Robert Browning

by C. H. Herford

VI.

The Grammarian's Funeral achieves, in the terms and with the resources of Browning's art, the problem of which he saw the consummate master in Shelley,—that [of] throwing "films" for the connexion of Power and Love in the abstract with Beauty and Good in the concrete, and finding a link between the lowliest service or worship and the spirit of God. Such a conception of a poet's crowning glory implied a peculiarly close relation in Browning's view between poetry and religion, and in particular with the religion which, above all others, glorified the lowly. Here lay, in short, the supreme worth for him of the Christian idea. "The revelation of God in Christ" was for him the consummate example of that union of divine love with the world—"through all the web of Being blindly wove"—which Shelley had contemplated in the radiant glow of his poetry; accepted by the reason, as he wrote a few years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken "Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I think,—had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the Christians."

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time; he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought [of] our time has in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of Shelleyism—a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.

It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions, the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing "revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi [and] Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from the souls of men outside the Christian world—an Arab physician, a Greek poet, a Jewish shepherd or rabbi, or from Christians yet farther from the centre than these, like Blougram and the Abbe Deodaet. In method as in conception these pieces are among the most Browningesque things that Browning ever wrote. It is clear, however, that while his way of handling these topics is absolutely his own, his peculiar concern with them is new. The Karshish, the Clean, and the Blougram have no prototype or parallel among the poems of Browning's previous periods. In the early Dramatic Lyrics and Romances, and in the plays, there is exquisite rendering of religion, and also of irreligion; but the religion is just the simple faith of Pippa or of Theocrite that "God's in his world"; and the irreligion is the Humanist paganism of St Praxed's, not so much hostile to Christianity as unconscious of it. No single poem written before 1850 shows that acute interest in the problems of Christian faith which constantly emerges in the work of this and the following years. Saul, which might be regarded as signally refuting this view, strikingly confirms it; the David of the first nine sections, which alone were produced in 1845, being the naïve, devout child, brother of Pippa and of Theocrite; the evolution of this harping shepherd-boy into the illuminated prophet of Christ [was] the splendid achievement of the later years.[33] And to all this more acutely Christian work the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850) served as a significant prologue.

[33] It is, indeed, clear, as has been seen, from Browning's correspondence that a sequel of this kind was intended when the first nine sections were published. The traditional legend of David would in any case suggest so much. That the intention was not then executed is just the significant fact.

There can be little doubt that the devout Christian faith of his wife was principally concerned in this new direction of his poetry. Yet we may easily overstate both the nature of her influence and its extent. She, as little as he, was a dogmatic Christian; both refused to put on, in her phrase, "any of the liveries of the sects."[34] "The truth, as God sees it, must be something so different from these opinions about truth.... I believe in what is divine and floats at highest, in all these different theologies,—and because the really Divine draws together souls, and tends so to a unity, could pray anywhere and with all sorts of worshippers, from the Sistine chapel to Mr Fox's, those kneeling and those standing."[35] Yet she demurs, a little farther on in the same letter, to both these extremes. "The Unitarians seem to me to throw over what is most beautiful in the Christian Doctrine; but the Formulists, on the other side, stir up a dust, in which it appears excusable not to see." To which he replies (Aug. 17): "Dearest, I know your very meaning, in what you said of religion, [and] responded to it with my whole soul—what you express now is for us both, ... those are my own feelings, my convictions beside—instinct confirmed by reason."

[34] E.B.B. to R.B., 15th Aug. 1846.
[35] Ib.

These words of Browning's seem to furnish the clue to the relation between their minds in this matter. Their intercourse disturbed no conviction on either side, for their convictions were identical. But her intense personal devoutness undoubtedly quickened what was personal in his belief, drew it into an atmosphere of keener and more emotional consciousness, and in particular gave to that "revelation of God in Christ" which they both regarded as what was "most beautiful in the Christian doctrine," a more vital hold upon his intellectual and imaginative life. In this sense, but only in this sense, his fervid words to her (February 1846)—"I mean to ... let my mind get used to its new medium of sight, seeing all things as it does through you; and then let all I have done be the prelude and the real work begin"—were not unfulfilled. No deep hiatus, such as this phrase suggests, divides the later, as a whole, from the earlier work: the "dramatic" method, which was among the elements of his art most foreign to her lyric nature, established itself more and more firmly in his practice. But the letters of 1845-46 show that her example was stimulating him to attempt a more direct and personal utterance in poetry, and while he did not succeed, or succeeded only "once and for one only," in evading his dramatic bias, he certainly [succeeded] in making the dramatic form more eloquently expressive of his personal faith.

This was peculiarly the case in the remarkable Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day (1850), the first-fruits of his married life, and the most instinct of all his poems with the mingled literary and religious influences which it brought. The influence of the ardent singer, which impelled him to fuller self-expression, here concurred with that of the devout but undogmatic Christian, which drew the problem of Christianity nearer to the focus of his imagination and his thought. There is much throughout which suggests that Browning was deliberately putting off the habits and usages of his art, and reaching out this way and that towards untried sources and avenues of expression. He lays hold for the first time of the machinery of supernatural vision. Nothing that he had yet done approached in boldness these Christmas and Easter apparitions of the Lord of Love. They break in, unheralded, a startling but splendid anomaly, upon his human and actual world. And the really notable thing is that never had he drawn human actuality with so remorseless and even brutal fidelity as just here. He seeks no legendary scene and atmosphere like that of Theocrite's Rome, in which the angels who come and go, and God who enjoys his "little human praise," would be missed if they were not there; but opens the visions of the Empyrean upon modern Camberwell. The pages in which Browning might seem, for once, to vie with the author of the Apocalypse [are] interleaved with others in which, for once, he seems to vie with Balzac or Zola. Of course this is intensely characteristic of Browning. The quickened spiritual pulse which these poems betoken betrays itself just in his more daringly assured embrace of the heights and the depths of the universe, as communicating and akin, prompting also that not less daring embrace of the extremes of expression,—sublime imagery and rollicking rhymes,—as equally genuine utterances of spiritual fervour,—

"When frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest."

These lines, and the great Shelleyan declaration that

"A loving worm within its clod
Were diviner than a loveless God,"

are the key to both poems, but peculiarly to the Christmas-Day, in which they occur. We need not in any wise identify Browning with the Christmas-Day visionary; but it is clear that what is "dramatic" in him exfoliates, as it were, from a root of character and thought which are altogether Browning's own. Browning is apparent in the vivacious critic and satirist of religious extravagances, standing a little aloof from all the constituted religions; but he is apparent also in the imaginative and sympathetic student of religion, who divines the informing spark of love in all sincere worship; and however far he may have been from putting forward the little conventicle with its ruins of humanity, [its] soul at struggle with insanity, as his own final choice, that choice symbolised in a picturesque half-humorous way his own profound preference for the spiritual good which is hardly won. He makes the speaker choose the "earthen vessel" in spite of its "taints of earth," because it brimmed with spiritual water; but in Browning himself there was something which relished the spiritual water the more because the earthen vessel was flawed.

Like Christmas-Eve, Easter-Day is a dramatic study,—profound convictions of the poet's own being projected as it were through forms of religious consciousness perceptibly more angular and dogmatically defined than his own. The main speaker is plainly not identical with the narrator of Christmas-Eve, who is incidentally referred to as "our friend." Their first beliefs may be much alike, but in the temper of their belief they differ widely. The speaker in Christmas-Eve is a genial if caustic observer, submitting with robust tolerance to the specks in the water which quenches his thirst; the speaker of Easter-Day is an anxious precisian, fearful of the contamination of earth, and hoping that he may "yet escape" the doom of too facile content. The problem of the one is, what to believe; the problem of the other, how to believe; and each is helped towards a solution by a vision of divine love. But the Easter-Day Vision conveys a sterner message than that of Christmas-Eve. Love now illuminates, not by enlarging sympathy and disclosing the hidden soul of good in [error], but by suppressing sympathies too diffusely and expansively bestowed. The Christmas Vision makes humanity seem more divine; the Easter Vision makes the divine seem less human. The hypersensitive moral nature of the Easter-Day speaker, on the other hand, sees his own criminal darkness of heart and mind before all else, and the divine visitation becomes a Last Judgment, with the fierce vindictive red of the Northern Lights replacing the mild glory of the lunar rainbows, and a stern and scornful cross-examination the silent swift convoy of the winged robe. This difference of temper is vividly expressed in the style. The rollicking rhymes, the "spume and sputter" of the fervent soul, give place to a manner of sustained seriousness and lyric beauty.

Yet the Easter-Day speaker probes deeper and raises more fundamental issues. When the form of Christian belief to be adopted has been settled, a certain class of believing minds, not the least estimable, will still remain restive. Browning of all men felt impatient of every nominal belief held as unassimilated material, not welded into the living substance of character; and he makes his Easter-Day visionary confound with withering irony the "faith" which seeks assurance in outward "evidence,"—

"'Tis found,
No doubt: as is your sort of mind,
So is your sort of search: you'll find
What you desire."

Still less mercy has he for the dogmatic voluptuary who [complacently] assumes the "all-stupendous tale" of Christianity to have been enacted

"to give our joys a zest,
And prove our sorrows for the best."

Upon these complacent materialisms and epicureanisms of the religious character falls the scorching splendour of the Easter Vision, with its ruthless condemnation of whatever is not glorified by Love, passing over into the uplifting counter—affirmation, indispensable to Browning's optimism, that—

"All thou dost enumerate
Of power and beauty in the world
The mightiness of Love was curled
Inextricably round about."

With all their nobility of feeling, and frequent splendour of description, these twin poems cannot claim a place in Browning's work at all corresponding to the seriousness with which he put them forward, and the imposing imaginative apparatus called in. The strong personal conviction which seems to have been striving for direct utterance, checked without perfectly mastering his dramatic instincts and habitudes, resulting in a beautiful but indecisive poetry which lacks both the frankness of a personal deliverance and the plasticity of a work of art. The speakers can neither be identified with the poet nor detached from him; they are neither his mouthpieces nor his creations. The daring supernaturalism seems to indicate that the old spell of Dante, so keenly felt in the Sordello days, had been [wrought] to new potency by the magic of the life in Dante's Florence, and the subtler magic of the love which he was presently to compare not obscurely to that of Dante for Beatrice.[36] The divine apparitions have the ironic hauteurs and sarcasms of Beatrice in the Paradise. Yet the comparison brings into glaring prominence the radical incoherence of Browning's presentment. In Dante's world all the wonders that he describes seem to be in place; but the Christmas and Easter Visions are felt as intrusive anachronisms in modern London, where the divinest influences are not those which become palpable in visions, but those which work through heart and brain.

[36] One Word More.

Browning probably felt this, for the Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day stands in this respect alone in his work. But the idea of Christ as the sign and symbol of the love which penetrates the universe lost none of its hold upon his imagination; and it inspired some of the greatest achievements of the Men and Women. It was under this impulse that he now, at some time during the early Italian years, completed the splendid torso of Saul. David's Vision of the Christ that is to be has as little apparent relation to the quiet pastoralism of the earlier stanzas as the Easter Vision to the common-sense reflections that preceded it. But while this Vision abruptly bursts upon him, David's is the final conquest of his own ardent intellect, under the impulse of a great human task which lifts it beyond its experience, and [calls] out all its powers. David is occupied with no speculative question, but with the practical problem of saving a ruined soul; and neither logical ingenuity nor divine suggestion, but the inherent spiritual significance of the situation, urges his thought along the lonely path of prophecy. The love for the old king, which prompts him to try all the hidden paths of his soul in quest of healing, becomes a lighted torch by which he tracks out the meaning of the world and the still unrevealed purposes of God; until the energy of thought culminates in vision, and the Christ stands full before his eyes. All that is supernatural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of angels and powers are unuttered and unseen.

Only less beautiful than Browning's pictures of spiritual childhood are his pictures of spiritual maturity and old age. The lyric simplicity, the naïve intensity which bear a David, a Pippa, a Pompilia without effort into the region of the highest spiritual vision, appealed less fully to his imagination than the more complex and embarrassed processes through which riper minds forge their way towards the completed insight of a Rabbi ben [Ezra]. In this sense, the great song of David has a counterpart in the subtle dramatic study of the Arab physician Karshish. He also is startled into discovery by a unique experience. But where David is lifted on and on by a continuous tide of illuminating thought, perfectly new and strange, but to which nothing in him opposes the semblance of resistance, Karshish feels only a mysterious attraction, which he hardly confesses, and which all the intellectual habits and convictions of a life given up to study and thought seem to gainsay. No touch of worldly motive belongs to either. The shepherd-boy is not more single-souled than this devoted "picker up of learning's crumbs," who makes nothing of perilous and toilsome journeys for the sake of his art, who is threatened by hungry wild beasts, stripped and beaten by robbers, arrested as a spy. At every step his quick scrutiny is rewarded by the discovery of some new drug, mineral, or herb,—"things of price"—"blue flowering borage, the Aleppo sort," or "Judaea's gum-tragacanth." But Karshish has much of the temper of Browning himself: these technicalities are the garb of a deep underlying mysticism. This man's flesh so admirably made by God is yet but the earthly prison for "that puff of vapour from his mouth, man's soul." The case of Lazarus, though at once, as a matter of course, referred to the recognised medical categories, yet strangely puzzles and arrests him, with a fascination that will not be put by. This abstracted docile man of perfect physical vigour, who heeds the approach of [the] Roman avenger as he would the passing of a woman with gourds by the way, and is yet no fool, who seems apathetic and yet loves the very brutes and the flowers of the field,—compels his scrutiny, as a phenomenon of soul, and it is with the eye of a psychological idealist rather than of a physician that he interprets him:—

"He holds on firmly to some thread of life— ...
Which runs across some vast distracting orb
Of glory on either side that meagre thread,
Which, conscious of, he must not enter yet—
The spiritual life around the earthly life:
The law of that is known to him as this,
His heart and brain move there, his feet stay here.
So is the man perplext with impulses
Sudden to start off crosswise, not straight on,
Proclaiming what is right and wrong across,
And not along, this black thread through the blaze—
'It should be' baulked by 'here it cannot be.'"

Lazarus stands where Paracelsus conceived that he himself stood: he "knows God's secret while he holds the thread of life"; he lives in the glare of absolute knowledge, an implicit criticism of the Paracelsian endeavour to let in upon men the searing splendour of the unclouded day. To Karshish, however, these very embarrassments—so unlike the knowing cleverness of the spiritual charlatan—make it credible that Lazarus is indeed no oriental Sludge, but one who has verily seen God. But then came the terrible crux,—the pretension, intolerable to Semitic monotheism, that God had been embodied in a man. The words scorch the paper as he writes, and, like Ferishtah, he will not repeat them. [Yet] he cannot escape the spell of the witness, and the strange thought clings tenaciously to him, defying all the evasive shifts of a trained mind, and suddenly overmastering him when his concern with it seems finally at an end—when his letter is finished, pardon asked, and farewell said—in that great outburst, startling and unforeseen yet not incredible:—

"The very God! think, Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too,—
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!'
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!"

That words like these, intensely Johannine in conception, should seem to start naturally from a mind which just before has shrunk in horror from the idea of an approximation between God and that which He fashioned, is an extraordinary tour de force of dramatic portraiture. Among the minor traits which contribute to it is one of a kind to which Browning rarely resorts. The "awe" which invests Lazarus is heightened by a mystic setting of landscape. The visionary scene of his first meeting with Karshish, though altogether Browningesque in detail, is Wordsworthian in its mysterious effect upon personality:—

"I crossed a ridge of short, sharp, broken hills
Like an old lion's cheek teeth. Out there came
A moon made like a face with certain spots
Multiform, manifold and menacing:
Then a wind rose behind me."

A less formidable problem is handled in the companion study of Cleon. The Greek mind fascinated Browning, though most of his renderings of it have the savour of a salt not gathered in Attica, and his choice of types shows a strong personal bias. From the heroic and majestic elder art of Greece he turns with pronounced preference to Euripides the human and the positive, with his facile and versatile intellect, his agile criticism, and his "warm tears." It is somewhat along these lines that he has conceived his Greek poet of the days of Karshish, confronted, like the Arab doctor, with the "new thing." As Karshish is at heart a spiritual idealist, for all his preoccupation with drugs and stones, so Cleon, a past-master of poetry and painting, is among the most positive and worldly-wise of men. He looks back over a life scored with literary triumphs, as Karshish over his crumbs of learning gathered at the cost of blows and obloquy. But while Karshish has the true scholar's dispassionate and self-effacing thirst for knowledge, Cleon measures his achievements with the insight of an epicurean artist. He gathers in luxuriously the incense of universal applause,—his epos inscribed on golden plates, his songs rising from every fishing-bark at nightfall,—and wistfully contrasts the vast range of delights which as an artist he imagines, with the limited pleasures which as a man he enjoys. The magnificent symmetry, the rounded completeness of his life, suffer a serious deduction here, and his Greek sense of harmony suffers offence as well as his human hunger for joy. He [is] a thorough realist, and finds no satisfaction in contemplating what he may not possess. Art itself suffers disparagement, as heightening this vain capacity of contemplation:—

"I know the joy of kingship: well, thou art king!"

With great ingenuity this Greek realism is made the stepping-stone to a conception of immortality as un-Greek as that of the Incarnation is un-Semitic. Karshish shrank intuitively from a conception which fascinated while it awed; to Cleon a future state in which joy and capability will be brought again to equality seems a most plausible supposition, which he only rejects with a sigh for lack of outer evidence:—

"Zeus has not yet revealed it; and alas,
He must have done so, were it possible!"

The little vignette in the opening lines finely symbolises the brilliant Greek decadence, as does the closing picture in Karshish the mystic dawn of the Earth. Here the portico, flooded with the glory of a sun about to set, profusely heaped with treasures of art; there the naked uplands of Palestine, and the moon rising over jagged hills in a wind-swept sky.

In was in such grave adagio notes as these that Browning chose to set forth the "intimations of immortality" in the meditative wisdom and humanity of heathendom. The after-fortunes of the Christian legend, on the other hand, and the naïve ferocities and fantasticalities of the medieval world provoked him rather to [scherzo],—audacious and inimitable scherzo, riotously grotesque on the surface, but with a grotesqueness so penetrated and informed by passion that it becomes sublime. Holy-Cross Day and The Heretic's Tragedy both culminate, like Karshish and Clean, in a glimpse of Christ. But here, instead of being approached through stately avenues of meditation, it is wrung from the grim tragedy of persecution and martyrdom. The Jews, packed like rats to hear the sermon, mutter under their breath the sublime song of Ben Ezra, one of the most poignant indictments of Christianity in the name of Christ ever conceived:—

"We withstood Christ then? Be mindful how
At least we withstand Barabbas now!
Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared,
To have called these—Christians, had we dared!
Let defiance of them pay mistrust of Thee,
And Rome make amends for Calvary!"

And John of Molay, as he burns in Paris Square, cries upon "the Name he had cursed with all his life." The Tragedy stands alone in literature; Browning has written nothing more original. Its singularity springs mainly from a characteristic and wonderfully successful attempt to render several planes of emotion and animus through the same tale. The "singer" looks on at the burning, the very embodiment of the robust, savagely genial spectator, with a keen eye for all the sporting-points in the exhibition,—noting that the fagots are piled to the right height and are of the right quality—

"Good sappy bavins that kindle forthwith, ...
Larch-heart that chars to a chalk-white glow:"

and when the torch is clapt-to and he has "leapt back safe," poking jests and gibes at the victim. But through this distorting medium we see the soul of John himself, like a gleam-lit landscape through the whirl of a storm; a strange weird sinister thing, glimmering in a dubious light between the blasphemer we half see in him with the singer's eyes and the saint we half descry with our own. Of explicit pathos there is not a touch. Yet how subtly the inner pathos and the outward scorn are fused in the imagery of these last stanzas:—

"Ha, ha, John plucketh now at his rose
To rid himself of a sorrow at heart!
Lo,—petal on petal, fierce rays unclose;
Anther on anther, sharp spikes outstart;
And with blood for dew, the bosom boils;
And a gust of sulphur is all its smell;
And lo, he is horribly in the toils
Of a coal-black giant flower of hell!

So, as John called now, through the fire amain,
On the Name, he had cursed with, all his life—
To the Person, he bought and sold again—
For the Face, with his daily buffets rife—
Feature by feature It took its place:
And his voice, like a mad dog's choking bark,
At the steady whole of the Judge's face—
Died. Forth John's soul flared into the dark."

None of these dramatic studies of Christianity attracted so lively an interest as Bishop Blougram's Apology. It was "actual" beyond anything he had yet [done]; it portrayed under the thinnest of veils an illustrious Catholic prelate familiar in London society; it could be enjoyed with little or no feeling for poetry; and it was amazingly clever. Even Tennyson, his loyal friend but unwilling reader, excepted it, on the last ground, from his slighting judgment upon Men and Women at large. The figure of Blougram, no less than his discourse, was virtually new in Browning, and could have come from him at no earlier time. He is foreshadowed, no doubt, by a series of those accomplished mundane ecclesiastics whom Browning at all times drew with so keen a zest,—by Ogniben, the bishop in Pippa Passes, the bishop of St Praxed's. But mundane as he is, he bears the mark of that sense of the urgency of the Christian problem which since Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day had so largely and variously coloured Browning's work. It occurred to none of those worldly bishops to justify their worldliness,—it was far too deeply ingrained for that. But Blougram's brilliant defence, enormously disproportioned as it is to the insignificance of the attack, marks his tacit recognition of loftier ideals than he professes. Like Cleon, he bears involuntary witness to what he repudiates.

But there is much more in Blougram than this. The imposing personality of Wiseman contained much to attract and conciliate a poet like Browning, whose visionary idealism went along with so unaffected a relish for the world and the talents which succeed there. A great spiritual ruler, performing with congenial ease the [enormous] and varied functions of his office, and with intellectual resources, when they were discharged, to win distinction in scholarship, at chess, in society, appealed powerfully to Browning's congenital delight in all strong and vivid life. He was a great athlete, who had completely mastered his circumstances and shaped his life to his will. Opposed to a man of this varied and brilliant achievement, an ineffectual dilettante appeared a sorry creature enough; and Browning, far from taking his part and putting in his craven mouth the burning retorts which the reader in vain expects, makes him play helplessly with olive-stones while the great bishop rolls him out his mind, and then, as one cured and confuted, betake himself to the life of humbler practical activity and social service.

It is plain that the actual Blougram offered tempting points of contact with that strenuous ideal of life which he was later to preach through the lips of "Rabbi ben Ezra." Even what was most problematic in him, his apparently sincere profession of an outworn creed, suggested the difficult feat of a gymnast balancing on a narrow edge, or forcibly holding his unbelief in check,—

"Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot,
Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe."

But Browning marks clearly the element both of self-deception and deliberate masquerade in Blougram's defence. He made him "say right things and call them by wrong names." The intellectual athlete in him went out to the intellectual athlete in the other, and rejoiced in [every] equation he seemed to establish. He played, and made Blougram play, upon the elusive resemblance between the calm of effortless mastery and that of hardly won control.

The rich and varied poetry reviewed in the last three sections occupies less than half of Men and Women, and leaves the second half of the title unexplained. In that richer emotional atmosphere which breathes from every line of his Italian work, the profound fulfilment of his spiritual needs which he found in his home was the most vital and potent element. His imaginative grasp of every kind of spiritual energy, of every "incident of soul," was deepened by his new but incessant and unqualified experience of love. His poetry focussed itself more persistently than ever about those creative energies akin to love, of which art in the fullest sense is the embodiment, and religion the recognition. It would have been strange if the special form of love-experience to which the quickening thrill was due had remained untouched by it. In fact, however, the title of the volume is significant as well as accurate; for Browning's poetry of the love between men and women may be said, save for a few simple though exquisite earlier notes, to begin with it.