescue of the fiery old gentleman, and helped bySeymour Kirkup put him under very definite obligations by a course ofvery generous conduct. He was fully repaid in his own mind for histrouble by the mere presence and friendship of Landor, for whosequaint and volcanic personality he had a vast admiration, compoundedof the pleasure of the artist in an oddity and of the man in a hero. It is somewhat amusing and characteristic that Mrs. Browning did notshare this unlimited enjoyment of the company of Mr. Landor, andexpressed her feelings in her own humorous manner. She writes, "Dear, darling Robert amuses me by talking of his gentleness and sweetness. Amost courteous and refined gentleman he is, of course, and veryaffectionate to Robert (as he ought to be), but of self-restraint hehas not a grain, and of suspicion many grains. What do you really sayto dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it?Robert succeeded in soothing him, and the poor old lion is very quieton the whole, roaring softly to beguile the time in Latin alcaicsagainst his wife and Louis Napoleon. "

One event alone could really end this endless life of the ItalianArcadia. That event happened on June 29, 1861. Robert Browning's wifedied, stricken by the death of her sister, and almost as hard (it is acharacteristic touch) by the death of Cavour. She died alone in theroom with Browning, and of what passed then, though much has beensaid, little should be. He, closing the door of that room behind him, closed a door in himself, and none ever saw Browning upon earth againbut only a splendid surface. 

CHAPTER V

BROWNING IN LATER LIFE

Browning's confidences, what there were of them, immediately after hiswife's death were given to several women-friends; all his life, indeed, he was chiefly intimate with women. The two most intimate ofthese were his own sister, who remained with him in all his lateryears, and the sister of his wife, who seven years afterwards passedaway in his presence as Elizabeth had done. The other letters, whichnumber only one or two, referring in any personal manner to hisbereavement are addressed to Miss Haworth and Isa Blagden. He leftFlorence and remained for a time with his father and sister nearDinard. Then he returned to London and took up his residence inWarwick Crescent. Naturally enough, the thing for which he now chieflylived was the education of his son, and it is characteristic ofBrowning that he was not only a very indulgent father, but anindulgent father of a very conventional type: he had rather thechuckling pride of the city gentleman than the educational gravity ofthe intellectual. 

Browning was now famous, _Bells and Pomegranates, Men and Women, Christmas Eve_, and _Dramatis Personæ_ had successively glorified hisItalian period. But he was already brooding half-unconsciously on morefamous things. He has himself left on record a description of theincident out of which grew the whole impulse and plan of his greatestachievement. In a passage marked with all his peculiar sense ofmaterial things, all that power of writing of stone or metal or thefabric of drapery, so that we seem to be handling and smelling them, he has described a stall for the selling of odds and ends of everyvariety of utility and uselessness:--

 "picture frames White through the worn gilt, mirror-sconces chipped, Bronze angel-heads once knobs attached to chests, (Handled when ancient dames chose forth brocade) Modern chalk drawings, studies from the nude, Samples of stone, jet, breccia, porphyry Polished and rough, sundry amazing busts In baked earth, (broken, Providence be praised!) A wreck of tapestry proudly-purposed web When reds and blues were indeed red and blue, Now offer'd as a mat to save bare feet (Since carpets constitute a cruel cost). * * * * * Vulgarised Horace for the use of schools, 'The Life, Death, Miracles of Saint Somebody, Saint Somebody Else, his Miracles, Death, and Life'-- With this, one glance at the lettered back of which, And 'Stall, ' cried I; a _lira_ made it mine. "

This sketch embodies indeed the very poetry of _débris_, and comesnearer than any other poem has done to expressing the pathos andpicturesqueness of a low-class pawnshop. "This, " which Browning boughtfor a lira out of this heap of rubbish, was, of course, the old Latinrecord of the criminal case of Guido Franceschini, tried for themurder of his wife Pompilia in the year 1698. And this again, it isscarcely necessary to say, was the ground-plan and motive of _The Ringand the Book_. 

Browning had picked up the volume and partly planned the poem duringhis wife's lifetime in Italy. But the more he studied it, the more thedimensions of the theme appeared to widen and deepen; and he came atlast, there can be little doubt, to regard it definitely as his_magnum opus_ to which he would devote many years to come. Then camethe great sorrow of his life, and he cast about him for somethingsufficiently immense and arduous and complicated to keep his braingoing like some huge and automatic engine. "I mean to keep writing, "he said, "whether I like it or not. " And thus finally he took up thescheme of the Franceschini story, and developed it on a scale with adegree of elaboration, repetition, and management, and inexhaustiblescholarship which was never perhaps before given in the history of theworld to an affair of two or three characters. Of the larger literaryand spiritual significance of the work, particularly in reference toits curious and original form of narration, I shall speaksubsequently. But there is one peculiarity about the story which hasmore direct bearing on Browning's life, and it appears singular thatfew, if any, of his critics have noticed it. This peculiarity is theextraordinary resemblance between the moral problem involved in thepoem if understood in its essence, and the moral problem whichconstituted the crisis and centre of Browning's own life. Nothing, properly speaking, ever happened to Browning after his wife's death;and his greatest work during that time was the telling, under aliensymbols and the veil of a wholly different story, the inner truthabout his own greatest trial and hesitation. He himself had in thissense the same difficulty as Caponsacchi, the supreme difficulty ofhaving to trust himself to the reality of virtue not only without thereward, but even without the name of virtue. He had, like Caponsacchi, preferred what was unselfish and dubious to what was selfish andhonourable. He knew better than any man that there is little danger ofmen who really know anything of that naked and homeless responsibilityseeking it too often or indulging it too much. The conscientiousnessof the law-abider is nothing in its terrors to the conscientiousnessof the conscientious law-breaker. Browning had once, for what heseriously believed to be a greater good, done what he himself wouldnever have had the cant to deny, ought to be called deceit andevasion. Such a thing ought never to come to a man twice. If he findsthat necessity twice, he may, I think, be looked at with the beginningof a suspicion. To Browning it came once, and he devoted his greatestpoem to a suggestion of how such a necessity may come to any man whois worthy to live. 

As has already been suggested, any apparent danger that there may bein this excusing of an exceptional act is counteracted by the perilsof the act, since it must always be remembered that this kind of acthas the immense difference from all legal acts--that it can only bejustified by success. If Browning had taken his wife to Paris, and shehad died in an hotel there, we can only conceive him saying, with thebitter emphasis of one of his own lines, "How should I have borne me, please?" Before and after this event his life was as tranquil andcasual a one as it would be easy to imagine; but there always remainedupon him something which was felt by all who knew him in afteryears--the spirit of a man who had been ready when his time came, andhad walked in his own devotion and certainty in a position countedindefensible and almost along the brink of murder. This great moral ofBrowning, which may be called roughly the doctrine of the great hour, enters, of course, into many poems besides _The Ring and the Book_, and is indeed the mainspring of a great part of his poetry taken as awhole. It is, of course, the central idea of that fine poem, "TheStatue and the Bust, " which has given a great deal of distress to agreat many people because of its supposed invasion of recognisedmorality. It deals, as every one knows, with a Duke Ferdinand and anelopement which he planned with the bride of one of the Riccardi. Thelovers begin by deferring their flight for various more or lesscomprehensible reasons of convenience; but the habit of shrinking fromthe final step grows steadily upon them, and they never take it, butdie, as it were, waiting for each other. The objection that the actthus avoided was a criminal one is very simply and quite clearlyanswered by Browning himself. His case against the dilatory couple isnot in the least affected by the viciousness of their aim. His case isthat they exhibited no virtue. Crime was frustrated in them bycowardice, which is probably the worse immorality of the two. The sameidea again may be found in that delightful lyric "Youth and Art, "where a successful cantatrice reproaches a successful sculptor withtheir failure to understand each other in their youth and poverty. 

 "Each life unfulfilled, you see; It hangs still, patchy and scrappy: We have not sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired, --been happy. "

And this conception of the great hour, which breaks out everywhere inBrowning, it is almost impossible not to connect with his own internaldrama. It is really curious that this correspondence has not beeninsisted on. Probably critics have been misled by the fact thatBrowning in many places appears to boast that he is purely dramatic, that he has never put himself into his work, a thing which no poet, good or bad, who ever lived could possibly avoid doing. 

The enormous scope and seriousness of _The Ring and the Book_ occupiedBrowning for some five or six years, and the great epic appeared inthe winter of 1868. Just before it was published Smith and Elderbrought out a uniform edition of all Browning's works up to that time, and the two incidents taken together may be considered to mark thefinal and somewhat belated culmination of Browning's literary fame. The years since his wife's death, that had been covered by the writingof _The Ring and the Book_, had been years of an almost feverishactivity in that and many other ways. His travels had been restlessand continued, his industry immense, and for the first time he beganthat mode of life which afterwards became so characteristic ofhim--the life of what is called society. A man of a shallower and moresentimental type would have professed to find the life ofdinner-tables and soirées vain and unsatisfying to a poet, andespecially to a poet in mourning. But if there is one thing more thananother which is stirring and honourable about Browning, it is theentire absence in him of this cant of dissatisfaction. He had the onegreat requirement of a poet--he was not difficult to please. The lifeof society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people whoobject to the superficial. To the man who sees the marvellousness ofall things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as itsinterior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious asits mysteries. The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite asincomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming. 

A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or evendisapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning's. Not one of theseliterary people would have been shocked if Browning's interest inhumanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a lowtavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionablepeople are not human at all. Humanitarians of a material and dogmatictype, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to lookfor humanity in remote places and in huge statistics. Humanitarians ofa more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity inthieves' kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin. Buthumanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all. For them alone among all menthe nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their ownfamilies are human. Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house inhis own native town and talking to the townsmen. Browning was invitedto a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretendthat they bored him. In a letter belonging to this period of his lifehe describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with anunaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing somuch as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he wereinvited to a similar function and received a few compliments. It maybe indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in thislong-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his secondyouth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can dothat. 

Of Browning's actual personality and presence in this later middle ageof his, memories are still sufficiently clear. He was a middle-sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, asalmost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice. The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint anindignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as shesaid when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods. His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this timemust have been very well represented by Mr. G. F. Watts's fine portraitin the National Portrait Gallery. The portrait bears one of the manytestimonies which exist to Mr. Watts's grasp of the essential ofcharacter, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning inwhich we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of thebrain-worker. He looks here what he was--a very healthy man, tooscholarly to live a completely healthy life. 

His manner in society, as has been more than once indicated, was thatof a man anxious, if anything, to avoid the air of intellectualeminence. Lockhart said briefly, "I like Browning; he isn't at alllike a damned literary man. " He was, according to some, upon occasion, talkative and noisy to a fault; but there are two kinds of men whomonopolise conversation. The first kind are those who like the soundof their own voice; the second are those who do not know what thesound of their own voice is like. Browning was one of the latterclass. His volubility in speech had the same origin as hisvoluminousness and obscurity in literature--a kind of headlonghumility. He cannot assuredly have been aware that he talked peopledown or have wished to do so. For this would have been precisely aviolation of the ideal of the man of the world, the one ambition andeven weakness that he had. He wished to be a man of the world, and henever in the full sense was one. He remained a little too much of aboy, a little too much even of a Puritan, and a little too much ofwhat may be called a man of the universe, to be a man of the world. 

One of his faults probably was the thing roughly called prejudice. Onthe question, for example, of table-turning and psychic phenomena hewas in a certain degree fierce and irrational. He was not indeed, aswe shall see when we come to study "Sludge the Medium, " exactlyprejudiced against spiritualism. But he was beyond all questionstubbornly prejudiced against spiritualists. Whether the medium Homewas or was not a scoundrel it is somewhat difficult in our day toconjecture. But in so far as he claimed supernatural powers, he mayhave been as honest a gentleman as ever lived. And even if we thinkthat the moral atmosphere of Home is that of a man of dubiouscharacter, we can still feel that Browning might have achieved hispurpose without making it so obvious that he thought so. Some tracesagain, though much fainter ones, may be found of something like asubconscious hostility to the Roman Church, or at least a less fullcomprehension of the grandeur of the Latin religious civilisation thanmight have been expected of a man of Browning's great imaginativetolerance. Æstheticism, Bohemianism, the irresponsibilities of theartist, the untidy morals of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, hehated with a consuming hatred. He was himself exact in everything, from his scholarship to his clothes; and even when he wore the loosewhite garments of the lounger in Southern Europe, they were in theirown way as precise as a dress suit. This extra carefulness in allthings he defended against the cant of Bohemianism as the rightattitude for the poet. When some one excused coarseness or negligenceon the ground of genius, he said, "That is an error: Noblesse oblige. "

Browning's prejudices, however, belonged altogether to that healthyorder which is characterised by a cheerful and satisfied ignorance. Itnever does a man any very great harm to hate a thing that he knowsnothing about. It is the hating of a thing when we do know somethingabout it which corrodes the character. We all have a dark feeling ofresistance towards people we have never met, and a profound and manlydislike of the authors we have never read. It does not harm a man tobe certain before opening the books that Whitman is an obscene ranteror that Stevenson is a mere trifler with style. It is the man who canthink these things after he has read the books who must be in a fairway to mental perdition. Prejudice, in fact, is not so much the greatintellectual sin as a thing which we may call, to coin a word, "postjudice, " not the bias before the fair trial, but the bias thatremains afterwards. With Browning's swift and emphatic nature the biaswas almost always formed before he had gone into the matter. Butalmost all the men he really knew he admired, almost all the books hehad really read he enjoyed. He stands pre-eminent among those greatuniversalists who praised the ground they trod on and commendedexistence like any other material, in its samples. He had no kinshipwith those new and strange universalists of the type of Tolstoi whopraise existence to the exclusion of all the institutions they havelived under, and all the ties they have known. He thought the worldgood because he had found so many things that were good init--religion, the nation, the family, the social class. He did not, like the new humanitarian, think the world good because he had foundso many things in it that were bad. 

As has been previously suggested, there was something very queer anddangerous that underlay all the good humour of Browning. If one ofthese idle prejudices were broken by better knowledge, he was all thebetter pleased. But if some of the prejudices that were really rootedin him were trodden on, even by accident, such as his aversion toloose artistic cliques, or his aversion to undignified publicity, hisrage was something wholly transfiguring and alarming, something farremoved from the shrill disapproval of Carlyle and Ruskin. It can onlybe said that he became a savage, and not always a very agreeable orpresentable savage. The indecent fury which danced upon the bones ofEdward Fitzgerald was a thing which ought not to have astonished anyone who had known much of Browning's character or even of his work. Some unfortunate persons on another occasion had obtained some of Mrs. Browning's letters shortly after her death, and proposed to write a_Life_ founded upon them. They ought to have understood that Browningwould probably disapprove; but if he talked to them about it, as hedid to others, and it is exceedingly probable that he did, they musthave thought he was mad. "What I suffer with the paws of theseblack-guards in my bowels you can fancy, " he says. Again he writes:"Think of this beast working away, not deeming my feelings, or thoseof her family, worthy of notice. It shall not be done if I can stopthe scamp's knavery along with his breath. " Whether Browning actuallyresorted to this extreme course is unknown; nothing is known exceptthat he wrote a letter to the ambitious biographer which reduced himto silence, probably from stupefaction. 

The same peculiarity ought, as I have said, to have been apparent toany one who knew anything of Browning's literary work. A great numberof his poems are marked by a trait of which by its nature it is moreor less impossible to give examples. Suffice it to say that it istruly extraordinary that poets like Swinburne (who seldom uses a grossword) should have been spoken of as if they had introduced morallicense into Victorian poetry. What the Non-conformist conscience hasbeen doing to have passed Browning is something difficult to imagine. But the peculiarity of this occasional coarseness in his work isthis--that it is always used to express a certain wholesome fury andcontempt for things sickly, or ungenerous, or unmanly. The poet seemsto feel that there are some things so contemptible that you can onlyspeak of them in pothouse words. It would be idle, and perhapsundesirable, to give examples; but it may be noted that the samebrutal physical metaphor is used by his Caponsacchi about the peoplewho could imagine Pompilia impure and by his Shakespeare in "At theMermaid, " about the claim of the Byronic poet to enter into the heartof humanity. In both cases Browning feels, and perhaps in a mannerrightly, that the best thing we can do with a sentiment essentiallybase is to strip off its affectations and state it basely, and thatthe mud of Chaucer is a great deal better than the poison of Sterne. Herein again Browning is close to the average man; and to do theaverage man justice, there is a great deal more of this Browningesquehatred of Byronism in the brutality of his conversation than manypeople suppose. 

Such, roughly and as far as we can discover, was the man who, in thefull summer and even the full autumn of his intellectual powers, beganto grow upon the consciousness of the English literary world aboutthis time. For the first time friendship grew between him and theother great men of his time. Tennyson, for whom he then and alwaysfelt the best and most personal kind of admiration, came into hislife, and along with him Gladstone and Francis Palgrave. There beganto crowd in upon him those honours whereby a man is to some extentmade a classic in his lifetime, so that he is honoured even if he isunread. He was made a Fellow of Balliol in 1867, and the homage of thegreat universities continued thenceforth unceasingly until his death, despite many refusals on his part. He was unanimously elected LordRector of Glasgow University in 1875. He declined, owing to his deepand somewhat characteristic aversion to formal public speaking, and in1877 he had to decline on similar grounds the similar offer from theUniversity of St. Andrews. He was much at the English universities, was a friend of Dr. Jowett, and enjoyed the university life at the ageof sixty-three in a way that he probably would not have enjoyed it ifhe had ever been to a university. The great universities would not lethim alone, to their great credit, and he became a D. C. L. Of Cambridgein 1879, and a D. C. L. Of Oxford in 1882. When he received thesehonours there were, of course, the traditional buffooneries of theundergraduates, and one of them dropped a red cotton night-cap neatlyon his head as he passed under the gallery. Some indignantintellectuals wrote to him to protest against this affront, butBrowning took the matter in the best and most characteristic way. "Youare far too hard, " he wrote in answer, "on the very harmlessdrolleries of the young men. Indeed, there used to be a regularlyappointed jester, 'Filius Terrae' he was called, whose business it wasto gibe and jeer at the honoured ones by way of reminder that allhuman glories are merely gilded baubles and must not be fanciedmetal. " In this there are other and deeper things characteristic ofBrowning besides his learning and humour. In discussing anything, hemust always fall back upon great speculative and eternal ideas. Evenin the tomfoolery of a horde of undergraduates he can only see asymbol of the ancient office of ridicule in the scheme of morals. Theyoung men themselves were probably unaware that they were therepresentatives of the "Filius Terrae. "

But the years during which Browning was thus reaping some of his latelaurels began to be filled with incidents that reminded him how theyears were passing over him. On June 20, 1866, his father had died, aman of whom it is impossible to think without a certain emotion, a manwho had lived quietly and persistently for others, to whom Browningowed more than it is easy to guess, to whom we in all probabilitymainly owe Browning. In 1868 one of his closest friends, ArabellaBarrett, the sister of his wife, died, as her sister had done, alonewith Browning. Browning was not a superstitious man; he somewhatstormily prided himself on the contrary; but he notes at this time "adream which Arabella had of Her, in which she prophesied their meetingin five years, " that is, of course, the meeting of Elizabeth andArabella. His friend Milsand, to whom _Sordello_ was dedicated, diedin 1886. "I never knew, " said Browning, "or ever shall know, his likeamong men. " But though both fame and a growing isolation indicatedthat he was passing towards the evening of his days, though he boretraces of the progress, in a milder attitude towards things, and agreater preference for long exiles with those he loved, one thingcontinued in him with unconquerable energy--there was no diminution inthe quantity, no abatement in the immense designs of his intellectualoutput. 

In 1871 he produced _Balaustion's Adventure_, a work exhibiting notonly his genius in its highest condition of power, but something moreexacting even than genius to a man of his mature and changed life, immense investigation, prodigious memory, the thorough assimilationof the vast literature of a remote civilisation. _Balaustion'sAdventure_, which is, of course, the mere framework for an Englishversion of the Alcestis of Euripides, is an illustration of one ofBrowning's finest traits, his immeasurable capacity for a classicadmiration. Those who knew him tell us that in conversation he neverrevealed himself so impetuously or so brilliantly as when declaimingthe poetry of others; and _Balaustion's Adventure_ is a monument ofthis fiery self-forgetfulness. It is penetrated with the passionatedesire to render Euripides worthily, and to that imitation are for thetime being devoted all the gigantic powers which went to make thesongs of Pippa and the last agony of Guido. Browning never put himselfinto anything more powerfully or more successfully; yet it is only anexcellent translation. In the uncouth philosophy of Caliban, in thetangled ethics of Sludge, in his wildest satire, in his mostfeather-headed lyric, Browning was never more thoroughly Browning thanin this splendid and unselfish plagiarism. This revived excitement inGreek matters; "his passionate love of the Greek language" continuedin him thenceforward till his death. He published more than one poemon the drama of Hellas. _Aristophanes' Apology_ came out in 1875, and_The Agamemnon of Æschylus_, another paraphrase, in 1877. All threepoems are marked by the same primary characteristic, the fact that thewriter has the literature of Athens literally at his fingers' ends. Heis intimate not only with their poetry and politics, but with theirfrivolity and their slang; he knows not only Athenian wisdom, butAthenian folly; not only the beauty of Greece, but even its vulgarity. In fact, a page of _Aristophanes' Apology_ is like a page ofAristophanes, dark with levity and as obscure as a schoolman'streatise, with its load of jokes. 

In 1871 also appeared _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour ofSociety_, one of the finest and most picturesque of all Browning'sapologetic monologues. The figure is, of course, intended for NapoleonIII. , whose Empire had just fallen, bringing down his country with it. The saying has been often quoted that Louis Napoleon deceived Europetwice--once when he made it think he was a noodle, and once when hemade it think he was a statesman. It might be added that Europe wasnever quite just to him, and was deceived a third time, when it tookhim after his fall for an exploded mountebank and nonentity. Amid thegeneral chorus of contempt which was raised over his weak andunscrupulous policy in later years, culminating in his great disaster, there are few things finer than this attempt of Browning's to give theman a platform and let him speak for himself. It is the apologia of apolitical adventurer, and a political adventurer of a kind peculiarlyopen to popular condemnation. Mankind has always been somewhatinclined to forgive the adventurer who destroys or re-creates, butthere is nothing inspiring about the adventurer who merely preserves. We have sympathy with the rebel who aims at reconstruction, but thereis something repugnant to the imagination in the rebel who rebels inthe name of compromise. Browning had to defend, or rather tointerpret, a man who kidnapped politicians in the night and delugedthe Montmartre with blood, not for an ideal, not for a reform, notprecisely even for a cause, but simply for the establishment of a_régime_. He did these hideous things not so much that he might beable to do better ones, but that he and every one else might be ableto do nothing for twenty years; and Browning's contention, and a veryplausible contention, is that the criminal believed that his crimewould establish order and compromise, or, in other words, that hethought that nothing was the very best thing he and his people coulddo. There is something peculiarly characteristic of Browning in thusselecting not only a political villain, but what would appear the mostprosaic kind of villain. We scarcely ever find in Browning a defenceof those obvious and easily defended publicans and sinners whosemingled virtues and vices are the stuff of romance and melodrama--thegenerous rake, the kindly drunkard, the strong man too great forparochial morals. He was in a yet more solitary sense the friend ofthe outcast. He took in the sinners whom even sinners cast out. Hewent with the hypocrite and had mercy on the Pharisee. 

How little this desire of Browning's, to look for a moment at theman's life with the man's eyes, was understood, may be gathered fromthe criticisms on _Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, which, says Browning, "theEditor of the _Edinburgh Review_ calls my eulogium on the SecondEmpire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirmsit to be, a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England. It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say forhimself. "

In 1873 appeared _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, which, if it be notabsolutely one of the finest of Browning's poems, is certainly one ofthe most magnificently Browningesque. The origin of the name of thepoem is probably well known. He was travelling along the Normandycoast, and discovered what he called

 "Meek, hitherto un-Murrayed bathing-places, Best loved of sea-coast-nook-full Normandy!"

Miss Thackeray, who was of the party, delighted Browning beyondmeasure by calling the sleepy old fishing district "White CottonNight-Cap Country. " It was exactly the kind of elfish phrase to whichBrowning had, it must always be remembered, a quite unconquerableattraction. The notion of a town of sleep, where men and women walkedabout in nightcaps, a nation of somnambulists, was the kind of thingthat Browning in his heart loved better than _Paradise Lost_. Sometime afterwards he read in a newspaper a very painful story ofprofligacy and suicide which greatly occupied the French journals inthe year 1871, and which had taken place in the same district. It isworth noting that Browning was one of those wise men who can perceivethe terrible and impressive poetry of the police-news, which iscommonly treated as vulgarity, which is dreadful and may beundesirable, but is certainly not vulgar. From _The Ring and the Book_to _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_ a great many of his works might becalled magnificent detective stories. The story is somewhat ugly, andits power does not alter its ugliness, for power can only makeugliness uglier. And in this poem there is little or nothing of therevelation of that secret wealth of valour and patience in humanitywhich makes real and redeems the revelation of its secret vileness in_The Ring and the Book_. It almost looks at first sight as if Browninghad for a moment surrendered the whole of his impregnablephilosophical position and admitted the strange heresy that a humanstory can be sordid. But this view of the poem is, of course, amistake. It was written in something which, for want of a more exactword, we must call one of the bitter moods of Browning; but thebitterness is entirely the product of a certain generous hostilityagainst the class of morbidities which he really detested, sometimesmore than they deserved. In this poem these principles of weakness andevil are embodied to him as the sicklier kind of Romanism, and themore sensual side of the French temperament. We must never forget whata great deal of the Puritan there remained in Browning to the end. This outburst of it is fierce and ironical, not in his best spirit. Itsays in effect, "You call this a country of sleep, I call it a countryof death. You call it 'White Cotton Night-Cap Country'; I call it 'RedCotton Night-Cap Country. '"

Shortly before this, in 1872, he had published _Fifine at the Fair_, which his principal biographer, and one of his most uncompromisingadmirers, calls a piece of perplexing cynicism. Perplexing it may beto some extent, for it was almost impossible to tell whether Browningwould or would not be perplexing even in a love-song or a post-card. But cynicism is a word that cannot possibly be applied with anypropriety to anything that Browning ever wrote. Cynicism denotes thatcondition of mind in which we hold that life is in its nature mean andarid; that no soul contains genuine goodness, and no state of thingsgenuine reliability. _Fifine at the Fair_, like _PrinceHohenstiel-Schwangau_, is one of Browning's apologeticsoliloquies--the soliloquy of an epicurean who seeks half-playfullyto justify upon moral grounds an infidelity into which he afterwardsactually falls. This casuist, like all Browning's casuists, is givenmany noble outbursts and sincere moments, and therefore apparently thepoem is called cynical. It is difficult to understand what particularconnection there is between seeing good in nobody and seeing good evenin a sensual fool. 

After _Fifine at the Fair_ appeared the _Inn Album_, in 1875, a purelynarrative work, chiefly interesting as exhibiting in yet another placeone of Browning's vital characteristics, a pleasure in retelling andinterpreting actual events of a sinister and criminal type; and afterthe _Inn Album_ came what is perhaps the most preposterouslyindividual thing he ever wrote, _Of Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked inDistemper_, in 1876. It is impossible to call the work poetry, and itis very difficult indeed to know what to call it. Its chiefcharacteristic is a kind of galloping energy, an energy that hasnothing intellectual or even intelligible about it, a purely animalenergy of words. Not only is it not beautiful, it is not even clever, and yet it carries the reader away as he might be carried away byromping children. It ends up with a voluble and largely unmeaningmalediction upon the poet's critics, a malediction so outrageouslygood-humoured that it does not take the trouble even to make itselfclear to the objects of its wrath. One can compare the poem to nothingin heaven or earth, except to the somewhat humorous, more or lessbenevolent, and most incomprehensible catalogues of curses and oathswhich may be heard from an intoxicated navvy. This is the kind ofthing, and it goes on for pages:--

 "Long after the last of your number Has ceased my front-court to encumber While, treading down rose and ranunculus, You _Tommy-make-room-for-your-uncle_-us! Troop, all of you man or homunculus, Quick march! for Xanthippe, my housemaid, If once on your pates she a souse made With what, pan or pot, bowl or _skoramis_, First comes to her hand--things were more amiss! I would not for worlds be your place in-- Recipient of slops from the basin! You, Jack-in-the-Green, leaf-and-twiggishness Won't save a dry thread on your priggishness!"

You can only call this, in the most literal sense of the word, thebrute-force of language. 

In spite however of this monstrosity among poems, which gives itstitle to the volume, it contains some of the most beautiful versesthat Browning ever wrote in that style of light philosophy in which hewas unequalled. Nothing ever gave so perfectly and artistically whatis too loosely talked about as a thrill, as the poem called "Fears andScruples, " in which a man describes the mystifying conduct of anabsent friend, and reserves to the last line the climax--

 "Hush, I pray you! What if this friend happen to be--God. "

It is the masterpiece of that excellent but much-abused literaryquality, Sensationalism. 

The volume entitled _Pacchiarotto_, moreover, includes one or two ofthe most spirited poems on the subject of the poet in relation topublicity--"At the Mermaid, " "House, " and "Shop. "

In spite of his increasing years, his books seemed if anything tocome thicker and faster. Two were published in 1878--_La Saisiaz_, hisgreat metaphysical poem on the conception of immortality, and thatdelightfully foppish fragment of the _ancien régime_, _The Two Poetsof Croisic_. Those two poems would alone suffice to show that he hadnot forgotten the hard science of theology or the harder science ofhumour. Another collection followed in 1879, the first series of_Dramatic Idylls_, which contain such masterpieces as "Pheidippides"and "Ivàn Ivànovitch. " Upon its heels, in 1880, came the second seriesof _Dramatic Idylls_, including "Muléykeh" and "Clive, " possibly thetwo best stories in poetry, told in the best manner of story-telling. Then only did the marvellous fountain begin to slacken in quantity, but never in quality. _Jocoseria_ did not appear till 1883. Itcontains among other things a cast-back to his very earliest manner inthe lyric of "Never the Time and the Place, " which we may call themost light-hearted love-song that was ever written by a man overseventy. In the next year appeared _Ferishtah's Fancies_, whichexhibit some of his shrewdest cosmic sagacity, expressed in some ofhis quaintest and most characteristic images. Here perhaps more thananywhere else we see that supreme peculiarity of Browning--his senseof the symbolism of material trifles. Enormous problems, and yet moreenormous answers, about pain, prayer, destiny, liberty, and conscienceare suggested by cherries, by the sun, by a melon-seller, by an eagleflying in the sky, by a man tilling a plot of ground. It is thisspirit of grotesque allegory which really characterises Browning amongall other poets. Other poets might possibly have hit upon the samephilosophical idea--some idea as deep, as delicate, and as spiritual. But it may be safely asserted that no other poet, having thought of adeep, delicate, and spiritual idea, would call it "A Bean Stripe; alsoApple Eating. "

Three more years passed, and the last book which Browning published inhis lifetime was _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance intheir Day_, a book which consists of apostrophes, amicable, furious, reverential, satirical, emotional to a number of people of whom thevast majority even of cultivated people have never heard in theirlives--Daniel Bartoli, Francis Furini, Gerard de Lairesse, and CharlesAvison. This extraordinary knowledge of the fulness of history was athing which never ceased to characterise Browning even when he wasunfortunate in every other literary quality. Apart altogether fromevery line he ever wrote, it may fairly be said that no mind so richas his ever carried its treasures to the grave. All these later poemsare vigorous, learned, and full-blooded. They are thoroughlycharacteristic of their author. But nothing in them is quite socharacteristic of their author as this fact, that when he hadpublished all of them, and was already near to his last day, he turnedwith the energy of a boy let out of school, and began, of all thingsin the world, to re-write and improve "Pauline, " the boyish poem thathe had written fifty-five years before. Here was a man covered withglory and near to the doors of death, who was prepared to give himselfthe elaborate trouble of reconstructing the mood, and rebuilding theverses of a long juvenile poem which had been forgotten for fiftyyears in the blaze of successive victories. It is such things as thesewhich give to Browning an interest of personality which is far beyondthe more interest of genius. It was of such things that ElizabethBarrett wrote in one of her best moments of insight--that his geniuswas the least important thing about him. 

During all these later years, Browning's life had been a quiet andregular one. He always spent the winter in Italy and the summer inLondon, and carried his old love of precision to the extent of neverfailing day after day throughout the year to leave the house at thesame time. He had by this time become far more of a public figure thanhe had ever been previously, both in England and Italy. In 1881, Dr. Furnivall and Miss E. H. Hickey founded the famous "Browning Society. "He became President of the new "Shakespeare Society" and of the"Wordsworth Society. " In 1886, on the death of Lord Houghton, heaccepted the post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy. Whenhe moved to De Vere Gardens in 1887, it began to be evident that hewas slowly breaking up. He still dined out constantly; he stillattended every reception and private view; he still correspondedprodigiously, and even added to his correspondence; and there isnothing more typical of him than that now, when he was almost alreadya classic, he answered any compliment with the most delightful vanityand embarrassment. In a letter to Mr. George Bainton, touching style, he makes a remark which is an excellent criticism on his wholeliterary career: "I myself found many forgotten fields which haveproved the richest of pastures. " But despite his continued energy, hishealth was gradually growing worse. He was a strong man in a muscular, and ordinarily in a physical sense, but he was also in a certain sensea nervous man, and may be said to have died of brain-excitementprolonged through a lifetime. In these closing years he began to feelmore constantly the necessity for rest. He and his sister went to liveat a little hotel in Llangollen, and spent hours together talking anddrinking tea on the lawn. He himself writes in one of his quaint andpoetic phrases that he had come to love these long country retreats, "another term of delightful weeks, each tipped with a sweet starrySunday at the little church. " For the first time, and in the last twoor three years, he was really growing old. On one point he maintainedalways a tranquil and unvarying decision. The pessimistic school ofpoetry was growing up all round him; the decadents, with their beliefthat art was only a counting of the autumn leaves, were approachingmore and more towards their tired triumph and their tastelesspopularity. But Browning would not for one instant take the scorn ofthem out of his voice. "Death, death, it is this harping on death thatI despise so much. In fiction, in poetry, French as well as English, and I am told in American also, in art and literature, the shadow ofdeath, call it what you will, despair, negation, indifference, is uponus. But what fools who talk thus! Why, _amico mio_, you know as wellas I, that death is life, just as our daily momentarily dying body isnone the less alive, and ever recruiting new forces of existence. Without death, which is our church-yardy crape-like word for change, for growth, there could be no prolongation of that which we call life. Never say of me that I am dead. "

On August 13, 1888, he set out once more for Italy, the last of hisinnumerable voyages. During his last Italian period he seems to havefallen back on very ultimate simplicities, chiefly a mere staring atnature. The family with whom he lived kept a fox cub, and Browningwould spend hours with it watching its grotesque ways; when itescaped, he was characteristically enough delighted. The old man couldbe seen continually in the lanes round Asolo, peering into hedges andwhistling for the lizards. 

This serene and pastoral decline, surely the mildest of slopes intodeath, was suddenly diversified by a flash of something lying farbelow. Browning's eye fell upon a passage written by the distinguishedEdward Fitzgerald, who had been dead for many years, in whichFitzgerald spoke in an uncomplimentary manner of Elizabeth BarrettBrowning. Browning immediately wrote the "Lines to Edward Fitzgerald, "and set the whole literary world in an uproar. The lines were bitterand excessive to have been written against any man, especially bitterand excessive to have been written against a man who was not alive toreply. And yet, when all is said, it is impossible not to feel acertain dark and indescribable pleasure in this last burst of the oldbarbaric energy. The mountain had been tilled and forested, and laidout in gardens to the summit; but for one last night it had proveditself once more a volcano, and had lit up all the plains with itsforgotten fire. And the blow, savage as it was, was dealt for thatgreat central sanctity--the story of a man's youth. All that the oldman would say in reply to every view of the question was, "I felt asif she had died yesterday. "

Towards December of 1889 he moved to Venice, where he fell ill. Hetook very little food; it was indeed one of his peculiar small fadsthat men should not take food when they are ill, a matter in which hemaintained that the animals were more sagacious. He assertedvigorously that this somewhat singular regimen would pull him through, talked about his plans, and appeared cheerful. Gradually, however, thetalking became more infrequent, the cheerfulness passed into a kind ofplacidity; and without any particular crisis or sign of the end, Robert Browning died on December 12, 1889. The body was taken on boardship by the Venice Municipal Guard, and received by the Royal Italianmarines. He was buried in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, thechoir singing his wife's poem, "He giveth His beloved sleep. " On theday that he died _Asolando_ was published. 

CHAPTER VI

BROWNING AS A LITERARY ARTIST

Mr. William Sharp, in his _Life_ of Browning, quotes the remarks ofanother critic to the following effect: "The poet's processes ofthought are scientific in their precision and analysis; the suddenconclusion that he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept. "

This is a very fair but a very curious example of the way in whichBrowning is treated. For what is the state of affairs? A man publishesa series of poems, vigorous, perplexing, and unique. The critics readthem, and they decide that he has failed as a poet, but that he is aremarkable philosopher and logician. They then proceed to examine hisphilosophy, and show with great triumph that it is unphilosophical, and to examine his logic and show with great triumph that it is notlogical, but "transcendental and inept. " In other words, Browning isfirst denounced for being a logician and not a poet, and thendenounced for insisting on being a poet when they have decided that heis to be a logician. It is just as if a man were to say first that agarden was so neglected that it was only fit for a boys' playground, and then complain of the unsuitability in a boys' playground ofrockeries and flower-beds. 

As we find, after this manner, that Browning does not actsatisfactorily as that which we have decided that he shall be--alogician--it might possibly be worth while to make another attempt tosee whether he may not, after all, be more valid than we thought as towhat he himself professed to be--a poet. And if we study thisseriously and sympathetically, we shall soon come to a conclusion. Itis a gross and complete slander upon Browning to say that hisprocesses of thought are scientific in their precision and analysis. They are nothing of the sort; if they were, Browning could not be agood poet. The critic speaks of the conclusions of a poem as"transcendental and inept"; but the conclusions of a poem, if they arenot transcendental, must be inept. Do the people who call one ofBrowning's poems scientific in its analysis realise the meaning ofwhat they say? One is tempted to think that they know a scientificanalysis when they see it as little as they know a good poem. The onesupreme difference between the scientific method and the artisticmethod is, roughly speaking, simply this--that a scientific statementmeans the same thing wherever and whenever it is uttered, and that anartistic statement means something entirely different, according tothe relation in which it stands to its surroundings. The remark, letus say, that the whale is a mammal, or the remark that sixteen ouncesgo to a pound, is equally true, and means exactly the same thing, whether we state it at the beginning of a conversation or at the end, whether we print it in a dictionary or chalk it up on a wall. But ifwe take some phrase commonly used in the art of literature--such asentence, for the sake of example, as "the dawn was breaking"--thematter is quite different. If the sentence came at the beginning of ashort story, it might be a mere descriptive prelude. If it were thelast sentence in a short story, it might be poignant with somepeculiar irony or triumph. Can any one read Browning's greatmonologues and not feel that they are built up like a good shortstory, entirely on this principle of the value of language arisingfrom its arrangement. Take such an example as "Caliban upon Setebos, "a wonderful poem designed to describe the way in which a primitivenature may at once be afraid of its gods and yet familiar with them. Caliban in describing his deity starts with a more or less natural andobvious parallel between the deity and himself, carries out thecomparison with consistency and an almost revolting simplicity, andends in a kind of blasphemous extravaganza of anthropomorphism, basinghis conduct not merely on the greatness and wisdom, but also on themanifest weaknesses and stupidities, of the Creator of all things. Then suddenly a thunderstorm breaks over Caliban's island, and theprofane speculator falls flat upon his face--

 "Lo! 'Lieth flat and loveth Setebos! 'Maketh his teeth meet through his upper lip, Will let those quails fly, will not eat this month One little mess of whelks, so he may 'scape!"

Surely it would be very difficult to persuade oneself that thisthunderstorm would have meant exactly the same thing if it hadoccurred at the beginning of "Caliban upon Setebos. " It does not meanthe same thing, but something very different; and the deduction fromthis is the curious fact that Browning is an artist, and thatconsequently his processes of thought are not "scientific in theirprecision and analysis. "

No criticism of Browning's poems can be vital, none in the face of thepoems themselves can be even intelligible, which is not based upon thefact that he was successfully or otherwise a conscious and deliberateartist. He may have failed as an artist, though I do not think so;that is quite a different matter. But it is one thing to say that aman through vanity or ignorance has built an ugly cathedral, and quiteanother to say that he built it in a fit of absence of mind, and didnot know whether he was building a lighthouse or a first-class hotel. Browning knew perfectly well what he was doing; and if the reader doesnot like his art, at least the author did. The general sentimentexpressed in the statement that he did not care about form is simplythe most ridiculous criticism that could be conceived. It would be farnearer the truth to say that he cared more for form than any otherEnglish poet who ever lived. He was always weaving and modelling andinventing new forms. Among all his two hundred to three hundred poemsit would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half asmany different metres as there are different poems. 

The great English poets who are supposed to have cared more for formthan Browning did, cared less at least in this sense--that they werecontent to use old forms so long as they were certain that they hadnew ideas. Browning, on the other hand, no sooner had a new idea thanhe tried to make a new form to express it. Wordsworth and Shelley werereally original poets; their attitude of thought and feeling markedwithout doubt certain great changes in literature and philosophy. Nevertheless, the "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" is aperfectly normal and traditional ode, and "Prometheus Unbound" is aperfectly genuine and traditional Greek lyrical drama. But if we studyBrowning honestly, nothing will strike us more than that he reallycreated a large number of quite novel and quite admirable artisticforms. It is too often forgotten what and how excellent these were. _The Ring and the Book_, for example, is an illuminating departure inliterary method--the method of telling the same story several timesand trusting to the variety of human character to turn it into severaldifferent and equally interesting stories. _Pippa Passes_, to takeanother example, is a new and most fruitful form, a series of detacheddramas connected only by the presence of one fugitive and isolatedfigure. The invention of these things is not merely like the writingof a good poem--it is something like the invention of the sonnet orthe Gothic arch. The poet who makes them does not merely createhimself--he creates other poets. It is so in a degree long pastenumeration with regard to Browning's smaller poems. Such a pious andhorrible lyric as "The Heretic's Tragedy, " for instance, is absolutelyoriginal, with its weird and almost blood-curdling echo verses, mocking echoes indeed--

 "And dipt of his wings in Paris square, They bring him now to lie burned alive. 

 _[And wanteth there grace of lute or clavicithern, ye shall say to confirm him who singeth_--

 We bring John now to be burned alive. "

A hundred instances might, of course, be given. Milton's "Sonnet onhis Blindness, " or Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn, " are both thoroughlyoriginal, but still we can point to other such sonnets and other suchodes. But can any one mention any poem of exactly the same structuraland literary type as "Fears and Scruples, " as "The Householder, " as"House" or "Shop, " as "Nationality in Drinks, " as "SibrandusSchafnaburgensis, " as "My Star, " as "A Portrait, " as any of"Ferishtah's Fancies, " as any of the "Bad Dreams. "

The thing which ought to be said about Browning by those who do notenjoy him is simply that they do not like his form; that they havestudied the form, and think it a bad form. If more people said thingsof this sort, the world of criticism would gain almost unspeakably inclarity and common honesty. Browning put himself before the world as agood poet. Let those who think he failed call him a bad poet, andthere will be an end of the matter. There are many styles in art whichperfectly competent æsthetic judges cannot endure. For instance, itwould be perfectly legitimate for a strict lover of Gothic to say thatone of the monstrous rococo altar-pieces in the Belgian churches withbulbous clouds and oaken sun-rays seven feet long, was, in hisopinion, ugly. But surely it would be perfectly ridiculous for any oneto say that it had no form. A man's actual feelings about it might bebetter expressed by saying that it had too much. To say that Browningwas merely a thinker because you think "Caliban upon Setebos" ugly, isprecisely as absurd as it would be to call the author of the oldBelgian altarpiece a man devoted only to the abstractions of religion. The truth about Browning is not that he was indifferent to technicalbeauty, but that he invented a particular kind of technical beauty towhich any one else is free to be as indifferent as he chooses. 

There is in this matter an extraordinary tendency to vague andunmeaning criticism. The usual way of criticising an author, particularly an author who has added something to the literary formsof the world, is to complain that his work does not contain somethingwhich is obviously the speciality of somebody else. The correct thingto say about Maeterlinck is that some play of his in which, let ussay, a princess dies in a deserted tower by the sea, has a certainbeauty, but that we look in vain in it for that robust geniality, thatreally boisterous will to live which may be found in _MartinChuzzlewit_. The right thing to say about _Cyrano de Bergerac_ is thatit may have a certain kind of wit and spirit, but that it reallythrows no light on the duty of middle-aged married couples in Norway. It cannot be too much insisted upon that at least three-quarters ofthe blame and criticism commonly directed against artists and authorsfalls under this general objection, and is essentially valueless. Authors both great and small are, like everything else in existence, upon the whole greatly under-rated. They are blamed for not doing, notonly what they have failed to do to reach their own ideal, but whatthey have never tried to do to reach every other writer's ideal. If wecan show that Browning had a definite ideal of beauty and loyallypursued it, it is not necessary to prove that he could have written_In Memoriam_ if he had tried. 

Browning has suffered far more injustice from his admirers than fromhis opponents, for his admirers have for the most part got hold of thematter, so to speak, by the wrong end. They believe that what isordinarily called the grotesque style of Browning was a kind ofnecessity boldly adopted by a great genius in order to express noveland profound ideas. But this is an entire mistake. What is calledugliness was to Browning not in the least a necessary evil, but aquite unnecessary luxury, which he enjoyed for its own sake. Forreasons that we shall see presently in discussing the philosophicaluse of the grotesque, it did so happen that Browning's grotesque stylewas very suitable for the expression of his peculiar moral andmetaphysical view. But the whole mass of poems will be misunderstoodif we do not realise first of all that he had a love of the grotesqueof the nature of art for art's sake. Here, for example, is a shortdistinct poem merely descriptive of one of those elfish German jugs inwhich it is to be presumed Tokay had been served to him. This is thewhole poem, and a very good poem too--

 "Up jumped Tokay on our table, Like a pigmy castle-warder, Dwarfish to see, but stout and able, Arms and accoutrements all in order; And fierce he looked North, then, wheeling South Blew with his bugle a challenge to Drouth, Cocked his flap-hat with the tosspot-feather, Twisted his thumb in his red moustache, Jingled his huge brass spurs together, Tightened his waist with its Buda sash, And then, with an impudence nought could abash, Shrugged his hump-shoulder, to tell the beholder, For twenty such knaves he would laugh but the bolder: And so, with his sword-hilt gallantly jutting, And dexter-hand on his haunch abutting, Went the little man, Sir Ausbruch, strutting!"

I suppose there are Browning students in existence who would thinkthat this poem contained something pregnant about the Temperancequestion, or was a marvellously subtle analysis of the romanticmovement in Germany. But surely to most of us it is sufficientlyapparent that Browning was simply fashioning a ridiculousknick-knack, exactly as if he were actually moulding one of thesepreposterous German jugs. Now before studying the real character ofthis Browningesque style, there is one general truth to be recognisedabout Browning's work. It is this--that it is absolutely necessary toremember that Browning had, like every other poet, his simple andindisputable failures, and that it is one thing to speak of thebadness of his artistic failures, and quite another thing to speak ofthe badness of his artistic aim. Browning's style may be a good style, and yet exhibit many examples of a thoroughly bad use of it. On thispoint there is indeed a singularly unfair system of judgment used bythe public towards the poets. It is very little realised that the vastmajority of great poets have written an enormous amount of very badpoetry. The unfortunate Wordsworth is generally supposed to be almostalone in this; but any one who thinks so can scarcely have read acertain number of the minor poems of Byron and Shelley and Tennyson. 

Now it is only just to Browning that his more uncouth effusions shouldnot be treated as masterpieces by which he must stand or fall, buttreated simply as his failures. It is really true that such a line as

 "Irks fear the crop-full bird, frets doubt the maw-crammed beast?"

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But it is quite equally true thatTennyson's

 "And that good man, the clergyman, has told me words of peace, "

is a very ugly and a very bad line. But people do not say that thisproves that Tennyson was a mere crabbed controversialist andmetaphysician. They say that it is a bad example of Tennyson's form;they do not say that it is a good example of Tennyson's indifferenceto form. Upon the whole, Browning exhibits far fewer instances of thisfailure in his own style than any other of the great poets, with theexception of one or two like Spenser and Keats, who seem to have amysterious incapacity for writing bad poetry. But almost all originalpoets, particularly poets who have invented an artistic style, aresubject to one most disastrous habit--the habit of writing imitationsof themselves. Every now and then in the works of the noblestclassical poets you will come upon passages which read like extractsfrom an American book of parodies. Swinburne, for example, when hewrote the couplet--

 "From the lilies and languors of virtue To the raptures and roses of vice, "

wrote what is nothing but a bad imitation of himself, an imitationwhich seems indeed to have the wholly unjust and uncritical object ofproving that the Swinburnian melody is a mechanical scheme of initialletters. Or again, Mr. Rudyard Kipling when he wrote the line--

 "Or ride with the reckless seraphim on the rim of a red-maned star, "

was caricaturing himself in the harshest and least sympathetic spiritof American humour. This tendency is, of course, the result of theself-consciousness and theatricality of modern life in which each ofus is forced to conceive ourselves as part of a _dramatis personæ_and act perpetually in character. Browning sometimes yielded to thistemptation to be a great deal too like himself. 

 "Will I widen thee out till thou turnest From Margaret Minnikin mou' by God's grace, To Muckle-mouth Meg in good earnest. "

This sort of thing is not to be defended in Browning any more than inSwinburne. But, on the other hand, it is not to be attributed inSwinburne to a momentary exaggeration, and in Browning to a vitalæsthetic deficiency. In the case of Swinburne, we all feel that thequestion is not whether that particular preposterous couplet aboutlilies and roses redounds to the credit of the Swinburnian style, butwhether it would be possible in any other style than the Swinburnianto have written the Hymn to Proserpine. In the same way, the essentialissue about Browning as an artist is not whether he, in common withByron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne, sometimes wrotebad poetry, but whether in any other style except Browning's you couldhave achieved the precise artistic effect which is achieved by suchincomparable lyrics as "The Patriot" or "The Laboratory. " The answermust be in the negative, and in that answer lies the wholejustification of Browning as an artist. 

The question now arises, therefore, what was his conception of hisfunctions as an artist? We have already agreed that his artisticoriginality concerned itself chiefly with the serious use of thegrotesque. It becomes necessary, therefore, to ask what is the serioususe of the grotesque, and what relation does the grotesque bear to theeternal and fundamental elements in life?

One of the most curious things to notice about popular æstheticcriticism is the number of phrases it will be found to use which areintended to express an æsthetic failure, and which express merely anæsthetic variety. Thus, for instance, the traveller will often hearthe advice from local lovers of the picturesque, "The scenery roundsuch and such a place has no interest; it is quite flat. " To disparagescenery as quite flat is, of course, like disparaging a swan as quitewhite, or an Italian sky as quite blue. Flatness is a sublime qualityin certain landscapes, just as rockiness is a sublime quality inothers. In the same way there are a great number of phrases commonlyused in order to disparage such writers as Browning which do not infact disparage, but merely describe them. One of the mostdistinguished of Browning's biographers and critics says of him, forexample, "He has never meant to be rugged, but has become so instriving after strength. " To say that Browning never tried to berugged is to say that Edgar Allan Poe never tried to be gloomy, orthat Mr. W. S. Gilbert never tried to be extravagant. The whole issuedepends upon whether we realise the simple and essential fact thatruggedness is a mode of art like gloominess or extravagance. Somepoems ought to be rugged, just as some poems ought to be smooth. Whenwe see a drift of stormy and fantastic clouds at sunset, we do not saythat the cloud is beautiful although it is ragged at the edges. Whenwe see a gnarled and sprawling oak, we do not say that it is finealthough it is twisted. When we see a mountain, we do not say that itis impressive although it is rugged, nor do we say apologetically thatit never meant to be rugged, but became so in its striving afterstrength. Now, to say that Browning's poems, artistically considered, are fine although they are rugged, is quite as absurd as to say that arock, artistically considered, is fine although it is rugged. Ruggedness being an essential quality in the universe, there is thatin man which responds to it as to the striking of any other chord ofthe eternal harmonies. As the children of nature, we are akin not onlyto the stars and flowers, but also to the toad-stools and themonstrous tropical birds. And it is to be repeated as the essential ofthe question that on this side of our nature we do emphatically lovethe form of the toad-stools, and not merely some complicated botanicaland moral lessons which the philosopher may draw from them. Forexample, just as there is such a thing as a poetical metre beingbeautifully light or beautifully grave and haunting, so there is sucha thing as a poetical metre being beautifully rugged. In the oldballads, for instance, every person of literary taste will be struckby a certain attractiveness in the bold, varying, irregular verse--

 "He is either himsell a devil frae hell, Or else his mother a witch maun be; I wadna have ridden that wan water For a' the gowd in Christentie, "

is quite as pleasing to the ear in its own way as

 "There's a bower of roses by Bendemeer stream, And the nightingale sings in it all the night long, "

is in another way. Browning had an unrivalled ear for this particularkind of staccato music. The absurd notion that he had no sense ofmelody in verse is only possible to people who think that there is nomelody in verse which is not an imitation of Swinburne. To give asatisfactory idea of Browning's rhythmic originality would beimpossible without quotations more copious than entertaining. But theessential point has been suggested. 

 "They were purple of raiment and golden, Filled full of thee, fiery with wine, Thy lovers in haunts unbeholden, In marvellous chambers of thine, "

is beautiful language, but not the only sort of beautiful language. This, for instance, has also a tune in it--

 "I--'next poet. ' No, my hearties, I nor am, nor fain would be! Choose your chiefs and pick your parties, Not one soul revolt to me! * * * * * Which of you did I enable Once to slip inside my breast, There to catalogue and label What I like least, what love best, Hope and fear, believe and doubt of, Seek and shun, respect, deride, Who has right to make a rout of Rarities he found inside?"

This quick, gallantly stepping measure also has its own kind of music, and the man who cannot feel it can never have enjoyed the sound ofsoldiers marching by. This, then, roughly is the main fact to rememberabout Browning's poetical method, or about any one's poeticalmethod--that the question is not whether that method is the best inthe world, but the question whether there are not certain things whichcan only be conveyed by that method. It is perfectly true, forinstance, that a really lofty and lucid line of Tennyson, such as--

 "Thou art the highest, and most human too"and "We needs must love the highest when we see it"

would really be made the worse for being translated into Browning. Itwould probably become

 "High's human; man loves best, best visible, "

and would lose its peculiar clarity and dignity and courtly plainness. But it is quite equally true that any really characteristic fragmentof Browning, if it were only the tempestuous scolding of the organistin "Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha"--

 "Hallo, you sacristan, show us a light there! Down it dips, gone like a rocket. What, you want, do you, to come unawares, Sweeping the church up for first morning-prayers, And find a poor devil has ended his cares At the foot of your rotten-runged rat-riddled stairs? Do I carry the moon in my pocket?"

--it is quite equally true that this outrageous gallop of rhymesending with a frantic astronomical image would lose in energy andspirit if it were written in a conventional and classical style, andran--

 "What must I deem then that thou dreamest to find Disjected bones adrift upon the stair Thou sweepest clean, or that thou deemest that I Pouch in my wallet the vice-regal sun?"

Is it not obvious that this statelier version might be excellentpoetry of its kind, and yet would be bad exactly in so far as it wasgood; that it would lose all the swing, the rush, the energy of thepreposterous and grotesque original? In fact, we may see howunmanageable is this classical treatment of the essentially absurd inTennyson himself. The humorous passages in _The Princess_, thoughoften really humorous in themselves, always appear forced and feeblebecause they have to be restrained by a certain metrical dignity, andthe mere idea of such restraint is incompatible with humour. IfBrowning had written the passage which opens _The Princess_, descriptive of the "larking" of the villagers in the magnate's park, he would have spared us nothing; he would not have spared us theshrill uneducated voices and the unburied bottles of ginger beer. Hewould have crammed the poem with uncouth similes; he would havechanged the metre a hundred times; he would have broken into doggereland into rhapsody; but he would have left, when all is said and done, as he leaves in that paltry fragment of the grumbling organist, theimpression of a certain eternal human energy. Energy and joy, thefather and the mother of the grotesque, would have ruled the poem. Weshould have felt of that rowdy gathering little but the sensation ofwhich Mr. Henley writes--

 "Praise the generous gods for giving, In this world of sin and strife, With some little time for living, Unto each the joy of life, "

the thought that every wise man has when looking at a Bank Holidaycrowd at Margate. 

To ask why Browning enjoyed this perverse and fantastic style mostwould be to go very deep into his spirit indeed, probably a greatdeal deeper than it is possible to go. But it is worth while tosuggest tentatively the general function of the grotesque in artgenerally and in his art in particular. There is one very curious ideainto which we have been hypnotised by the more eloquent poets, andthat is that nature in the sense of what is ordinarily called thecountry is a thing entirely stately and beautiful as those terms arecommonly understood. The whole world of the fantastic, all thingstop-heavy, lop-sided, and nonsensical are conceived as the work ofman, gargoyles, German jugs, Chinese pots, political caricatures, burlesque epics, the pictures of Mr. Aubrey Beardsley and the puns ofRobert Browning. But in truth a part, and a very large part, of thesanity and power of nature lies in the fact that out of her comes allthis instinct of caricature. Nature may present itself to the poet toooften as consisting of stars and lilies; but these are not poets wholive in the country; they are men who go to the country forinspiration and could no more live in the country than they could goto bed in Westminster Abbey. Men who live in the heart of nature, farmers and peasants, know that nature means cows and pigs, andcreatures more humorous than can be found in a whole sketch-book ofCallot. And the element of the grotesque in art, like the element ofthe grotesque in nature, means, in the main, energy, the energy whichtakes its own forms and goes its own way. Browning's verse, in so faras it is grotesque, is not complex or artificial; it is natural and inthe legitimate tradition of nature. The verse sprawls like the trees, dances like the dust; it is ragged like the thunder-cloud, it istop-heavy like the toadstool. Energy which disregards the standard ofclassical art is in nature as it is in Browning. The same sense of theuproarious force in things which makes Browning dwell on the oddity ofa fungus or a jellyfish makes him dwell on the oddity of aphilosophical idea. Here, for example, we have a random instance from"The Englishman in Italy" of the way in which Browning, when he wasmost Browning, regarded physical nature. 

 "And pitch down his basket before us, All trembling alive With pink and grey jellies, your sea-fruit; You touch the strange lumps, And mouths gape there, eyes open, all manner Of horns and of humps, Which only the fisher looks grave at. "

Nature might mean flowers to Wordsworth and grass to Walt Whitman, butto Browning it really meant such things as these, the monstrositiesand living mysteries of the sea. And just as these strange thingsmeant to Browning energy in the physical world, so strange thoughtsand strange images meant to him energy in the mental world. When, inone of his later poems, the professional mystic is seeking in asupreme moment of sincerity to explain that small things may be filledwith God as well as great, he uses the very same kind of image, theimage of a shapeless sea-beast, to embody that noble conception. 

 "The Name comes close behind a stomach-cyst, The simplest of creations, just a sac That's mouth, heart, legs, and belly at once, yet lives And feels, and could do neither, we conclude, If simplified still further one degree. "

 (SLUDGE. )

These bulbous, indescribable sea-goblins are the first thing on whichthe eye of the poet lights in looking on a landscape, and the last inthe significance of which he trusts in demonstrating the mercy of theEverlasting. 

There is another and but slightly different use of the grotesque, butwhich is definitely valuable in Browning's poetry, and indeed in allpoetry. To present a matter in a grotesque manner does certainly tendto touch the nerve of surprise and thus to draw attention to theintrinsically miraculous character of the object itself. It isdifficult to give examples of the proper use of grotesqueness withoutbecoming too grotesque. But we should all agree that if St. Paul'sCathedral were suddenly presented to us upside down we should, for themoment, be more surprised at it, and look at it more than we have doneall the centuries during which it has rested on its foundations. Nowit is the supreme function of the philosopher of the grotesque to makethe world stand on its head that people may look at it. If we say "aman is a man" we awaken no sense of the fantastic, however much weought to, but if we say, in the language of the old satirist, "thatman is a two-legged bird, without feathers, " the phrase does, for amoment, make us look at man from the outside and gives us a thrill inhis presence. When the author of the Book of Job insists upon thehuge, half-witted, apparently unmeaning magnificence and might ofBehemoth, the hippopotamus, he is appealing precisely to this sense ofwonder provoked by the grotesque. "Canst thou play with him as with abird, canst thou bind him for thy maidens?" he says in an admirablepassage. The notion of the hippopotamus as a household pet iscuriously in the spirit of the humour of Browning. 

But when it is clearly understood that Browning's love of thefantastic in style was a perfectly serious artistic love, when weunderstand that he enjoyed working in that style, as a Chinese pottermight enjoy making dragons, or a mediæval mason making devils, thereyet remains something definite which must be laid to his account as afault. He certainly had a capacity for becoming perfectly childish inhis indulgence in ingenuities that have nothing to do with poetry atall, such as puns, and rhymes, and grammatical structures that onlyjust fit into each other like a Chinese puzzle. Probably it was onlyone of the marks of his singular vitality, curiosity, and interest indetails. He was certainly one of those somewhat rare men who arefierily ambitious both in large things and in small. He prided himselfon having written _The Ring and the Book_, and he also prided himselfon knowing good wine when he tasted it. He prided himself onre-establishing optimism on a new foundation, and it is to bepresumed, though it is somewhat difficult to imagine, that he pridedhimself on such rhymes as the following in _Pacchiarotto_:--

 "The wolf, fox, bear, and monkey, By piping advice in one key-- That his pipe should play a prelude To something heaven-tinged not hell-hued, Something not harsh but docile, Man-liquid, not man-fossil. "

This writing, considered as writing, can only be regarded as a kind ofjoke, and most probably Browning considered it so himself. It hasnothing at all to do with that powerful and symbolic use of thegrotesque which may be found in such admirable passages as this from"Holy Cross Day":--

 "Give your first groan--compunction's at work; And soft! from a Jew you mount to a Turk. Lo, Micah--the self-same beard on chin He was four times already converted in!"

This is the serious use of the grotesque. Through it passion andphilosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But therhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to thepoems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it canonly be called the horse-play of literature. It may be noted, forexample, as a rather curious fact, that the ingenious rhymes aregenerally only mathematical triumphs, not triumphs of any kind ofassonance. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin, " a poem written for children, and bound in general to be lucid and readable, ends with a rhyme whichit is physically impossible for any one to say:--

 "And, whether they pipe us free, fróm rats or fróm mice, If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise!"

This queer trait in Browning, his inability to keep a kind of dementedingenuity even out of poems in which it was quite inappropriate, is athing which must be recognised, and recognised all the more because asa whole he was a very perfect artist, and a particularly perfectartist in the use of the grotesque. But everywhere when we go a littlebelow the surface in Browning we find that there was something in himperverse and unusual despite all his working normality andsimplicity. His mind was perfectly wholesome, but it was not madeexactly like the ordinary mind. It was like a piece of strong woodwith a knot in it. 

The quality of what, can only be called buffoonery which is underdiscussion is indeed one of the many things in which Browning was moreof an Elizabethan than a Victorian. He was like the Elizabethans intheir belief in the normal man, in their gorgeous and over-loadedlanguage, above all in their feeling for learning as an enjoyment andalmost a frivolity. But there was nothing in which he was sothoroughly Elizabethan, and even Shakespearian, as in this fact, thatwhen he felt inclined to write a page of quite uninteresting nonsense, he immediately did so. Many great writers have contrived to betedious, and apparently aimless, while expounding some thought whichthey believed to be grave and profitable; but this frivolous stupidityhad not been found in any great writer since the time of Rabelais andthe time of the Elizabethans. In many of the comic scenes ofShakespeare we have precisely this elephantine ingenuity, this huntingof a pun to death through three pages. In the Elizabethan dramatistsand in Browning it is no doubt to a certain extent the mark of a realhilarity. People must be very happy to be so easily amused. 

In the case of what is called Browning's obscurity, the question issomewhat more difficult to handle. Many people have supposed Browningto be profound because he was obscure, and many other people, hardlyless mistaken, have supposed him to be obscure because he wasprofound. He was frequently profound, he was occasionally obscure, butas a matter of fact the two have little or nothing to do with eachother. Browning's dark and elliptical mode of speech, like his love ofthe grotesque, was simply a characteristic of his, a trick of istemperament, and had little or nothing to do with whether what he wasexpressing was profound or superficial. Suppose, for example, that aperson well read in English poetry but unacquainted with Browning'sstyle were earnestly invited to consider the following verse:--

 "Hobbs hints blue--straight he turtle eats. Nobbs prints blue--claret crowns his cup. Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats-- Both gorge. Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?"

The individual so confronted would say without hesitation that it mustindeed be an abstruse and indescribable thought which could only beconveyed by remarks so completely disconnected. But the point of thematter is that the thought contained in this amazing verse is notabstruse or philosophical at all, but is a perfectly ordinary andstraightforward comment, which any one might have made upon an obviousfact of life. The whole verse of course begins to explain itself, ifwe know the meaning of the word "murex, " which is the name of asea-shell, out of which was made the celebrated blue dye of Tyre. Thepoet takes this blue dye as a simile for a new fashion in literature, and points out that Hobbs, Nobbs, etc. , obtain fame and comfort bymerely using the dye from the shell; and adds the perfectly naturalcomment:--

 ". .. Who fished the murex up? What porridge had John Keats?"

So that the verse is not subtle, and was not meant to be subtle, butis a perfectly casual piece of sentiment at the end of a light poem. Browning is not obscure because he has such deep things to say, anymore than he is grotesque because he has such new things to say. He isboth of these things primarily, because he likes to express himself ina particular manner. The manner is as natural to him as a man'sphysical voice, and it is abrupt, sketchy, allusive, and full of gaps. Here comes in the fundamental difference between Browning and such awriter as George Meredith, with whom the Philistine satirist would sooften in the matter of complexity class him. The works of GeorgeMeredith are, as it were, obscure even when we know what they mean. They deal with nameless emotions, fugitive sensations, subconsciouscertainties and uncertainties, and it really requires a somewhatcurious and unfamiliar mode of speech to indicate the presence ofthese. But the great part of Browning's actual sentiments, and almostall the finest and most literary of them, are perfectly plain andpopular and eternal sentiments. Meredith is really a singer producingstrange notes and cadences difficult to follow because of the delicaterhythm of the song he sings. Browning is simply a great demagogue, with an impediment in his speech. Or rather, to speak more strictly, Browning is a man whose excitement for the glory of the obvious is sogreat that his speech becomes disjointed and precipitate: he becomeseccentric through his advocacy of the ordinary, and goes mad for thelove of sanity. 

If Browning and George Meredith were each describing the same act, they might both be obscure, but their obscurities would be entirelydifferent. Suppose, for instance, they were describing even so prosaicand material an act as a man being knocked downstairs by another manto whom he had given the lie, Meredith's description would refer tosomething which an ordinary observer would not see, or at least couldnot describe. It might be a sudden sense of anarchy in the brain ofthe assaulter, or a stupefaction and stunned serenity in that of theobject of the assault. He might write, "Wainwood's 'Men vary inveracity, ' brought the baronet's arm up. He felt the doors of hisbrain burst, and Wainwood a swift rushing of himself through airaccompanied with a clarity as of the annihilated. " Meredith, in otherwords, would speak queerly because he was describing queer mentalexperiences. But Browning might simply be describing the materialincident of the man being knocked downstairs, and his descriptionwould run:--

 "What then? 'You lie' and doormat below stairs Takes bump from back. "

This is not subtlety, but merely a kind of insane swiftness. Browningis not like Meredith, anxious to pause and examine the sensations ofthe combatants, nor does he become obscure through this anxiety. He isonly so anxious to get his man to the bottom of the stairs quicklythat he leaves out about half the story. 

Many who could understand that ruggedness might be an artisticquality, would decisively, and in most cases rightly, deny thatobscurity could under any conceivable circumstances be an artisticquality. But here again Browning's work requires a somewhat morecautious and sympathetic analysis. There is a certain kind offascination, a strictly artistic fascination, which arises from amatter being hinted at in such a way as to leave a certain tormentinguncertainty even at the end. It is well sometimes to half understand apoem in the same manner that we half understand the world. One of thedeepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which willsuddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in slopingmeadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just utteredsomething stupendously direct and important, and that we have by aprodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certainpoetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missedthe full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, butin this dazed and dramatic ignorance. 

But in truth it is very difficult to keep pace with all the strangeand unclassified artistic merits of Browning. He was always tryingexperiments; sometimes he failed, producing clumsy and irritatingmetres, top-heavy and over-concentrated thought. Far more often hetriumphed, producing a crowd of boldly designed poems, every one ofwhich taken separately might have founded an artistic school. Butwhether successful or unsuccessful, he never ceased from his fiercehunt after poetic novelty. He never became a conservative. The lastbook he published in his life-time, _Parleyings with Certain People ofImportance in their Day_, was a new poem, and more revolutionary than_Paracelsus_. This is the true light in which to regard Browning as anartist. He had determined to leave no spot of the cosmos unadorned byhis poetry which he could find it possible to adorn. An admirableexample can be found in that splendid poem "Childe Roland to the DarkTower came. " It is the hint of an entirely new and curious type ofpoetry, the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspect of the earthitself. Daring poets who wished to escape from conventional gardensand orchards had long been in the habit of celebrating the poetry ofrugged and gloomy landscapes, but Browning is not content with this. He insists upon celebrating the poetry of mean landscapes. That senseof scrubbiness in nature, as of a man unshaved, had never beenconveyed with this enthusiasm and primeval gusto before. 

 "If there pushed any ragged thistle-stalk Above its mates, the head was chopped; the bents Were jealous else. What made those holes and rents In the dock's harsh swarth leaves, bruised as to baulk All hope of greenness? 'tis a brute must walk Pashing their life out, with a brute's intents. "

This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes uponus, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on somehalf-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey meanstreet. It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was thefirst to sing it. Oddly enough it has been one of the poems aboutwhich most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a scienceinstead of a poet, "What does the poem of 'Childe Roland' mean?" Theonly genuine answer to this is, "What does anything mean?" Does theearth mean nothing? Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistlesmean nothing? Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing? Ifit does, there is but one further truth to be added--that everythingmeans nothing. 

CHAPTER VII

_THE RING AND THE BOOK_

When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of _TheRing and the Book_, the studying of a single matter from ninedifferent stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to noticewhat these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected asvoicing the essential and distinct versions of the case. One of theablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the twoadvocates in _The Ring and the Book_ will scarcely be very interestingto the ordinary reader. However that may be, there can be little doubtthat a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside themark and adventitious. But it is exceedingly dangerous to say thatanything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary. We are apt to go onthinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, andthe detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the centralpillar of the structure. In the successive monologues of his poem, Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which afact gets itself presented to the world. In every question there arepartisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the rightside; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincingarguments for the wrong side. But over and above these, there doesexist in every great controversy a class of more or less officialpartisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause byentirely inappropriate arguments. They do not know the real good thatcan be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said forthe bad one. They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of JurisDoctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis. These two menbrilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other's cause, but their owncause. The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artisticstrokes in _The Ring and the Book_. 

We can see the matter best by taking an imaginary parallel. Supposethat a poet of the type of Browning lived some centuries hence andfound in some _cause célèbre_ of our day, such as the ParnellCommission, an opportunity for a work similar in its design to _TheRing and the Book_. The first monologue, which would be called"Half-London, " would be the arguments of an ordinary educated andsensible Unionist who believed that there really was evidence that theNationalist movement in Ireland was rooted in crime and public panic. The "Otherhalf-London" would be the utterance of an ordinary educatedand sensible Home Ruler, who thought that in the main Nationalism wasone distinct symptom, and crime another, of the same poisonous andstagnant problem. The "Tertium Quid" would be some detachedintellectual, committed neither to Nationalism nor to Unionism, possibly Mr. Bernard Shaw, who would make a very entertaining Browningmonologue. Then of course would come the speeches of the great actorsin the drama, the icy anger of Parnell, the shuffling apologies ofPigott. But we should feel that the record was incomplete withoutanother touch which in practice has so much to do with the confusionof such a question. Bottinius and Hyacinthus de Archangelis, the twocynical professional pleaders, with their transparent assumptions andincredible theories of the case, would be represented by two partyjournalists; one of whom was ready to base his case either on the factthat Parnell was a Socialist or an Anarchist, or an Atheist or a RomanCatholic; and the other of whom was ready to base his case on thetheory that Lord Salisbury hated Parnell or was in league with him, orhad never heard of him, or anything else that was remote from theworld of reality. These are the kind of little touches for which wemust always be on the look-out in Browning. Even if a digression, or asimile, or a whole scene in a play, seems to have no point or value, let us wait a little and give it a chance. He very seldom wroteanything that did not mean a great deal. 

It is sometimes curious to notice how a critic, possessing no littlecultivation and fertility, will, in speaking of a work of art, letfall almost accidentally some apparently trivial comment, whichreveals to us with an instantaneous and complete mental illuminationthe fact that he does not, so far as that work of art is concerned, inthe smallest degree understand what he is talking about. He may haveintended to correct merely some minute detail of the work he isstudying, but that single movement is enough to blow him and all hisdiplomas into the air. These are the sensations with which the trueBrowningite will regard the criticism made by so many of Browning'scritics and biographers about _The Ring and the Book_. That criticismwas embodied by one of them in the words "the theme looked atdispassionately is unworthy of the monument in which it is entombedfor eternity. " Now this remark shows at once that the critic does notknow what _The Ring and the Book_ means. We feel about it as we shouldfeel about a man who said that the plot of _Tristram Shandy_ was notwell constructed, or that the women in Rossetti's pictures did notlook useful and industrious. A man who has missed the fact that_Tristram Shandy is_ a game of digressions, that the whole book is akind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply hasnot read _Tristram Shandy_ at all. The man who objects to the Rossettipictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects totheir existing at all. And any one who objects to Browning writing hishuge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in realitymissed the whole length and breadth of the poet's meaning. The essenceof _The Ring and the Book_ is that it is the great epic of thenineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormousimportance of small things. The supreme difference that divides _TheRing and the Book_ from all the great poems of similar length andlargeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are aboutaffairs commonly called important, and _The Ring and the Book_ isabout an affair commonly called contemptible. Homer says, "I will showyou the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a greatlegend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of allmortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women. " Theauthor of the Book of Job says, "I will show you the relations betweenman and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God outof a whirlwind. " Virgil says, "I will show you the relations of man toheaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and thefounding of the most wonderful city in the world. " Dante says, "I willshow you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the verymachinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I haveheard, the roaring of the mills of God. " Milton says, "I will show youthe relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning ofall things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in thefirst twilight of time. " Browning says, "I will show you the relationsof man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book ofcriminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and mostcompletely forgotten. " Until we have realised this fundamental idea in_The Ring and the Book_ all criticism is misleading. 

In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time. The characteristic of the modern movements _par excellence_ is theapotheosis of the insignificant. Whether it be the school of poetrywhich sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests andwaterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds somethingindescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tintof a man's tweed coat, the tendency is the same. Maeterlinck strickenstill and wondering by a deal door half open, or the light shining outof a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medicalsignificance of the twitching of a man's toes, or the loss of hisappetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves ofthe lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-classticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul'stragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw fillingthree pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all thesemen, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that theyhave ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest tobe unimportant. Significance is to them a wild thing that may leapupon them from any hiding-place. They have all become terriblyimpressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers ofsmall things. Their difference from the old epic poets is the wholedifference between an age that fought with dragons and an age thatfights with microbes. 

This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadilyaround us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realisethat if there was one man in English literary history who might withjustice be called its fountain and origin, that man was RobertBrowning. When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands ofthe Tennysonian poet. The Tennysonian poet does indeed mentiontrivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially;Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally. Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense whichmay be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of ademoniac possession. Sane as he was, this one feeling might havedriven him to a condition not far from madness. Any room that he wassitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping witha story. There was sometimes no background and no middle distance inhis mind. A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it cameforward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that ifever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it wouldhave been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked ata porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, eachbegan to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland ofphilosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to sendup a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as aconjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadowthe earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at ascamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has readBrowning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure ofspeech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figurescommon in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and howoften it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitudewhich could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, forinstance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychologicalmeaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparingthem to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act oftalking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as toconnect two separate blots that were already there. This queer exampleis selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamentalrestlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit ofman. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea afterdoing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring ata piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and inthat insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, namelessfrom the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of thespiritual sea. 

It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the veryessence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormousmultiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticismto complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for thewhole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual goodand evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this isrealised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about thework. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesqueaccount of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out ofwhich he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence onits cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbedLatin. The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the textappear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon. It explainsagain the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of theforgotten intrigue. He was playing the game of seeing how much wasreally involved in one paltry fragment of fact. To have introducedlarge quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. _TheRing and the Book_ therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at sofar, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richnessof life by taking as a text a poor story. It pays to existence thehighest of all possible compliments--the great compliment whichmonarchy paid to mankind--the compliment of selecting from it almostat random. 

But this is only the first half of the claim of _The Ring and theBook_ to be the typical epic of modern times. The second half of thatclaim, the second respect in which the work is representative of allmodern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. _TheRing and the Book_ is of course, essentially speaking, a detectivestory. Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that itseeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centreof spiritual guilt. But it has exactly the same kind of excitingquality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality itis. But the element which is important, and which now requirespointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guiltand the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered. Inorder to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it isnecessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back somelittle way in literary history. 

I do not know whether anybody, including the editor himself, has evernoticed a peculiar coincidence which may be found in the arrangementof the lyrics in Sir Francis Palgrave's _Golden Treasury_. Howeverthat may be, two poems, each of them extremely well known, are placedside by side, and their juxtaposition represents one vast revolutionin the poetical manner of looking at things. The first is Goldsmith'salmost too well known

 "When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy? What art can wash her guilt away?"

Immediately afterwards comes, with a sudden and thrilling change ofnote, the voice of Burns:--

 "Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon, How can ye bloom sae fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' of care?

 Thou'll break my heart, thou bonny bird, That sings upon the bough, Thou minds me of the happy days When my fause Love was true. "

A man might read those two poems a great many times without happeningto realise that they are two poems on exactly the same subject--thesubject of a trusting woman deserted by a man. And the wholedifference--the difference struck by the very first note of the voiceof any one who reads them--is this fundamental difference, thatGoldsmith's words are spoken about a certain situation, and Burns'swords are spoken in that situation. 

In the transition from one of these lyrics to the other, we have avital change in the conception of the functions of the poet; a changeof which Burns was in many ways the beginning, of which Browning, in amanner that we shall see presently, was the culmination. 

Goldsmith writes fully and accurately in the tradition of the oldhistoric idea of what a poet was. The poet, the _vates_, was thesupreme and absolute critic of human existence, the chorus in thehuman drama; he was, to employ two words, which when analysed are thesame word, either a spectator or a seer. He took a situation, such asthe situation of a woman deserted by a man before-mentioned, and hegave, as Goldsmith gives, his own personal and definite decision uponit, entirely based upon general principles, and entirely from theoutside. Then, as in the case of _The Golden Treasury_, he has nosooner given judgment than there comes a bitter and confounding cryout of the very heart of the situation itself, which tells us thingswhich would have been quite left out of account by the poet of thegeneral rule. No one, for example, but a person who knew something ofthe inside of agony would have introduced that touch of the rage ofthe mourner against the chattering frivolity of nature, "Thou'll breakmy heart, thou bonny bird. " We find and could find no such touch inGoldsmith. We have to arrive at the conclusion therefore, that the_vates_ or poet in his absolute capacity is defied and overthrown bythis new method of what may be called the songs of experience. 

Now Browning, as he appears in _The Ring and the Book_, represents theattempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith statesit, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotionalexperiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith, seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it byendeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmithstands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includesthem all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a caselike that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would nottouch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it, but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or asoliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of itslanguage, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama;some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in apassionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love, lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We shouldbe reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let ussay, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upondevelopments which a mésalliance would overthrow, or in the positionof some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in whichhe had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All thesecharacters in the story, Browning would realise from their ownemotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in hisancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gavemen halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, hegives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all thefunctions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from thebeginning of the world have starved more than for bread. 

Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and theBook_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age, because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said, of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth withoutpossessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a littlemore to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likelyto say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely theapplication of this principle would revolutionise the old heroicepic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations andmoral value of the characters. Suppose, for example, that Homer hadwritten the _Odyssey_ on the principle of _The Ring and the Book_, howdisturbing, how weird an experience it would be to read the story fromthe point of view of Antinous! Without contradicting a single materialfact, without telling a single deliberate lie, the narrative would sochange the whole world around us, that we should scarcely know we weredealing with the same place and people. The calm face of Penelopewould, it may be, begin to grow meaner before our eyes, like a facechanging in a dream. She would begin to appear as a fickle and selfishwoman, passing falsely as a widow, and playing a double game betweenthe attentions of foolish but honourable young men, and the fitfulappearances of a wandering and good-for-nothing sailor-husband; a manprepared to act that most well-worn of melodramatic rôles, theconjugal bully and blackmailer, the man who uses marital rights as aninstrument for the worse kind of wrongs. Or, again, if we had thestory of the fall of King Arthur told from the stand-point of Mordred, it would only be a matter of a word or two; in a turn, in thetwinkling of an eye, we should find ourselves sympathising with theefforts of an earnest young man to frustrate the profligacies ofhigh-placed paladins like Lancelot and Tristram, and ultimatelydiscovering, with deep regret but unshaken moral courage, that therewas no way to frustrate them, except by overthrowing the cold andpriggish and incapable egotist who ruled the country, and the wholeartificial and bombastic schemes which bred these moral evils. Itmight be that in spite of this new view of the case, it wouldultimately appear that Ulysses was really right and Arthur was reallyright, just as Browning makes it ultimately appear that Pompilia wasreally right. But any one can see the enormous difference in scope anddifficulty between the old epic which told the whole story from oneman's point of view, and the new epic which cannot come to itsconclusion, until it has digested and assimilated views as paradoxicaland disturbing as our imaginary defence of Antinous and apologia ofMordred. 

One of the most important steps ever taken in the history of the worldis this step, with all its various aspects, literary, political, andsocial, which is represented by _The Ring and the Book_. It is thestep of deciding, in the face of many serious dangers anddisadvantages, to let everybody talk. The poet of the old epic is thepoet who had learnt to speak; Browning in the new epic is the poet whohas learnt to listen. This listening to truth and error, to heretics, to fools, to intellectual bullies, to desperate partisans, to merechatterers, to systematic poisoners of the mind, is the hardest lessonthat humanity has ever been set to learn. _The Ring and the Book_ isthe embodiment of this terrible magnanimity and patience. It is theepic of free speech. 

Free speech is an idea which has at present all the unpopularity of atruism; so that we tend to forget that it was not so very long agothat it had the more practical unpopularity which attaches to a newtruth. Ingratitude is surely the chief of the intellectual sins ofman. He takes his political benefits for granted, just as he takesthe skies and the seasons for granted. He considers the calm of a citystreet a thing as inevitable as the calm of a forest clearing, whereasit is only kept in peace by a sustained stretch and effort similar tothat which keeps up a battle or a fencing match. Just as we forgetwhere we stand in relation to natural phenomena, so we forget it inrelation to social phenomena. We forget that the earth is a star, andwe forget that free speech is a paradox. 

It is not by any means self-evident upon the face of it that aninstitution like the liberty of speech is right or just. It is notnatural or obvious to let a man utter follies and abominations whichyou believe to be bad for mankind any more than it is natural orobvious to let a man dig up a part of the public road, or infect halfa town with typhoid fever. The theory of free speech, that truth is somuch larger and stranger and more many-sided than we know of, that itis very much better at all costs to hear every one's account of it, isa theory which has been justified upon the whole by experiment, butwhich remains a very daring and even a very surprising theory. It isreally one of the great discoveries of the modern time; but, onceadmitted, it is a principle that does not merely affect politics, butphilosophy, ethics, and finally poetry. 

Browning was upon the whole the first poet to apply the principle topoetry. He perceived that if we wish to tell the truth about a humandrama, we must not tell it merely like a melodrama, in which thevillain is villainous and the comic man is comic. He saw that thetruth had not been told until he had seen in the villain the pure anddisinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselvesto be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is thecustom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyondall question the founder of the most modern school of poetry. Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerablein the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimatesource in Browning's great conception that every one's point of viewis interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point ofview. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it isemphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to knowsomething of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man. Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with themoods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolengoods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of thevalue of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by achasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessaryto listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth ofit. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held thatjustice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was adelusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that ina dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadentdoctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by thenature of things wrong. 

Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressedthan in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who wentto visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted thatan elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and wasready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. Inthe same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; tothe man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran uponits tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I havesaid, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differsfrom the psychological decadents and impressionists in this importantpoint, that he thinks that although the blind men found out verylittle about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was thereall the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because anelephant is a thing with a very curious shape. And Browning firmlybelieved that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shapeindeed. No blind poet could even imagine an elephant withoutexperience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God andnot die. But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view ofBrowning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much forthem to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of themodern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothingfor them to learn. To the impressionist artist of our time we are notblind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent. We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees andserpents without reason and without result. 

CHAPTER VIII

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING

The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in thefact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to liein what is called "the message of Browning, " or "the teaching ofBrowning, " or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning. NowBrowning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote forParliament. He did not hesitate to express these opinions any morethan he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value. Forexample, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or theintellectual basis of Christianity. Those opinions were very strikingand very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning's mind. His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in twocomparatively parallel phrases. The first was what may be called thehope which lies in the imperfection of man. The characteristic poem of"Old Pictures in Florence" expresses very quaintly and beautifully theidea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in otherwords, that in so far as man is a one-legged or a one-eyed creature, there is something about his appearance which indicates that heshould have another leg and another eye. The poem suggests admirablythat such a sense of incompleteness may easily be a great advance upona sense of completeness, that the part may easily and obviously begreater than the whole. And from this Browning draws, as he is fullyjustified in drawing, a definite hope for immortality and the largerscale of life. For nothing is more certain than that though this worldis the only world that we have known, or of which we could even dream, the fact does remain that we have named it "a strange world. " In otherwords, we have certainly felt that this world did not explain itself, that something in its complete and patent picture has been omitted. And Browning was right in saying that in a cosmos where incompletenessimplies completeness, life implies immortality. This then was thefirst of the doctrines or opinions of Browning: the hope that lies inthe imperfection of man. The second of the great Browning doctrinesrequires some audacity to express. It can only be properly stated asthe hope that lies in the imperfection of God. That is to say, thatBrowning held that sorrow and self-denial, if they were the burdens ofman, were also his privileges. He held that these stubborn sorrows andobscure valours might, to use a yet more strange expression, haveprovoked the envy of the Almighty. If man has self-sacrifice and Godhas none, then man has in the Universe a secret and blasphemoussuperiority. And this tremendous story of a Divine jealousy Browningreads into the story of the Crucifixion. If the Creator had not beencrucified He would not have been as great as thousands of wretchedfanatics among His own creatures. It is needless to insist upon thispoint; any one who wishes to read it splendidly expressed need only bereferred to "Saul. " But these are emphatically the two main doctrinesor opinions of Browning which I have ventured to characterise roughlyas the hope in the imperfection of man, and more boldly as the hope inthe imperfection of God. They are great thoughts, thoughts written bya great man, and they raise noble and beautiful doubts on behalf offaith which the human spirit will never answer or exhaust. But aboutthem in connection with Browning there nevertheless remains somethingto be added. 

Browning was, as most of his upholders and all his opponents say, anoptimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection impliesa design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. Histheory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice impliesGod's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is another very goodargument for optimism. But any one will make the deepest and blackestand most incurable mistake about Browning who imagines that hisoptimism was founded on any arguments for optimism. Because he had astrong intellect, because he had a strong power of conviction, heconceived and developed and asserted these doctrines of theincompleteness of Man and the sacrifice of Omnipotence. But thesedoctrines were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not its origin. It is surely obvious that no one can be argued into optimism since noone can be argued into happiness. Browning's optimism was not foundedon opinions which were the work of Browning, but on life which wasthe work of God. One of Browning's most celebrated biographers hassaid that something of Browning's theology must be put down to hispossession of a good digestion. The remark was, of course, like allremarks touching the tragic subject of digestion, intended to be funnyand to convey some kind of doubt or diminution touching the value ofBrowning's faith. But if we examine the matter with somewhat greatercare we shall see that it is indeed a thorough compliment to thatfaith. Nobody, strictly speaking, is happier on account of hisdigestion. He is happy because he is so constituted as to forget allabout it. Nobody really is convulsed with delight at the thought ofthe ingenious machinery which he possesses inside him; the thing whichdelights him is simply the full possession of his own human body. Icannot in the least understand why a good digestion--that is, a goodbody--should not be held to be as mystic a benefit as a sunset or thefirst flower of spring. But there is about digestion this peculiaritythrowing a great light on human pessimism, that it is one of the manythings which we never speak of as existing until they go wrong. Weshould think it ridiculous to speak of a man as suffering from hisboots if we meant that he had really no boots. But we do speak of aman suffering from digestion when we mean that he suffers from a lackof digestion. In the same way we speak of a man suffering from nerveswhen we mean that his nerves are more inefficient than any one else'snerves. If any one wishes to see how grossly language can degenerate, he need only compare the old optimistic use of the word nervous, which we employ in speaking of a nervous grip, with the newpessimistic use of the word, which we employ in speaking of a nervousmanner. And as digestion is a good thing which sometimes goes wrong, as nerves are good things which sometimes go wrong, so existenceitself in the eyes of Browning and all the great optimists is a goodthing which sometimes goes wrong. He held himself as free to draw hisinspiration from the gift of good health as from the gift of learningor the gift of fellowship. But he held that such gifts were in lifeinnumerable and varied, and that every man, or at least almost everyman, possessed some window looking out on this essential excellence ofthings. 

Browning's optimism then, since we must continue to use this somewhatinadequate word, was a result of experience--experience which is forsome mysterious reason generally understood in the sense of sad ordisillusioning experience. An old gentleman rebuking a little boy foreating apples in a tree is in the common conception the type ofexperience. If he really wished to be a type of experience he wouldclimb up the tree himself and proceed to experience the apples. Browning's faith was founded upon joyful experience, not in the sensethat he selected his joyful experiences and ignored his painful ones, but in the sense that his joyful experiences selected themselves andstood out in his memory by virtue of their own extraordinary intensityof colour. He did not use experience in that mean and pompous sense inwhich it is used by the worldling advanced in years. He rather used itin that healthier and more joyful sense in which it is used atrevivalist meetings. In the Salvation Army a man's experiences meanhis experiences of the mercy of God, and to Browning the meaning wasmuch the same. But the revivalists' confessions deal mostly withexperiences of prayer and praise; Browning's dealt pre-eminently withwhat may be called his own subject, the experiences of love. 

And this quality of Browning's optimism, the quality of detail, isalso a very typical quality. Browning's optimism is of that ultimateand unshakeable order that is founded upon the absolute sight, andsound, and smell, and handling of things. If a man had gone up toBrowning and asked him with all the solemnity of the eccentric, "Doyou think life is worth living?" it is interesting to conjecture whathis answer might have been. If he had been for the moment under theinfluence of the orthodox rationalistic deism of the theologian hewould have said, "Existence is justified by its manifest design, itsmanifest adaptation of means to ends, " or, in other words, "Existenceis justified by its completeness. " If, on the other hand, he had beeninfluenced by his own serious intellectual theories he would havesaid, "Existence is justified by its air of growth and doubtfulness, "or, in other words, "Existence is justified by its incompleteness. "But if he had not been influenced in his answer either by the acceptedopinions, or by his own opinions, but had simply answered the question"Is life worth living?" with the real, vital answer that awaited it inhis own soul, he would have said as likely as not, "Crimson toadstoolsin Hampshire. " Some plain, glowing picture of this sort left on hismind would be his real verdict on what the universe had meant to him. To his traditions hope was traced to order, to his speculations hopewas traced to disorder. But to Browning himself hope was traced tosomething like red toadstools. His mysticism was not of that idle andwordy type which believes that a flower is symbolical of life; it wasrather of that deep and eternal type which believes that life, a mereabstraction, is symbolical of a flower. With him the great concreteexperiences which God made always come first; his own deductions andspeculations about them always second. And in this point we find thereal peculiar inspiration of his very original poems. 

One of the very few critics who seem to have got near to the actualsecret of Browning's optimism is Mr. Santayana in his most interestingbook _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_. He, in contradistinctionto the vast mass of Browning's admirers, had discovered what was thereal root virtue of Browning's poetry; and the curious thing is, thathaving discovered that root virtue, he thinks it is a vice. Hedescribes the poetry of Browning most truly as the poetry ofbarbarism, by which he means the poetry which utters the primeval andindivisible emotions. "For the barbarian is the man who regards hispassions as their own excuse for being, who does not domesticate themeither by understanding their cause, or by conceiving their idealgoal. " Whether this be or be not a good definition of the barbarian, it is an excellent and perfect definition of the poet. It might, perhaps, be suggested that barbarians, as a matter of fact, aregenerally highly traditional and respectable persons who would not puta feather wrong in their head-gear, and who generally have very fewfeelings and think very little about those they have. It is when wehave grown to a greater and more civilised stature that we begin torealise and put to ourselves intellectually the great feelings thatsleep in the depths of us. Thus it is that the literature of our dayhas steadily advanced towards a passionate simplicity, and we becomemore primeval as the world grows older, until Whitman writes huge andchaotic psalms to express the sensations of a schoolboy out fishing, and Maeterlinck embodies in symbolic dramas the feelings of a child inthe dark. 

Thus, Mr. Santayana is, perhaps, the most valuable of all the Browningcritics. He has gone out of his way to endeavour to realise what it isthat repels him in Browning, and he has discovered the fault whichnone of Browning's opponents have discovered. And in this he hasdiscovered the merit which none of Browning's admirers havediscovered. Whether the quality be a good or a bad quality, Mr. Santayana is perfectly right. The whole of Browning's poetry does restupon primitive feeling; and the only comment to be added is that sodoes the whole of every one else's poetry. Poetry deals entirely withthose great eternal and mainly forgotten wishes which are the ultimatedespots of existence. Poetry presents things as they are to ouremotions, not as they are to any theory, however plausible, or anyargument, however conclusive. If love is in truth a glorious vision, poetry will say that it is a glorious vision, and no philosophers willpersuade poetry to say that it is the exaggeration of the instinct ofsex. If bereavement is a bitter and continually aching thing, poetrywill say that it is so, and no philosophers will persuade poetry tosay that it is an evolutionary stage of great biological value. Andhere comes in the whole value and object of poetry, that it isperpetually challenging all systems with the test of a terriblesincerity. The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upona point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of theactual desires of man. Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry isthe science of motives. Some actions are ugly, and therefore someparts of ethics are ugly. But all motives are beautiful, or presentthemselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry isbeautiful. If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the sheddingof blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood. Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures ofhappiness. And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyondthe power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actionsarise from a condition of mind. Prose can only use a large and clumsynotation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man ishappy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kindsof misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness. Poetry alone, withthe first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression isthe kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind ofdepression that drives him to the Tivoli. Poetry can tell us whetherthe happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, orthe much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church. 

Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that wehave been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper thanall his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love withexistence. If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earthrun with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, ifpossible a little more so. He is a great poet of human joy forprecisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains: that hishappiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy. He issomething far more convincing, far more comforting, far morereligiously significant than an optimist: he is a happy man. 

This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his ownway. He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters inwhich most poets find felicity. He finds much of it in those mattersin which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity. He is to aconsiderable extent the poet of towns. "Do you care for nature much?"a friend of his asked him. "Yes, a great deal, " he said, "but forhuman beings a great deal more. " Nature, with its splendid andsoothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of theessential worthiness of things. There are few poets who, if theyescaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quietedagain and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field. Thespeciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted andexalted by the waggonette. 

To Browning, probably the beginning and end of all optimism was to befound in the faces in the street. To him they were all the masks of adeity, the heads of a hundred-headed Indian god of nature. Each one ofthem looked towards some quarter of the heavens, not looked upon byany other eyes. Each one of them wore some expression, some blend ofeternal joy and eternal sorrow, not to be found in any othercountenance. The sense of the absolute sanctity of human differencewas the deepest of all his senses. He was hungrily interested in allhuman things, but it would have been quite impossible to have said ofhim that he loved humanity. He did not love humanity but men. Hissense of the difference between one man and another would have madethe thought of melting them into a lump called humanity simplyloathsome and prosaic. It would have been to him like playing fourhundred beautiful airs at once. The mixture would not combine all, itwould lose all. Browning believed that to every man that ever livedupon this earth had been given a definite and peculiar confidence ofGod. Each one of us was engaged on secret service; each one of us hada peculiar message; each one of us was the founder of a religion. Ofthat religion our thoughts, our faces, our bodies, our hats, ourboots, our tastes, our virtues, and even our vices, were more or lessfragmentary and inadequate expressions. 

In the delightful memoirs of that very remarkable man Sir CharlesGavan Duffy, there is an extremely significant and interestinganecdote about Browning, the point of which appears to have attractedvery little attention. Duffy was dining with Browning and JohnForster, and happened to make some chance allusion to his ownadherence to the Roman Catholic faith, when Forster remarked, halfjestingly, that he did not suppose that Browning would like him anythe better for that. Browning would seem to have opened his eyes withsome astonishment. He immediately asked why Forster should supposehim hostile to the Roman Church. Forster and Duffy replied almostsimultaneously, by referring to "Bishop Blougram's Apology, " which hadjust appeared, and asking whether the portrait of the sophistical andself-indulgent priest had not been intended for a satire on CardinalWiseman. "Certainly, " replied Browning cheerfully, "I intended it forCardinal Wiseman, but I don't consider it a satire, there is nothinghostile about it. " This is the real truth which lies at the heart ofwhat may be called the great sophistical monologues which Browningwrote in later years. They are not satires or attacks upon theirsubjects, they are not even harsh and unfeeling exposures of them. They are defences; they say or are intended to say the best that canbe said for the persons with whom they deal. But very few people inthis world would care to listen to the real defence of their owncharacters. The real defence, the defence which belongs to the Day ofJudgment, would make such damaging admissions, would clear away somany artificial virtues, would tell such tragedies of weakness andfailure, that a man would sooner be misunderstood and censured by theworld than exposed to that awful and merciless eulogy. One of the mostpractically difficult matters which arise from the code of manners andthe conventions of life, is that we cannot properly justify a humanbeing, because that justification would involve the admission ofthings which may not conventionally be admitted. We might explain andmake human and respectable, for example, the conduct of some oldfighting politician, who, for the good of his party and his country, acceded to measures of which he disapproved; but we cannot, because weare not allowed to admit that he ever acceded to measures of which hedisapproved. We might touch the life of many dissolute public men withpathos, and a kind of defeated courage, by telling the truth about thehistory of their sins. But we should throw the world into an uproar ifwe hinted that they had any. Thus the decencies of civilisation do notmerely make it impossible to revile a man, they make it impossible topraise him. 

Browning, in such poems as "Bishop Blougram's Apology, " breaks thisfirst mask of goodness in order to break the second mask of evil, andgets to the real goodness at last; he dethrones a saint in order tohumanise a scoundrel. This is one typical side of the real optimism ofBrowning. And there is indeed little danger that such optimism willbecome weak and sentimental and popular, the refuge of every idler, the excuse of every ne'er-do-well. There is little danger that menwill desire to excuse their souls before God by presenting themselvesbefore men as such snobs as Bishop Blougram, or such dastards asSludge the Medium. There is no pessimism, however stern, that is sostern as this optimism, it is as merciless as the mercy of God. 

It is true that in this, as in almost everything else connected withBrowning's character, the matter cannot be altogether exhausted bysuch a generalisation as the above. Browning's was a simple character, and therefore very difficult to understand, since it was impulsive, unconscious, and kept no reckoning of its moods. Probably in a greatmany cases, the original impulse which led Browning to plan asoliloquy was a kind of anger mixed with curiosity; possibly the firstcharcoal sketch of Blougram was a caricature of a priest. Browning, as we have said, had prejudices, and had a capacity for anger, and twoof his angriest prejudices were against a certain kind of worldlyclericalism, and against almost every kind of spiritualism. But as heworked upon the portraits at least, a new spirit began to possess him, and he enjoyed every spirited and just defence the men could make ofthemselves, like triumphant blows in a battle, and towards the endwould come the full revelation, and Browning would stand up in theman's skin and testify to the man's ideals. However this may be, it isworth while to notice one very curious error that has arisen inconnection with one of the most famous of these monologues. 

When Robert Browning was engaged in that somewhat obscure quarrel withthe spiritualist Home, it is generally and correctly stated that hegained a great number of the impressions which he afterwards embodiedin "Mr. Sludge the Medium. " The statement so often made, particularlyin the spiritualist accounts of the matter, that Browning himself isthe original of the interlocutor and exposer of Sludge, is of coursemerely an example of that reckless reading from which no one hassuffered more than Browning despite his students and societies. Theman to whom Sludge addresses his confession is a Mr. Hiram H. Horsfall, an American, a patron of spiritualists, and, as it is morethan once suggested, something of a fool. Nor is there the smallestreason to suppose that Sludge considered as an individual bears anyparticular resemblance to Home considered as an individual. Butwithout doubt "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is a general statement of theview of spiritualism at which Browning had arrived from hisacquaintance with Home and Home's circle. And about that view ofspiritualism there is something rather peculiar to notice. The poem, appearing as it did at the time when the intellectual public had justbecome conscious of the existence of spiritualism, attracted a greatdeal of attention, and aroused a great deal of controversy. Thespiritualists called down thunder upon the head of the poet, whom theydepicted as a vulgar and ribald lampooner who had not only committedthe profanity of sneering at the mysteries of a higher state of life, but the more unpardonable profanity of sneering at the convictions ofhis own wife. The sceptics, on the other hand, hailed the poem withdelight as a blasting exposure of spiritualism, and congratulated thepoet on making himself the champion of the sane and scientific view ofmagic. Which of these two parties was right about the question ofattacking the reality of spiritualism it is neither easy nor necessaryto discuss. For the simple truth, which neither of the two parties andnone of the students of Browning seem to have noticed, is that "Mr. Sludge the Medium" is not an attack upon spiritualism. It would be agreat deal nearer the truth, though not entirely the truth, to call ita justification of spiritualism. The whole essence of Browning'smethod is involved in this matter, and the whole essence of Browning'smethod is so vitally misunderstood that to say that "Mr. Sludge theMedium" is something like a defence of spiritualism will bear on theface of it the appearance of the most empty and perverse of paradoxes. But so, when we have comprehended Browning's spirit, the fact will befound to be. 

The general idea is that Browning must have intended "Sludge" for anattack on spiritual phenomena, because the medium in that poem is madea vulgar and contemptible mountebank, because his cheats are quiteopenly confessed, and he himself put into every ignominious situation, detected, exposed, throttled, horsewhipped, and forgiven. To regardthis deduction as sound is to misunderstand Browning at the very startof every poem that he ever wrote. There is nothing that the man lovedmore, nothing that deserves more emphatically to be called aspeciality of Browning, than the utterance of large and noble truthsby the lips of mean and grotesque human beings. In his poetry praiseand wisdom were perfected not only out of the mouths of babes andsucklings, but out of the mouths of swindlers and snobs. Now what, asa matter of fact, is the outline and development of the poem of"Sludge"? The climax of the poem, considered as a work of art, is sofine that it is quite extraordinary that any one should have missedthe point of it, since it is the whole point of the monologue. Sludgethe Medium has been caught out in a piece of unquestionable trickery, a piece of trickery for which there is no conceivable explanation orpalliation which will leave his moral character intact. He istherefore seized with a sudden resolution, partly angry, partlyfrightened, and partly humorous, to become absolutely frank, and totell the whole truth about himself for the first time not only to hisdupe, but to himself. He excuses himself for the earlier stages of thetrickster's life by a survey of the border-land between truth andfiction, not by any means a piece of sophistry or cynicism, but aperfectly fair statement of an ethical difficulty which does exist. There are some people who think that it must be immoral to admit thatthere are any doubtful cases of morality, as if a man should refrainfrom discussing the precise boundary at the upper end of the Isthmusof Panama, for fear the inquiry should shake his belief in theexistence of North America. People of this kind quite consistentlythink Sludge to be merely a scoundrel talking nonsense. It may beremembered that they thought the same thing of Newman. It is actuallysupposed, apparently in the current use of words, that casuistry isthe name of a crime; it does not appear to occur to people thatcasuistry is a science, and about as much a crime as botany. Thistendency to casuistry in Browning's monologues has done much towardsestablishing for him that reputation for pure intellectualism whichhas done him so much harm. But casuistry in this sense is not a coldand analytical thing, but a very warm and sympathetic thing. To knowwhat combination of excuse might justify a man in manslaughter orbigamy, is not to have a callous indifference to virtue; it is ratherto have so ardent an admiration for virtue as to seek it in theremotest desert and the darkest incognito. 

This is emphatically the case with the question of truth and falsehoodraised in "Sludge the Medium. " To say that it is sometimes difficultto tell at what point the romancer turns into the liar is not to statea cynicism, but a perfectly honest piece of human observation. Tothink that such a view involves the negation of honesty is likethinking that red is green, because the two fade into each other inthe colours of the rainbow. It is really difficult to decide when wecome to the extreme edge of veracity, when and when not it ispermissible to create an illusion. A standing example, for instance, is the case of the fairy-tales. We think a father entirely pure andbenevolent when he tells his children that a beanstalk grew up intoheaven, and a pumpkin turned into a coach. We should consider that helapsed from purity and benevolence if he told his children that inwalking home that evening he had seen a beanstalk grow half-way up thechurch, or a pumpkin grow as large as a wheelbarrow. Again, few peoplewould object to that general privilege whereby it is permitted to aperson in narrating even a true anecdote to work up the climax by anyexaggerative touches which really tend to bring it out. The reason ofthis is that the telling of the anecdote has become, like the tellingof the fairy-tale, almost a distinct artistic creation; to offer totell a story is in ordinary society like offering to recite or playthe violin. No one denies that a fixed and genuine moral rule could bedrawn up for these cases, but no one surely need be ashamed to admitthat such a rule is not entirely easy to draw up. And when a man likeSludge traces much of his moral downfall to the indistinctness of theboundary and the possibility of beginning with a natural extravaganceand ending with a gross abuse, it certainly is not possible to denyhis right to be heard. 

We must recur, however, to the question of the main development of theSludge self-analysis. He begins, as we have said, by urging a generalexcuse by the fact that in the heat of social life, in the course oftelling tales in the intoxicating presence of sympathisers andbelievers, he has slid into falsehood almost before he is aware of it. So far as this goes, there is truth in his plea. Sludge might indeedfind himself unexpectedly justified if we had only an exact record ofhow true were the tales told about Conservatives in an exclusivecircle of Radicals, or the stories told about Radicals in a circle ofindignant Conservatives. But after this general excuse, Sludge goes onto a perfectly cheerful and unfeeling admission of fraud; thisprincipal feeling towards his victims is by his own confession acertain unfathomable contempt for people who are so easily taken in. He professes to know how to lay the foundations for every species ofpersonal acquaintanceship, and how to remedy the slight and trivialslips of making Plato write Greek in naughts and crosses. 

 "As I fear, sir, he sometimes used to do Before I found the useful book that knows. "

It would be difficult to imagine any figure more indecentlyconfessional, more entirely devoid of not only any of the restraintsof conscience, but of any of the restraints even of a wholesomepersonal conceit, than Sludge the Medium. He confesses not only fraud, but things which are to the natural man more difficult to confess eventhan fraud--effeminacy, futility, physical cowardice. And then, whenthe last of his loathsome secrets has been told, when he has nothingleft either to gain or to conceal, then he rises up into a perfectbankrupt sublimity and makes the great avowal which is the whole pivotand meaning of the poem. He says in effect: "Now that my interest indeceit is utterly gone, now that I have admitted, to my own finalinfamy, the frauds that I have practised, now that I stand before youin a patent and open villainy which has something of thedisinterestedness and independence of the innocent, now I tell youwith the full and impartial authority of a lost soul that I believethat there is something in spiritualism. In the course of a thousandconspiracies, by the labour of a thousand lies, I have discovered thatthere is really something in this matter that neither I nor any otherman understands. I am a thief, an adventurer, a deceiver of mankind, but I am not a disbeliever in spiritualism. I have seen too much forthat. " This is the confession of faith of Mr. Sludge the Medium. Itwould be difficult to imagine a confession of faith framed andpresented in a more impressive manner. Sludge is a witness to hisfaith as the old martyrs were witnesses to their faith, but even moreimpressively. They testified to their religion even after they hadlost their liberty, and their eyesight, and their right hands. Sludgetestifies to his religion even after he has lost his dignity and hishonour. 

It may be repeated that it is truly extraordinary that any one shouldhave failed to notice that this avowal on behalf of spiritualism isthe pivot of the poem. The avowal itself is not only expressedclearly, but prepared and delivered with admirable rhetorical force:--

 "Now for it, then! Will you believe me, though? You've heard what I confess: I don't unsay A single word: I cheated when I could, Rapped with my toe-joints, set sham hands at work, Wrote down names weak in sympathetic ink. Rubbed odic lights with ends of phosphor-match, And all the rest; believe that: believe this, By the same token, though it seem to set The crooked straight again, unsay the said, Stick up what I've knocked down; I can't help that, It's truth! I somehow vomit truth to-day. This trade of mine--I don't know, can't be sure But there was something in it, tricks and all!"

It is strange to call a poem with so clear and fine a climax an attackon spiritualism. To miss that climax is like missing the last sentencein a good anecdote, or putting the last act of _Othello_ into themiddle of the play. Either the whole poem of "Sludge the Medium" meansnothing at all, and is only a lampoon upon a cad, of which the matteris almost as contemptible as the subject, or it means this--that somereal experiences of the unseen lie even at the heart of hypocrisy, andthat even the spiritualist is at root spiritual. 

One curious theory which is common to most Browning critics is thatSludge must be intended for a pure and conscious impostor, becauseafter his confession, and on the personal withdrawal of Mr. Horsfall, he bursts out into horrible curses against that gentleman and cynicalboasts of his future triumphs in a similar line of business. Surelythis is to have a very feeble notion either of nature or art. A mandriven absolutely into a corner might humiliate himself, and gain acertain sensation almost of luxury in that humiliation, in pouring outall his imprisoned thoughts and obscure victories. For let it never beforgotten that a hypocrite is a very unhappy man; he is a man who hasdevoted himself to a most delicate and arduous intellectual art inwhich he may achieve masterpieces which he must keep secret, fightthrilling battles, and win hair's-breadth victories for which hecannot have a whisper of praise. A really accomplished impostor is themost wretched of geniuses; he is a Napoleon on a desert island. A manmight surely, therefore, when he was certain that his credit was gone, take a certain pleasure in revealing the tricks of his unique trade, and gaining not indeed credit, but at least a kind of glory. And inthe course of this self-revelation he would come at last upon thatpart of himself which exists in every man--that part which doesbelieve in, and value, and worship something. This he would fling inhis hearer's face with even greater pride, and take a delight ingiving a kind of testimony to his religion which no man had ever givenbefore--the testimony of a martyr who could not hope to be a saint. But surely all this sudden tempest of candour in the man would notmean that he would burst into tears and become an exemplary ratepayer, like a villain in the worst parts of Dickens. The moment the dangerwas withdrawn, the sense of having given himself away, of havingbetrayed the secret of his infamous freemasonry, would add anindescribable violence and foulness to his reaction of rage. A man insuch a case would do exactly as Sludge does. He would declare his ownshame, declare the truth of his creed, and then, when he realised whathe had done, say something like this:--

 "R-r-r, you brute-beast and blackguard! Cowardly scamp! I only wish I dared burn down the house And spoil your sniggering!"

and so on, and so on. 

He would react like this; it is one of the most artistic strokes inBrowning. But it does not prove that he was a hypocrite aboutspiritualism, or that he was speaking more truthfully in the secondoutburst than in the first. Whence came this extraordinary theory thata man is always speaking most truly when he is speaking most coarsely?The truth about oneself is a very difficult thing to express, andcoarse speaking will seldom do it. 

When we have grasped this point about "Sludge the Medium, " we havegrasped the key to the whole series of Browning's casuisticalmonologues--_Bishop Blaugram's Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes' Apology_, andseveral of the monologues in _The Ring and the Book_. They are all, without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certainreality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man's mind, and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that thegreatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may befound side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance. 

 "For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke. "

Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poemsis, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out totell lies. If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetualmotion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be somepoint in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all thatwe require to know. 

If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples ofthis general idea in Browning's monologues, he may be recommended tonotice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking. As awhole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and evenbrutal English. Browning's love of what is called the ugly is nowhereelse so fully and extravagantly indulged. This, like a great manyother things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectlyappropriate to the theme. A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthyegotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap andweather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in alanguage flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity. Butthe peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is thatevery now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which arelike a burst of birds singing. Browning does not hesitate to put someof the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written inthe English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge andGuido Franceschini. Take, for the sake of example, "Bishop Blougram'sApology. " The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet's works. It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patriciangrossness of a grand dinner-party _à deux_. It has many touches of analmost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossiblename of Gigadibs. The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument forconformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is acondition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of thereligious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the materialtheory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertaintycontinually shaken by a tormenting suggestion. We cannot establishourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us. Faith itselfis capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts. Then comes the passage:--

 "Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch, A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death, A chorus ending from Euripides, -- And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears As old and new at once as Nature's self, To rap and knock and enter in our soul, Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring, Round the ancient idol, on his base again, -- The grand Perhaps!"

Nobler diction and a nobler meaning could not have been put into themouth of Pompilia, or Rabbi Ben Ezra. It is in reality put into themouth of a vulgar, fashionable priest, justifying his own cowardiceover the comfortable wine and the cigars. 

Along with this tendency to poetry among Browning's knaves, must bereckoned another characteristic, their uniform tendency to theism. These loose and mean characters speak of many things feverishly andvaguely; of one thing they always speak with confidence and composure, their relation to God. It may seem strange at first sight that thosewho have outlived the indulgence, and not only of every law, but ofevery reasonable anarchy, should still rely so simply upon theindulgence of divine perfection. Thus Sludge is certain that his lifeof lies and conjuring tricks has been conducted in a deep and subtleobedience to the message really conveyed by the conditions created byGod. Thus Bishop Blougram is certain that his life of panic-strickenand tottering compromise has been really justified as the only methodthat could unite him with God. Thus Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau iscertain that every dodge in his thin string of political dodges hasbeen the true means of realising what he believes to be the will ofGod. Every one of these meagre swindlers, while admitting a failure inall things relative, claims an awful alliance with the Absolute. Tomany it will at first sight appear a dangerous doctrine indeed. But, in truth, it is a most solid and noble and salutary doctrine, far lessdangerous than its opposite. Every one on this earth should believe, amid whatever madness or moral failure, that his life and temperamenthave some object on the earth. Every one on the earth should believethat he has something to give to the world which cannot otherwise begiven. Every one should, for the good of men and the saving of his ownsoul, believe that it is possible, even if we are the enemies of thehuman race, to be the friends of God. The evil wrought by thismystical pride, great as it often is, is like a straw to the evilwrought by a materialistic self-abandonment. The crimes of the devilwho thinks himself of immeasurable value are as nothing to the crimesof the devil who thinks himself of no value. With Browning's knaves wehave always this eternal interest, that they are real somewhere, andmay at any moment begin to speak poetry. We are talking to a peevishand garrulous sneak; we are watching the play of his paltry features, his evasive eyes, and babbling lips. And suddenly the face begins tochange and harden, the eyes glare like the eyes of a mask, the wholeface of clay becomes a common mouthpiece, and the voice that comesforth is the voice of God, uttering His everlasting soliloquy. 

INDEX

A

_Agamemnon of Aeschylus, The_, 120. 

Alliance, The Holy, 89. 

"Andrea del Sarto, " 83. 

_Aristophanes' Apology_, 120, 199. 

Arnold, Matthew, 41, 55, 56. 

_Asolando_, 132. 

Asolo (Italy), 42, 131. 

"At the Mermaid, " 117. 

Austria, 88, 89. 

B

"Bad Dreams, " 138. 

_Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120. 

Barrett, Arabella, 74, 119. 

Barrett, Edward Moulton, 58 _seq. _, 70, 73, 74, 76, 79. 

Beardsley, Mr. Aubrey, 149. 

_Bells and Pomegranates_, 105. 

"Ben Ezra, " 23, 201. 

Birrell, Mr. Augustine, 160. 

"Bishop Blougram, " 51, 189. 

_Bishop Blougram's Apology_, 188, 189, 199, 200. 

_Blot on the 'Scutcheon, A_, 53. 

Boyd, Mr. , 62. 

Browning, Robert: birth and family history, 3; theories as to his descent, 4-8; a typical Englishman of the middle class, 9; his immediate ancestors, 10 _seq. _; education, 12; boyhood and youth, 17; first poems, _Incondita_, 17; romantic spirit, 18; publication of _Pauline_, 20; friendship with literary men, 21; _Paracelsus_, 22; introduction to literary world, 25; his earliest admirers, 26; friendship with Carlyle, 26; _Strafford_, 27; _Sordello_, 34; _Pippa Passes_, 43; _Dramatic Lyrics_, 45; _The Return of the Druses_, 51; _A Blot on the 'Scutcheon_, 53; correspondence with Elizabeth Barrett, 62 _seq. _; their first meeting, 70; marriage and elopement, 78, 79; life in Italy, 81 _seq. _; love of Italy, 82, 85 _seq. _; sympathy with Italian Revolution, 90; attitude towards spiritualism, 91 _seq. _, 113, 190-199; death of his wife, 103; returns to England, 105; _The Ring and the Book_, 110; culmination of his literary fame, 110, 117; life in society, 110; elected Fellow of Balliol, 117; honoured by the great Universities, 118; _Balaustion's Adventure_, 119-120; _Aristophanes' Apology_, 120; _The Agamemnon of Aeschylus_, 120; _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121; _Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122; _Fifine at the Fair_, 124; _The Inn Album_, 125; _Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125; _La Saisiaz_, 127; _The Two Poets of Croisic_, 127; _Dramatic Idylls_, 127; _Jocoseria_, 127; _Ferishtah's Fancies_, 127; _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day_, 128; accepts post of Foreign Correspondent to the Royal Academy, 129; goes to Llangollen with his sister, 130; last journey to Italy, 130; death at Venice, 132; publication of _Asolando_, 132; his conversation, 36; vanity, 33, 36; faults and virtues, 40, 55; his interest in Art, 82 _seq. _; his varied accomplishments, 84-85; personality and presence, 18, 33, 112 _seq. _; his prejudices, 113-116; his occasional coarseness, 116; politics, 86 _seq. _; Browning as a father, 105; as dramatist, 52; as a literary artist, 133 _seq. _; his use of the grotesque, 48, 140, 143, 148 _seq. _; his failures, 141; artistic originality, 136, 143, 158; keen sense of melody and rhythm, 145 _seq. _; ingenuity in rhyming, 152; his buffoonery, 154; obscurity, 154 _seq. _; his conception of the Universe, 175; philosophy, 177 _seq. _; optimism, 179 _seq. _; his love poetry, 49; his knaves, 51, 201-202; the key to his casuistical monologues, 199. 

_Browning, Life of_ (Mrs. Orr), 92. 

Browning, Robert (father of the poet), 10, 119. 

Browning, Mrs. , _née_ Wiedermann (mother), 11, 82. 

Browning, Anna (sister), 14, 105. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (wife), 57 _seq. _, 91-99, 101, 103, 116, 119, 129, 131. 

Browning Society, 129. 

Burns, Robert, 169-170. 

Byron, 11, 38, 141, 143. 

Byronism, 19, 117. 

C

"Caliban, " 9, 120. 

"Caliban upon Setebos, " 93, 135, 138. 

Camberwell, 3, 8, 19. 

"Caponsacchi, " 108. 

Carlyle, Thomas, 12, 16, 17, 26, 55, 56, 87, 115. 

Carlyle, Mrs. , 26. 

"Cavalier Tunes, " 46. 

Cavour, 86, 90, 103. 

Charles I. , 28, 29. 

Chaucer, 117. 

"Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came, " 159. 

_Christmas Eve_, 105. 

Church in Italy, The, 88. 

"Clive, " 127. 

Clough, Arthur Hugh, 56. 

_Colombe's Birthday_, 32. 

Corelli, Miss Marie, 38. 

Cromwell, Oliver, 73. 

D

Darwin, 23, 39. 

Dickens, 16. 

"Djabal, " 51, 52. 

Domett, Alfred, 21. 

"Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, " 161. 

_Dramatic Idylls_, 127. 

_Dramatic Lyrics_, 45-50. 

_Dramatis Personæ_, 105. 

Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan, 187, 188. 

E

_Edinburgh Review_, 122. 

"Englishman in Italy, The, " 150. 

F

"Fears and Scruples, " 126, 138. 

"Ferishtah's Fancies, " 138. 

_Fifine at the Fair_, 9, 13, 51, 124, 199. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, 116, 131. 

_Flight of the Duchess, The_, 18. 

Florence, 81, 94. 

Forster, John, 26. 

Foster, John, 187, 188. 

Fox, Mr. Johnson, 20. 

Fox, Mrs. Bridell, 33. 

"Fra Lippo, ", 51. 

_Fra Lippo Lippi_, 83, 199. 

French Revolution, 87. 

Furnivall, Dr. , 7, 129. 

G

"Garden Fancies, " 46. 

Garibaldi, 86, 89. 

Gilbert, W. S. , 144. 

Gissing, Mr. George, 165. 

Gladstone, 117. 

_Golden Treasury_ (Palgrave), 168. 

Goldsmith, 169, 170. 

Gordon, General, 90. 

"Guido Franceschini, " 106, 120, 200. 

H

Henley, Mr. , 148. 

"Heretic's Tragedy, The, " 137. 

Hickey, Miss E. H. , 129. 

"Holy Cross Day, " 153. 

Home, David (spiritualist), 93-97, 113, 190, 191. 

Home, David, _Memoirs_ of, 93 _seq. _

Horne, 26. 

Houghton, Lord, 129. 

"House, " 138. 

"Householder, The, " 138. 

"How they brought the good News from Ghent to Aix, " 46. 

_Hudibras_ (Butler), 57. 

Hugo, Victor, 17. 

Hunt, Leigh, 26. 

I

_Incondita_, 17. 

_Inn Album, The_, 125. 

_Instans Tyrannus_, 9. 

Italy, 85 _seq. _

Italian Revolution, 88 _seq. _

"Ivàn Ivànovitch, " 127. 

J

Jameson, Mrs. , 75. 

Jerrold, Douglas, 34. 

_Jocoseria_, 127. 

Jowett, Dr. , 118. 

_Julius Cæsar_ (Shakespeare), 28. 

"Juris Doctor Bottinius, " 161. 

K

Keats, 15, 16, 19, 137, 142. 

Kenyon, Mr. , 22, 58, 69-70, 74, 76. 

_King Victor and King Charles_, 32. 

Kipling, Rudyard, 142. 

Kirkup, Seymour, 103. 

L

_L'Aiglon_, 28. 

"Laboratory, The, " 47, 143. 

Landor, 26, 56, 93, 101-103. 

_La Saisiaz_, 127. 

_Letters, The Browning_, 63. 

Liberalism, 86. 

"Lines to Edward Fitzgerald, " 131. 

Llangollen, 130. 

Lockhart, 112. 

"Lost Leader, The, " 46. 

"Lover's Quarrel, A, " 50. 

"Luigi, " 45. 

Lytton, Lord (novelist), 91. 

M

Macready, 17, 27, 53. 

Maeterlinck, 164, 184. 

Manning, Cardinal, 91. 

Mary Queen of Scots, 29. 

"Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, " 147. 

"May and Death. " 21. 

Mazzini, 89. 

_Men and Women_, 105. 

Meredith, George, 156, 165. Mill, John Stuart, 26, 56. 

Milsand, 119. 

Milton, 137. 

Monckton-Milnes, 26, 100. 

_Mr. Sludge the Medium_, 82, 96, 120, 190-199. 

"Muléykeh, " 127. 

"My Star, " 138. 

N

"Nationality in Drinks, " 46, 138. 

Napoleon, 42, 89. 

Napoleon III. , 56, 92, 121. 

"Never the Time and the Place, " 127. 

Newman, Cardinal, 193. 

Norwood, 18. 

O

"Ode on the Intimations of Immortality" (Wordsworth), 136. 

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" (Keats), 137. 

"Old Masters in Florence, " 177. 

"One Word More, " 65. 

Orr, Mrs. , 72. 

P

_Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper_, 125, 126, 152. 

_Paracelsus_, 22, 25, 26, 41, 47, 158. 

"Paracelsus, " 24, 25. 

Painting, Poems on, 83. 

Palgrave, Francis, 117. 

Paris, 94. 

_Parleyings with certain Persons of Importance in their Day_, 22, 128, 158. 

_Pauline_, 20, 21, 37, 41, 51. 

"Pheidippides, " 127. 

Phelps (actor), 53. 

"Pictor Ignotus, " 83. 

"Pied Piper of Hamelin, The, " 153. 

"Pippa, " 45, 120. 

_Pippa Passes_, 18, 45, 47, 51, 137. 

Pisa, 81. 

Pius IX. , Church under, 88. 

Plato, 21, 23. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, 144. 

Poetry, Pessimistic school of, 130. 

"Pompilia, " 201. 

Pope, 11, 20, 57. 

"Portrait, A, " 138. 

_Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 121-122. 

_Princess, The_ (Tennyson), 148. 

"Prometheus Unbound" (Shelley), 137. 

Prussia, 88, 89. 

Puritans, 30. 

Pym, 28, 30. 

R

"Rabbi Ben Ezra, " 201. 

_Red-Cotton Night-Cap Country_, 122-124. 

_Return of the Druses, The_, 51-53. 

Revolution, The French, 15; Italian, 90. 

_Ring and the Book, The_, 85, 106, 109, 123, 137, 160-176. 

Ripert-Monclar, Comte de, 22, 93. 

Roman Church, 114, 187, 188. 

Rossetti, 163. 

Royalists, 30. 

Ruskin, 16, 55, 56, 91, 115. 

Russia, 88. 

S

Sand, George, 9, 94. 

Santayana's, Mr. , _Interpretations of Poetry and Religion_, 183-186. 

"Sebald, " 45. 

Shakespeare, 17, 57. 

Shakespeare Society, 129. 

Sharp, Mr. William, 133. 

Shaw, Mr. Bernard, 165. 

Shelley, 15, 16, 17, 19, 56, 136, 141, 143. 

"Shop, " 138. 

"Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis, " 138. 

Silverthorne (Browning's cousin), 21. 

"Sludge, " 51, 52, 150, 189, 200. 

Smith, Elder (publishers), 110. 

"Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The, " 47. 

"Sonnets from the Portuguese, " 65. 

_Sordello_, 23, 34, 42. 

Speech, Free, 173. 

Spenser, 142. 

Spiritualism, 9, 91, 113, 190. 

"Statue and the Bust, The, " 109. 

Sterne, 117. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 60, 114. 

_Straford_, 27 _seq. _, 37. 

"Stafford, " 28, 29, 30. 

Swinburne, 56, 116, 142, 143. 

T

_Tait's Magazine_, 20. 

Talfourd, Sergeant, 26. 

Tennyson, 27, 34, 55, 117, 141, 142, 143, 148. 

Thackeray, Miss, 123. 

"Through the Metidja to Abd-el-Kadr, " 46. 

_Time's Revenges_, 9, 93. 

Tolstoi, 115. 

_Tristram Shandy_ (Sterne), 163. 

_Two Poets of Croisic, The_, 127. 

U

University College, 14. 

"Up jumped Tokay" (poem quoted), 140. 

V

Venice, 131. 

Victor of Sardinia, King, 23. 

Vogler, Abt, 23. 

W

_Water Babies_ (Kingsley), 8. 

Watts, Mr. G. F. , 112. 

Whitman, Walt, 21, 43, 49, 114, 165, 184. 

"Why I am a Liberal" (sonnet), 86. 

Wiedermann, William, 12. 

Wiseman, Cardinal, 188. 

Wimbledon Common, 18. 

Wordsworth, 69, 136, 141, 143. 

Wordsworth Society, 129. 

Y

"Youth and Art, " 50, 109. 

Z

Zola, 164. 

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