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some singular union of belief in the sub- warmth of its affections would belie the jectivity of all feeling and conviction indifferentism of its ideas, and we conwith that belief in transcendent existence stantly find it to be so. An innate venwhich always implies the recognition of eration for moral beauty, of which we fixed standards of truth; and this double find scarcely any trace in his philosopoint of view is so frankly assumed in phizing poems, asserts itself in all those "Fifine at the Fair" as to give to that of a more emotional character, and so vaeminently fantastic poem a philosophical rious is his mode of self-manifestation significance which its more serious prede- that the evidence contained in his colcessors do not possess. Its sensualistic lective works of his belief in the necesconceptions are expressed with the great- sary relativity of judgment is not a whit est poetic power, but it asserts with equal stronger than their indirect advocacy of distinctness the material unity of con- courage, devotion, singleness of heartsciousness and the separate existence of in short, of all the virtues which are born the soul; and though both ideas may be of conviction. His imagination is keenly reconciled by a religious theory of crea-alive to every condition of love; but its tion, Mr. Browning cannot deny that in deepest and most passionate response is accepting the one he cuts away all rational always yielded to that form of tenderness foundation from the other. The morality which by its disinterested nature most of "Fifine at the Fair" would be even approaches to the received ideal of the more eccentric than its philosophy, but Divine. This feeling attains its highest that its reasonings are neutralized in this expression in "Saul," where the anthrodirection by the dramatic impulse under pomorphism so often apparent in the which they were carried out; whether or author's conception of God is justified by not the author intended it so. The lead- historic truth and ennobled by a susing figure of the poem is a hard-working tained intensity of lyric emotion which social outcast, whom the author had prob- has been rarely equalled and probably ably seen, and who appears to have sug- never surpassed. It is the outpouring of gested to him some idea of the virtues a passionate human friendship gradually which reside in self-sustainment and of a raised by its own strength to the premoral good that may come of immorality, sentiment of a divine love manifest in the and the whole resolves itself into a series flesh, and to which in its final ecstasy of speculations on the precise mixing of the very life of nature becomes the the fruits of experience that may best throbbing of a mysterious and expectant conduce to the higher nourishment of the joy. The love of love is the prevailing soul. These questionings assume the inspiration of all such of Mr. Browning's form of a battle within the hero's mind poems as even trench on religious subbetween Fifine, the vagrant, and Elvire,jects, and it often resolves itself into so the symbol of domestic love, and unfor- earnest a plea for the divine nature and tunately the one is conceived as an individual, the other only as a type. Elvire is invested in the beginning with enough of the substance of a loving and lovable wife to give prominence to her husband's arguments in favour of an occasional Fifine; but as the story advances, and its fundamental mood becomes more pronounced, she fades into a pallid embodiment of mild satisfaction and monotonous duty, and by the time Mr. Browning has brought her and her companion back to their villa-door, he cannot resist the delight of making her the subject of a trick which his sense of justice sufficiently disclaims to make him display it in all its heartlessness. His Don Juan proves, in spite of himself, that in individual life disorder does not naturally lead to order, nor a simply erratic fancy rise to the abstractions of universal love.

We should naturally infer, from the temper of Mr. Browning's mind, that the

atoning mission of Christ, that we can scarcely retain the conviction that it is his heart, and not his mind, which accepts it. His romance of "Christmas Eve" presents itself as a genuine confession of Christian doctrine, and the poet is at least speaking in his own name, when he judges the German philosopher who has discarded the doctrine as still subject to its hopes and fears. Nevertheless, the poem proves nothing more than a sympathetic adoption of a certain point of view, and a speculative desire to reason it out; and as illogical as we must regard its attack on the consistent non-believer, so unanswerable appears to us the conviction it expresses of the religious uselessness of any conception of Christ falling short of literal belief. "Christmas Eve" is in every respect a striking manifestation of Mr. Browning's muse, for it combines, as does also its companion poem, his most

earnest continuousness of thought with part the expression of an idea more enhis most deliberate abruptness of ex- tirely Mr. Browning's own the idea of pression. Its ideas and images succeed each other with the jolting rapidity of categorical enumeration, and though this manner is well calculated to convey the rugged realities of a Dissenter's meeting, it is singularly discordant with the impressions of the abating storm, and of the lunar rainbow, flinging its double arch across the silent glories of the night; and with the gradual exaltation of soul and sense, in which the speaker finally realizes the actual presence of Christ.

the religious necessity of doubt. He enters with considerable subtlety into the difficulties and conditions of belief, and proves, it appears to us with complete success, that an unqualified faith would defeat its own ends, neutralizing the experiences of the earthly existence by an overwhelming interest in the heavenly, and that a state of expectancy equally removed from the calmness of scientific conviction, and the indifference of scientific disbelief, is the essence of spiritual life. We follow this doctrine with the more interest from its congeniality to our prevailing impression of Mr. Browning's mind; we know how dear to his imagination are the shifting lights, the varied groupings, the curiously blended contrasts of subjective experience; how habitually it recoils from the rigidity of every external standard of truth; and in this implied declaration that he adores in the possible Saviour rather the mystery and the message of love than the revealing of an articulate Will, we see also the reserve under which his most dramatic defence of Christian orthodoxy must have been conceived. "Easter Day" resolves itself into a Vision of Judgment, in which the man who has been blind to the workings of the spirit in the intellect and in the flesh is threatened with spirit-. ual death; he awakens to a grateful consciousness that this terrible doom has not gone out against him, that he may still go through the world

Mr. Browning is supposed to be taking refuge within the outer door of a Dissenting chapel on a rainy evening just as the service is going to begin. The congregation, recruited from the slums of the neighbouring town, are hurrying in one by one. The porch is four feet by two, the mat is soaked, every new-comer who edges past flings a reproachful glance at the intruder; the flame of the one tallow candle shoots a fresh grimace at him at every opening of the door. He thinks he had better go in ; but within there are smells and noises; the priest is all ranting irreverence, the flock all snuffling self-satisfaction; and in a very short time he plunges out into the pure air again. Alone, in the silent night, the spirit of his dream changes: Christ stands before him; repentant and beseeching he clings to the hem of His garment, and is wafted first to St. Peter's at Rome, where religion is smothered in ceremonial, and next to the lecture-room of a German philosopher, where it is reasoned away by the received methods of historical criticism, and after following In speaking of the religious poems, we through a long course of reflection the cannot leave unnoticed "A Death in the successive phases of religious belief, he Desert," the finest of the "Dramatis arrives at the certainty that, however Persona." St. John the Evangelist has confused be the vision of Christ, where fled from persecution into a cavern of the His love is, there is the Life, and that desert, and there for sixty days been at the more direct the revelation of that the point of death; but the care of the Love the deeper and more vital its power, Disciples has restored to him for a short -and he awakens in the chapel, which space the power of speech, and in a suhe had only left in a dream, with a quick-preme effort of the expiring soul, he bears ened sense of the presence among its humble inmates of a transforming spiritual joy, and a more patient appreciation of the coarse medium of expression through which it finds its way to their souls.

The originality of the thoughts contained in this poem lies entirely in their minor developments, which so bare an outline cannot even suggest; but "Easter Day," which forms the sequel to it, is in

Try, prove, reject, prefer;
still struggle to "effect his warfare."

witness to the presence of the revealed Love and to the coming reign of Doubt, through which its deeper purposes shall be attained. This slow and solemn extinction of the last living testimony to the mysterious truth already fading beneath the hand of time, brooded over by the silence of the desert, yet sustained by the tender reverence of those who watch at the head and feet and on either side of 'the dying man, fanning the smouldering

life into its last brief outburst of prophetic flame, forms a strangely impressive picture; and some of the lines, in which the poet has expressed the clairvoyance of approaching death, have a very noble and pathetic beauty:

I see you stand conversing, each new face
Either in fields, of yellow summer eves,
Or islets yet unnamed amid the sea;
Or pace for shelter 'neath a portico
Out of the crowd in some enormous town,
Where now the lark sings in a solitude;
Or muse upon blank heaps of stone and sand,
Idly conjectured to be Ephesus:
And no one asks his fellow any more
Where is the promise of his coming? But
Was he revealed in any of His lives;
As power, as love, as influencing soul?

Setting aside the points on which it necessarily reflects the common ideas of Theism, or the common experience of rational minds, it appears to us not only that Mr. Browning's conception of the æsthetic and religious life is essentially imaginative and poetical, but that the analyzing tendency which is so disturbing an element in his poetic genius is itself overborne and even conditioned by it; that his writings, if not always inspired by poetic emotion, are invariably marked by that conception of life which distinguishes a poet from a pure thinker.

A thinker, as such, will always eliminate what is secondary or incidental from his general statement of a case. With Mr. Browning, thus to simplify a question is to destroy it. The thinker merges the particular in the general; Mr. Browning only recognizes the general under the conditions of the particular. The thinker sees unity in complexity; Mr. Browning is always haunted by the complexity of unity. It is true that a specious reasoner is often a narrow one, and that an excess of imagination is considered synonymous with a deficiency of logic. But we cannot impute narrowness of mind to one whose imaginative powers are coextensive with life; and Mr. Browning's logical subtlety needs no vindication; that it rather works in a circle than towards any definite issue is the strongest negative proof of the presence of an opposing activity, and we believe that nothing short of a profound poetic bias could possess such a power of opposition.

that charms us in his writings and everything that repels us. His minutest works no less than the greatest, are each marked by a separate unity of image or idea, but this unity is the result of a multitude of details, no one of which can be isolated or suppressed. He evidently imitates the processes of nature, and strives at unity of effect through variety of means; and the principle is no doubt a sound one; but there is in his department of art a manifest obstacle to its application. He sees as a group of ideas what he can often only express as a series, and however he may endeavour to subordinate the parts to the whole, it is almost impossible that in his argumentative monologues he should always succeed in doing so; we do not think he does always succeed. Every successive reading of these works brings us nearer to their central inspiration, gives greater prominence to their leading idea, a more just subordination to their details; but we do not catch the inspiration at once, and it is natural that the minor facts and thoughts which its warmth has so closely transfused within the author's mind should drag themselves out in ours to a somewhat disjointed length, that the variety of proof should somewhat obscure the thing it is intended to prove. This minute elaboration of his ideas has done much, we are convinced, towards giving to Mr. Browning his reputation for the opposite defect of indistinctness in the statement of them. It is easy to mistake a strain on the attention for a strain on the understanding, and in his case the strain on the attention is the greater that, whilst he never condenses his thoughts, he habitually condenses his expression, and thus conveys to much of his argumentative writing the combined effect of abruptness and length. It is just to admit that, most of all on these occasions he stimulates his reader's mind, lashing it up to its task with the exhilarating energy of a March wind, but the sense of being driven against an obstacle generally remains. We have the wind in our teeth.

From the same intellectual source arises the deeper sense of remoteness which he is so often said to convey. He never employs an ill-defined idea, or a vague or abstruse expression; but his The dominant impression that all truth belief in the complexity of apparently is a question of circumstance, and conse- simple facts constantly shows itself in quently all picturesque force a question the forcing them into new relations, or of detail, explains Mr. Browning's every extracting from them fresh results; and peculiarity of form and conception. It for one person who is capable of followexplains more or less directly everythinging out an abnormal process of thought,

empty day," but it is as poet in the deepest sense of the word, that he has stirred the sympathies and stimulated the thought of the men and women of his generation.

and recognizing its individual value and as well as its actual antecedents, and its relative truth, there are a hundred, writing out the deed in the completed not wanting in intellectual gifts, to whom thought, which might impart to it a higher it will remain unintelligible or unreal. significance. His stand once taken Proportionably great is the success of within the man's mind, his habitual realthis realistic mode of treatment with all ism asserts itself, and he shows us by subjects of a pictorial or dramatic nature. how simple a chain of every-day expeThe beauties of most of Mr. Browning's rience the human spirit may be raised to minor poems are generally known and the white heat of a supreme emotion. appreciated, and it would be difficult to Setting aside the minor question of its make a just selection from the great num- perfect artistic consistency, we need only ber of those which convey an idea, an compare this monologue, in which image, or an emotion, through a succes- thought, anxious and intense, is slowly sion of minute touches, each in itself a quivering into deed, with the finest pastriumph of vivid fancy or incisive obser- sages of "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwanvation. The colossal power of "The gau," to feel how necessary is an emoRing and the Book" lies less in the ex- tional, and therefore a poetic subject, to posure of the various lights in which the the thorough display of Mr. Browning's same action may be regarded by a diver- genius. In no other is it just to itself. sity of minds, than in the author's un- Philosophic discussions, which are mainlimited imaginative command of the ly intended to prove the infinite refrangiminor circumstances and associations bility of truth, must sacrifice breadth to which individualize the same action for subtlety, and the large insight on which different minds. "Red-cotton Night- they are based has its only adequate excap Country" exhibits, on a smaller scale, pression in the full creativeness of poetic the value of descriptive minutiæ in pro-life. It is not as the "idle singer of an ducing a general effect; and though the poet in this case has had to deal with ready-made personages and events, he retains the credit of having recognized their artistic capabilities and done justice It is of course one thing to accept this to them. He has not only presented to view of the essential quality of Mr. us the fact that a tragical eruption took Browning's inspiration, and another to place in the midst of an apparently peace- place him in any known category of poful atmosphere, but by dwelling on the etic art; and the place he claims for himsmallest details of its repose he has creat- self as dramatic poet is open to dispute ed the idea of the calm which invites if we accept the word Drama in the usual the storm, and the mental stagnation in sense of a thing enacted rather than which passions once aroused rage unre- thought out. He has written few plays; sisted. The story is told in a succession in the last, and not least remarkable of of genre pictures, and it is through the these, thought already preponderates realistic accumulation of detail that we over action, and the increasing tendency gather the ideal force of its catastrophe. of his so-called dramatic poems to exIn the monologue on the Tower, Mr. hibit character in the condition of moBrowning has reversed the method, tive, excludes them from any definition which he pursues with unimportant ex- of dramatic art which implies the preceptions throughout the narrative, of senting it in the form of act; but he is presenting its incidents as an ordinary a dramatic writer in this essential rehuman witness would conceive them; spect, that his studies of thought and and though we cannot desire to see feeling invariably assume a concrete and omitted that part of the poem which con- individual form, and the reproach which tains almost all its pathos and some of has been so often addressed to him of its finest poetry, we think that if he had making his personages, under a slight aimed at mere dramatic effect he would disguise, so many repetitions of himself, have omitted it. He would have left to appears to us doubly unfounded. He is fancy, speculation, and the balance of always himself, in so far that his mode of probabilities, what real life could explain conception is recognizable in everything in no other way; as it is, he has given to that he writes. But there never was a Melleric's death the dramatic force of a great artist with whom it was not so. prolonged preparation and a sudden ful- Nobody cavils at the fact that Shakefilment, but he could not resist the spec-speare is always Shakespeare, or that Sir ulatiye pleasure of retracing its mental Joshua Reynolds's most lifelike portraits

are conceived in a manner which stamps | tative of legal fiction in this very matethem unmistakably as his; and it is a rial form. We can only imagine that in truism to repeat that it is precisely this his strong appreciation of the natural unsubjective conception of the idea to be fitness of things, he has found a fantastreated which insures the vitality of the tic pleasure in identifying the cause of treatment, and which distinguishes the the saturnine murderer with this kindlyartistic reproduction of nature from a natured old glutton, whose intellect elabvulgar or lifeless copying of it. Mr. orates the iniquities of the defence, Browning has, it is true, a verbal whilst his whole consciousness is satulanguage of his own, which is distinct rated with the anticipation of dinner, and from this finer manifestation of himself; the thought of the little fat son whose a compound of colloquialisms half ec- birth-day feast is to be held. The hucentric and half familiar, which must be manity of the characters in "The Ring congenial to him, first, because he has and the Book" has, in fact, never been created it, and secondly, because he ap- questioned, nor could we do more than parently makes opportunities for its em- allude to it in so merely suggestive a surployment. It has its strongest expres- vey of the author's works; but we think sion in parts of "The Ring and the there is one part of this extraordinary Book," to which it gives a flavour of me- composition the dramatic importance of diæval coarseness not always inappropri- which has been somewhat overlooked — ate, but always unpleasing; and we find Count Guido's second speech. We it in a modified form wherever he is might say its artistic importance, because either arguing or narrating from a point this expression of the central figure of of view which we may imagine to be his the poem gives to its wide-spreading own; but he never attributes this lan- structure a support which nothing else guage to any person who would be by could give it; but it is the triumph of nature unlikely to use it. It is spoken Mr. Browning's dramatic inspiration to in "The Ring and the Book" by the have felt that this man alone was talking Roman lawyer and the Roman gossip, behind a mask; and that the mask must but it is not spoken by Pompilia in the be torn off; and to have restored even outpourings of her pure young soul; to this villain in the torments of his last nor by Capon Sacchi as he relates his hour, in the hope which sickened into first meeting with her, and the succes- despair, and the despair which ran sive experiences which reveal to him, as through every phase of rage, scorn, and in the vision of a dream, the depth, the entreaty, the sympathy which life even in pathos, and the poetry of life; nor by its worst form commands from life. The the Pope, as he ponders in solemn seclu- concluding cry, sion the precarious chances of human justice and the overwhelming obligations of eternal truth. Mr. Browning does not speak it himself, when he tells us how he Not only are Mr. Browning's men and stood in the balcony of Casa Guidi on women complete after their kind; but as one black summer night, "a busy human we have already said, he has impressed sense beneath his feet;" above the si- the fulness of individual character even lent lightnings "dropping from cloud to on his descriptions of isolated mental cloud," and with his bodily eyes strained states. Bishop Blougram has a quite towards Arezzo and Rome, and his mental different personality from the Legate vision towards that long past Christmas Ogniben, though both are easy-going Day, saw the course of the Francheschini Churchmen, and one probably as tragedy unroll before him. To every vinced as the other that life in the flesh actor in this tragedy he has restored his was given us to be enjoyed. Both are distinctive existence, and not the least distinct from Fra Lippo Lippi, and all individual amongst them is the man in are equally so from the Bishop who is whom he has most strongly caricatured ordering his tomb in St. Praxed's Church. his own caprices of expression - Don Lippi is the most original of the four, in Hyacinthus de Archangelis. He is so his mingled candour and cunning, his unpleasantly real, that, whilst we cannot joyous worship of natural beauty, and imagine the history of the case as com- his sensuality, as simple and shameless plete without a statement of the legal as that of a heathen god. But the lastfictions that were brought to bear upon mentioned Bishop is a mixed product of it, we scarcely understand Mr. Brown- nature and circumstance, and as ing's impulse to clothe a mere represen-1 even more powerfully conceived. He is

Pompilia, will you let them murder me? has an almost terrifying power.

con

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