Mr. Stopford Brooke's recent volume upon Browning seems to me to present a rare combination of cordial appreciation and thorough sanity. Nobody can tell whether the most judicious verdict of to-day will be endorsed by the critics of a century hence. It can hardly be doubted indeed that those gentlemen will accept Browning as one of the greatest of English poets; and, on the other hand, that they will hold, in spite of the Browning Society, that a very large part of his work was not poetry at all. When, like Rabbi Ben Ezra, they come to "discern and pronounce a last," they will "leave the fire ashes," though "what survives will be gold." Like most, if not all, other poets, Browning will be virtually read in selections. Perhaps the surplus will be reprinted, but it will be "taken as read," except by the curious. Mr. Stopford Brooke endeavors to anticipate the results of this expurgatory process. I believe in his forecast, and if I cannot quite follow him in some points, I fully admit that he is more likely to be right than I. He insists upon the qualities which make Browning's best poems unique and stamp them at once and indelibly upon our memories. If these qualities never quite vanished, they were

strangely overlaid in other performances. There the "intellectual elements have all but completely suppressed the imaginative." The pleasure which the later works give is chiefly the pleasure of "the understanding called upon to solve with excitement a muddle of metaphysical problems." I am not quite sure that they give me much "pleasure” even in that way; but they certainly excite my curiosity. It is tempting to try to find some clue to the complicated tissue of arguments and if possible to understand what are the points in which he is so profoundly interested, and why he endeavors to seek a solution by these elaborately roundabout and indirect methods. Whatever else may be said, they certainly represent the lucubrations of an amazingly subtle and active understanding. If the "understanding," as distinguished from the imagination, means the faculty which makes the logical thinker but is not adequate for poetic creation, Browning's career is a history of an alliance and a conflict between the two. He is always indeed from the first a thinker. But in the "Sordello" period, the imagination is trammeled by having to work upon the tasks suggested by the understanding. The publication of "Bells and Pome

"The

granates" marks the period at which the imagination seems to have come by its rights; and in the poems which may be generally classified as dramatic monologues, he achieved the masterpieces which every one can admire without stint or qualification. Ring and the Book," which first spread his fame beyond the esoteric circle, shows in some of the sections his power at its highest. But in the "Hohenstiel-Schwangau," which followed, the understanding seemed to have taken the bit between its teeth, and to have dragged the imagination through the strange convolutions which raise the question whether the result is really poetry at all. Decay of the creative imagination after the age of fifty is not an unprecedented phenomenon, nor can it be said that Browning ever lost his power. But the transformation suggests a question of which something may be said. One may, that is, consider the thinker as distinguished from the poet. I propose to notice some of the curious problems in Casuistry to which Browning is led; but I must first take account of some of the general characteristics upon which Mr. Stopford Brooke insists.

In trying to explain why Browning was so slow in obtaining general recognition, he leans occasionally to one explanation which I am not quite prepared to accept. It is that readers fifty years ago were stupid and narrowminded. At that remote epoch we were all slaves in Philistia. That is an explanation which I at least have some personal reasons for doubting, and Mr, Brooke himself occasionally suggests others less humiliating. He admits, for example, as every sound critic must admit, that "Sordello," the great work of the early period, is obscure from other causes than excessive brilliance. I venture to add that even at the present day it is only readable by the esoteric disciple. The difference is that

appreciation is now supposed to prove the superior insight on which the devotee prides himself; whereas fifty years ago it raised a suspicion of eccentricity and priggishness. Browning conquered us by the undeniable and superlative merits of his later poems. We then found ourselves forced to admit that he had unique qualities, and were prepared to believe that they were really discoverable in "Sordello" and "Paracelsus." As long as those poems stood alone, the presumption did not exist, and the recognition of genius was confined to the few who were not repelled by prolixity and obscurity. It is, however, more remarkable that the later and thoroughly intelligible poetry could not at once disperse the natural prejudices. Some explanation may be suggested by a characteristic essay of Bagehot's upon "Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning," considered as types of what he calls "pure," "ornate," and "grotesque" art in English poetry. The essay, published in 1864, shortly before the "Ring and the Book," is full of keen remarks, like all Bagehot's writings. He recognizes, as he could not fail to recognize, that Browning had a "great mind." The poet is a man of keen insight and masculine power; his heart is in what he says, and he knows men and women. But then, he argues, Browning is a poet "working by incongruity." The examples selected are "Caliban upon Setebos," and the "Holy Cross Day at Rome," the last of which, it seems, was taken by some "devotees" to be Browning's "best piece." Bagehot cannot away with them. Such poems, he says, as "Caliban upon Setebos" are "a kind of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find those ideas in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he cannot bear them."

Browning's love of the far-fetched and grotesque, that is, repelled the reader brought up upon Wordsworth

and Tennyson. A writer who shows originality by oddness must count upon shocking the common-sense reader. The Carlylese dialect was in the same way an obstacle which long prevented the recognition of the extraordinary power which it masked. Wordsworth's agreeable theory that unpopularity is a natural result of original genius is not universally true. Many of the greatest writers have achieved popularity at once. But it may be true when the originality chooses to manifest itself by aggressive eccentricity. Bagehot, we see, could recognize the singular force and thought in two of the most characteristic poems. What he "could not bear" was the oddity of the mode of presentation. He is so disgusted by the coarse invective of the Jews as they are being driven into church that he is blind to the dignity and passion of their final protest against Christian persecution.

"Caliban" is so disgusting a monster, "sprawling flat on his belly in the mire," that Bagehot refuses to be interested in the singular power with which he illustrates anthropomorphic conceptions of theology. In both poems Browning, as we all see now, is not only uttering thoughts of deep interest, but gains a peculiar impressiveness from the very quaintness of the setting. Bagehot, and no doubt he represented many contemporaries, is so shocked by the quaint embodiment that he will not listen to the truth embodied; or rather denies it to be poetical. That really means, no doubt, that he invents a canon of poetry to justify his prejudice. He will indeed admit that the grotesque has its proper place. He admires the "Pied Piper," and quotes nearly the whole of it. It is "homely, comic and true," and does not disgust us like Caliban. But the grotesque, as a setting for the tragic or the solemn, jars upon him, and therefore is illegitimate. The tendency to admire it is, he thinks, a proof that

modern readers are half educated, and are taken by what is "glaring," instead of admiring the "pure art," which appeals to the thoughtful and cultivated. This, it may be said, is simply the expression of the dislike of the academic to the eccentric, or proves that Browning had the characteristics of the romanticists-and when we have called a man romantic or classical, we somehow fancy that we have explained as well as ticketed him. However that may be, there is another obvious reason why readers should have been slow to overcome the prejudice raised by Browning's indulgence in the "incongruous." Some of his chief predecessors, Wordsworth and Byron and Shelley, represented moments in the great revolutionary disturbances of the intellectual atmosphere. They had something very definite to say about the religious and political problems in which their contemporaries were most keenly interested. Now, it is characteristic, as Mr. Stopford Brooke remarks, of Browning's poetry that "no one could tell from it that he had any social views or politics at all." In a general way he was, of course, a Liberal, and obviously, for example, sympathized with Italian patriotism. But he is not only without the local patriotism of an Englishman, but never utters the general principles of democratic enthusiasm. He is in an attitude of detachment. Carlyle gained a hearing in spite of his oddities, when the prose epic of the French Revolution expressed his vehement convictions upon the whole social movement. Browning appeared to be interested only in the politics of the middle ages or the Renaissance, and had nothing to say upon modern democracy and the rights of man. He is equally indifferent to the intellectual changes due to the growth of science and criticism. Tennyson appealed to his most thoughtful readers because he expressed most

forcibly emotions roused by the socalled conflict between faith and reason. Browning had a theology of his own, which may have been, as Mr. Stopford Brooke thinks, more consistent and definite than that of Tennyson. But if so the strength of his convictions prevents him from giving utterance like his contemporary to the misgivings characteristic of his period. He is not preoccupied like Tennyson with the scepticism which seems to some the most hateful and to others the most acceptable movement of the time. He let Strauss or Darwin go their own way, and apparently they did not in the least trouble his mind. Obviously he had not the advantage for a popular audience of either accepting or rejecting the current formula which at a given moment embody the hopes and fears of ordinary mankind.

Browning, whatever else he was, was essentially a psychologist; not only interested, but it might seem exclusively interested, in varieties of human character and passion. So far, indeed, he represents one contemporary tendency. When the revolutionary impulse of the previous generation died away, and society was settling down for a time into a comparatively settled order, it was natural that men should begin to look about them and take stock of the social position. The novelists turned from the romance of Scott and tried like Bulwer and Thackeray and Dickens to portray the various phases of contemporary society. They make up for the want of romance by a closer psychological analysis than had satisfied their predecessors; and more or less consciously give us what may be called "descriptive sociology" by photographic portraits of characteristic types. No one was a keener observer of character than Browning, or more profoundly interested in anything which revealed human nature. The fascination for him of a remarkable crime is sufficient

But

ly proved by the amazing plan of making a poem by repeating such a story twelve times. The English crime recorded in the "Inn Album," and the unpleasant vagaries of the lunatic of "Red Cotton Night Cap Country," are equally singular if less successful. In that direction Browning no doubt anticipates one of the marks of modern "realism." He may be compared with his contemporary Balzac, who was beginning his comedy of human life a little before Browning's first publication. The contrasts are obvious enough; but the two are alike in the keen interest with which they follow the abnormal developments of human passions. In many poems, too, Browning gave with extraordinary intensity the characteristic types of different periods. Mr. Brooke agrees with Ruskin that the short poem in which the bishop orders his tomb at St. Praxed's concentrates in a few lines all the rich elements of the Renaissance. Browning's point of view has a distinctive difference from that of the novelist's. He must have read very widely and with keen penetration. But it can hardly be said that he is interested in the history of what we call the "social organism." When Balzac analyzed his contemporaries it was always with a view to exhibit the nature of contemporary changes-such as the growth of the corrupting influence of financial magnates. The interest in the past roused by the Waverley Novels and carried on in Hugo's "Notre Dame," implies also an interest in the old feudal and ecclesiastical order which formed the environment of the characters. With Browning the relation is inverted. He is primarily and essentially interested in the individual There are, no doubt, many striking descriptions in "Sordello" of the ways and manners of the Italians of the thirteenth century. But a reader must have got his information else