would scarcely have been possible were not the rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually free of Browning's prosaic mannerism.

It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications, Sordello, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. Le jeu, he says candidly, ne vaut pas les chandelles. Other works he goes through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with the exclamation: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poésie! And probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as Paradise Lost. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. There is another public which craves

6

a different food from the mere display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of "joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some people with a strange giddiness.

And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words Platonische Ideen and Begriffe, universalia ante rem and universalia post rem, which offer so convenient an escape from the difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a great

vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it with an ideal system:

Over the ball of it,

Peering and prying,

How I see all of it,

Life there, outlying!

Roughness and smoothness,

Shine and defilement,

Grace and uncouthness:

One reconcilement.

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires:

Let us not always say,

"Spite of this flesh to-day

I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole!" As the bird wings and sings,

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!"

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him

VOL. III.-II.

essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our existence, nay

We have to live alone to set forth well
God's praise.

His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says,

laneous vehemence."

is a blind and miscel

But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all good:

In my own heart love had not been made wise
To trace love's faint beginnings in mankind,
To know even hate is but a mask of love's.

It is the power that reaches up from earth to
heaven, and the divine nature is no more than a
higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy:
For the loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless god.

And in the closing vision of Saul this thought of the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:

'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for! my flesh, that I seek

In the Godhead! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be

A Face like my face that receives thee; a Man like to me,

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like

this hand

Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee! See the Christ stand!

But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the celestial character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic in its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's love is itself divine, only lesser in degree. There is nothing that corresponds to the tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he meets her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise:

Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice.
Come degnasti d' accedere al monte?
Non sapei tu che qui è l'uom felice?

(Behold me well: lo, Beatrice am I.

And thou, how daredst thou to this mount draw nigh? Knew'st thou not here was man's felicity ?)—

nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence," the tears, and the plunge into the river of Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins. Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Browning magnifies human love in its own sphere of beauty, but that he speaks of it with the voice of a prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as a complete doctrine of salvation. Often, as I read the books on Browning's gospel of human passion, my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospel of St. John, wherein it is told how a certain Nicodemus of the Pharisees came to Jesus by night and was puzzled by the hard saying: "Except a man