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hammered out into its proper shape, when, | haps with the youthful dream that quaintness with a spirt of acid, the alloy is burnt away, leaving the gold pure and all its embellishments perfect. The book, he tells us, is a volume, half print, half manuscript, which he found at a stall in Florence, and which contains all the documents and pleadings in the case of a murder committed in Rome in 1698 by Count Guido Franceschini upon his wife, Pompilia Comparini, and her supposed father and mother. This book he compares to the pure gold of fact, which he alloys with a sufficient amount of poetical fiction to be able to round it off into a perfect and living work of

art.

As it will be necessary afterwards to inquire how far he has complied with the conditions which he has set himself, we may pass on for the present, because, as one of the characters says,

แ we must not stick Quod non sit attendendus Titulus To the Title."

There can be little doubt that this poem is the masterpiece of the writer. With a timely consciousness that he has hitherto failed to be generally understood, he has set himself in the early afternoon of his power to repeat what he had to say in a tongue more comprehensible. Once, it seems, he thought that if he could understand himself, any one else could understand him; that if his eyes were focused, and his ears attuned for the cave,

is power and that to differ is greater than to agree, nor with that ambition of surprising which has ever been the fruitful parent of fustian, but with a consciousness of a secret gift which genius spontaneously reveals, with a feeling that a good writer writes, not like other people, but like himself, and that a man should be something that all men are not, and individual in somewhat besides his name. Originality accounts not only for obscurity, but for unpopularity. A special mode of thinking must have a special mode of expression, which will at first be as incomprehensible as an attempt to explain logarithms to a Sandwich islander in his own language. The new poet is brought within the abattoirs of criticism, where the majority condemn him, simply because men must think that nonsense which they do not understand. Dogs bark at unknown footsteps; and all the curs in the parish join in chorus. unintelligibility itself becomes a recommenOn the other hand, there are some to whom

dation;

"As charms are nonsense, nonsense seems a
charm
Which hearers of all judgment does disarm."

A few of these, rating higher their duties as
critics, dig painfully in the stony ground,
if perchance some harvest of meaning may
reward their toil. The book may be a me
nagerie of fabulous beasts, like the Queen's

"Where brooding darkness spreads his jealous arms, the style so figurative as to require a

wings,

And the night raven sings,"

herald to blazon it into English, the texts so oracular that none but the Sibyl can read all other eyes and ears would be equally them; but labour conquers. The critic puts piercing and equally pleased. But he ac- a false bottom even to an empty tub, and, knowledges that the British public has de- enamoured of his own handiwork, tells a creed otherwise; therefore, with a self-deny-vaunting tale of it. He breaks windows in ing modesty, he has determined to write for the dead wall, and then, the many, and not for the few. He has entered into himself, felt the pulse of his Muse, found where its beats were out of sympathy with the national pulse, and has at last attempted to produce a national poem,"Perchance more careful whoso runs may read Than erst, when all, it seemed, could read who

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Admires new light through holes himself has "in the chequered shade,

made."

Criticism, indeed, is hardly to be trusted in appraising novelties; nor is it quite its business to announce to the world the advent of the poet of the future. It can see the revo lution, can perceive the negation, but cannot determine the positive worth of the new phenomenon. It is not criticism, but sympathy, which catches at once the whispers of genius, and readily recognises a new poet in the bud. Such an apparition appeals to the critic, not on the critical side of his nature, which proceeds by rules and precedents, but on the side of his feelings, which it is his business to control and prune. The plodding critic sees too little; the enthusiastic critic sees too much; the genuine critic is suspected of

enthusiasm. Amongst them the new poet remains unacknowledged, and has to make his way painfully by his own weight. Mr. Browning has experienced this long struggle, and, though forcing himself to be cheerful under the trial, has, at least vicariously, grumbled at his audience,

"The public blames originalities.

You must not pump spring-water unawares
Upon a gracious public, full of nerves."

With "patience perforce," he has resigned himself to be his own audience and his own critic; but fortunately for himself, he has also kept his ears open to the sounds of the outer world, and at last the happy thought has struck him that he would try to say what he meant in a language common to himself and his fellow-men. This has worked well for his poetry. There is a new sense of freedom in his present book. The man who writes for himself only, his own sole reader and sole judge, can never satisfy himself; for, knowing both terms, the ideal and its embodiment, he also knows the gulf between them. In writing for others, he writes for those who can only guess at his ideal, and cannot tell whether his expression of it falls short or runs over; he must therefore be more careless of their judgment than of his own. Writing for other men thus delivers the scrupulous author from his own most importunate carper, himself, without making him the thrall of his new masters. It delivers him from his domestic slavery without selling him to a new servitude.

In availing himself of his new freedom, Mr. Browning has wrought no notable change in himself. He is the same man, the same thinker, the same speaker, as formerly, but delivered at last from the bonds of the anxious and minute self-inspection and examination which, he confesses, qualified his former utterances. The present poem of 21,000 lines, the product of four years' thought, has evidently not been distilled by driblets with a bar's rest between each drop, in the alternate fire of invention and frost of criticism. Mr. Browning has never been one "To strain from hard-bound brains eight lines a year."

On the contrary, his gush is, if anything, too easy; he sometimes squanders himself in a debauch of words, and, rather than fall short of his tale of bread, when wheat flour fails will make use of sawdust and chopped hay. Such stuffing is omitted in this, the first poem which the author has written avowedly and of set purpose, not for himself but for his audience, and with the express intention of converting the "British public," who hither

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to have "liked me not," into admirers who may like me yet, marry and amen." It is not that the coarse love of reputation has replaced the refined craving for sympathy, but that the sense of power urges him to assay his force upon a larger mass.

In the explanation which he gives of the title of his poem, Mr. Browning invites attention to the matter of which he makes it, to the form in which he ultimately leaves it, and to the alloy which he lends it, by projecting into it his own "surplusage of soul." The poet, his method, and his materials,make up his poem.

Mr. Browning has been long before the world. As a poet he seeks to be not a mere rhymer, not a mere expresser of ordinary thoughts in uncommon language, but a vates, a prophet, and expounder of the mysteries of things. He is a theological poet, a Christian, orthodox in the main, but tempering his creed with universalist notions about the ultimate salvation of all men. He is, moreover, a moralist, especially in relation to causes of love and marriage. Both as theologian and moralist he is a confirmed casuist. With a secondary sympathy for creeds which he does not profess, and for habits which he disallows, he takes a special pleasure, and shows an extraordinary facility, in throwing himself into the states of mind of the professors of such creeds, or the thralls of such habits, groping tenderly his assumed conscience, explaining and defending to himself his hypothetical position, and making out the best case he can in the assertion, or defence, or palliation, or simple exposition, of the mental and moral situation. He possesses this power to so a remarkable a degree, that he can enter into phases of intellect which are even beneath humanity, and belong, if to anything, to inferior beings. One of his strongest points is the faculty of seizing the lower and more bestial currents of thought and feeling, and translating them into human language. Nothing is more known to a man's obscure self-consciousness than the importunate proofs of his animality and his degradation. But nothing is more uncommon than the translation of these sullen and

darkness-haunting feelings into coherent and articulate thought. In all men, civilized or savage, there is a possibility of the generation of superstition out of sottish ignorance or panic terror. But it would be miraculous to see such ignorance and terror contemplating themselves, arguing upon themselves, and formulating their conclusions, as in Mr. Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos." He sees that the intellect can express all things, even what is most contrary to itself. There may be a science of ignorance; there may bɔ

a fine bust of an unrefined face, an amusing personation of bore, and a philosophical reflection of the workings of the dull and embryo intellect, of a lump neither alive nor dead. Mr. Browning even goes so far as to strive to enter the animal brain, to open a new intercourse with fishes and insects, to feel in his own fibres the irrational consciousness, and to express in words what birds and beasts express in cries and pipings. He, if any one, is the man for whom

"Pigs might squeak love odes, dogs bark satire."

He has a power of seeing things in their chaotic rudiments, of ranging them in lines one behind the other, so as to see one thing through another, of tracing the perfect form in the germ, and finding kindred not only in likeness but in contradiction. Such a pow er might result in Hudibras's confusion of vision, whose

"notions fitted things so well,

That which was which he could not tell.”

In Mr. Browning it only leads to a metaphorical habit, full of comparisons, which looks at things not centrally, in their own characteristic qualities and acts, but collaterally in their relations, and

"With windlaces, and with assays of bias

By indirections finds directions out." Mr. Browning thinks in blocks, by images and pictures, not by abstract notions, and forms his ideas not by clearing away the superfluous, but by conglomerating all possible details. He adopts not Goethe's ideal of simplicity and repose, but the Shakespearian ideal, and therefore cuts off no excrescence, though it be ugly, prefers substance to form, truth to ornament, the raw thing, with all its natural complications and irregularities, to the manufactured thing, with all its prunings, transformations, artifiTo embody cialities, and arrangements. this ideal a poet must have, besides subtlety and tenderness, a coarse, round-about common sense, and a freedom and familiarity of mind which jumbles together the great and the little, and jests about its creed as naturally as it rails with its friend or toys with

its mistress.

The same habit of mind which prefers the free forest scenery of Shakespeare's school to the clipped and prim parterres of Racine, usually magnifies nature and disparages art, and distributes arts into two classes, that which follows nature, and that which expels it. The first kind of art Mr. Browning allows, because in all its workings the art itself is nature.

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Truth, he tells us, comes out, not in the long-drawn collections of reason, but in the sudden interjections of feeling. Testimony is for him a perversion of facts to prove a foregone conclusion; this conclusion, mere words and wind, and life itself—at least ar tificial, correct, externally-ordered life-only a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Sir Humphrey Davy has remarked, that the first effect of incipient civilisation, in the way of clothing, is to make man rebel against nature by tattooing his skin, boring his ears, or slitting his nose; and Mr. Browning takes up the parable and delights in framing cases, which shall expose the unexpected but universal contradictions that crop up between nature and artificial life. He finds everywhere baseness, emptiness, and hollowness, but al ways, where Rousseau finds it, in the conventional and made-up part of life. The men and women whom he offers to our scorn, ridicule, or disapproval, are very often mere painted bladders distended with the wires and buckram of social machinery. He de lights in placing a cold colourless soul within some special social forcing-house, in order that he may study the influence which some political situation, or some wheel of the me chanism of society, would exercise upon This is the prescription according to which he has made up "Luria" and "The Soul's Tragedy." In "The Flight of the Duch ess and "My last Duchess," he carries out the principle so logically that the two Dukes become not men but apparitions of abstract dukeness. They hardly exist as persons; they impose themselves as institutions; and their wives, who ought to be nourished on their warm humanity, are starved, and either die or elope. Lord Tresham, in "The Blot on the Scutcheon," is rather abstract rank than a man of rank. Mr. Browning is a master in exhibiting how a system or creed, or conviction, or craze, imposes itself on a man, enters into him, possesses him, and

it.

takes the place of his soul. In his hands the abstract essence of an age, or society, or school, becomes a kind of goblin, a simulacrum of a soul, which may on occasion serve instead of a soul for his men and women. The quintessence of the Renaissance is impersonated in "The Bishop's Tomb in St. Praxed."

burst o'er the house, and wiped clean its filthy walls with a wash of hell-fire, and bathed the avenger's name clean in blood." A courtly canon, beginning life at Arezzo to end it at Rome, is

"A star, shall climb apace and culminate, Have its due hand-breadth of the heaven at Rome,

Though meanwhile pausing on Arezzo's edge,

As modest candle mid the mountain fog,
To rub off redness and rusticity

Eer it sweep chastened, gain the silver sphere."

But even the better part of human energy, its spontaneous action, is affected with an imperfection analogous to that of its premeditated action-incompleteness. Wherever the element of contrivance or thought comes in it leaves its mark. Art is marred by "the particular devil that makes all things incomplete." Even when reason is apprenticed to feeling, and is made blind to give passion eyes, it still retains its infectious virus. Human passion and human action become, not hollow like reason, but in-stract terms, and is making a new pictorial complete. or hieroglyphic vocabulary to represent his thoughts.

"All success

Proves partial failure; all advance implies What's left behind; all triumph, something crushed

At the chariot wheels."

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"Indisputably mistress of the man." Life then, made up as it is of the empty contrivances of reason, and the imperfect utterances of passion, becomes itself vanity, and would be merely a failure and a jest if it were not for its teleological consequences. But Mr. Browning, theologian as he is, can rarely help looking chiefly at its grotesque side, and speaking of it somewhat in Thersites's vein, without reference to its more serious aspects; or rather, he jumbles up its comic and tragic sides, and illustrates them by the first metaphors which come to hand, with the indifference of nature planting a hedgerow with nettles and honeysuckles, roses and toadstools.

The recklessness with which he squanders his similes is rather a characteristic of his mind than of his style. Next to Shakespeare, he is the most comparative of poets, because, like Shakespeare, he thinks by images, not by abstractions. And he treats each image as a word, not to be followed by a consequent image, as pictorial effect might demand, but by another image-word, which may carry on the sense, without reference to the congruity of the metaphor. He will describe a murder thus :-" Vengeance, like a mountain wave that holds a monster in it,

What would Boileau or Pope say to such confusion of metaphor? It is only defensible on the ground that the writer is dissatisfied with the coldness of our bleached ab

Sometimes the similes are prolonged into episodes; and in such cases the reader is almost certain to find that in the long-run the picture and the thought are only partially consistent. Incompleteness, first the devil of art, soon comes to receive a Pagan worship, and is then enthroned as a god. It is a grief which the poet learns to wear "like a hat, aside,

With a flower stuck in it."

One of the cantos of this poem is a speech of Bottini, an advocate, who, in about a hundred lines of exordium, discourses touching the way in which an artist composes a picture; then, for about forty lines, the principle thus illustrated is applied to his own business, when the orator suddenly finds the application unmanageable, and so takes to a new metaphor. Half-a-dozen lines further on he finds that he must let his new simile

go, and invent still another. Perhaps Bottini is no more astray in his application of painting to oratory than the poet himself is in his comparison between ring-making and poetry, from which The Ring and the Book has its title. The gold is the dead matter of the poem; the alloy is the "surplusage of soul," which the poet projects into the dead matter to make it malleable; the embossing and shaping is the poetic form; the spirit of acid by which the alloy is washed away is some final act of the poet, by which he removes all traces of himself, and leaves the poem quite impersonal. This Mr. Browning claims to have done :

"So I wrought

This arc, by furtherance of such alloy And so, by one spirt, take away its trace Till, justifiably golden, rounds my ring."

But the reader, who will see that each speaker in these idyls talks unmistakeable Browningese, that, however varied the character, the turns of thought and expression always remain similar, and that with the rough hands of Esau we still have the voice of Jacob, will justifiably wonder what spirt it is which has caused that which was only just now alloy suddenly to have become pure unalloyed gold. He may think the process as imaginary as that of the scrupulous Abbot, who, finding himself seated before roast chicken on a Friday, commanded the capon to be carp, and then canonically fell to with clear conscience. For in truth we cannot find that Mr. Browning makes any special spirt to clear away his own additions to the story, except an argument to prove that the alloy is no alloy, but spirit and life. According to him, historical fact is gold, but gold in the ingot. The gold is unformed; the fact unvivified, lifeless, unremembered. An old and dead fact can only be re-created by being infused, transfused, inspired, by the living force of a creative, or rather re-creative, fancy, which is related to fact as alloy is related to gold in making the ring-necessary to prepare it for the hammer and file which are to give it artistic shape and imagery. All facts, as they are performed, live their day, and then fade into oblivion. Some leave their shrunk skin and dry bones in annals, and are entombed in archives. These too are dead, but, like dry sponges, are able to suck up the living water, and so to be raised to a second life, which the artist, from whose breast that water flows, confers on them. God gives the first life; the artist gives the second. The creative force proceeds forth from the poet, mixes itself with the deceased fact, makes the shrunk skin plump, the dead bones to live, and the corpse to stand on its feet, and run on its own legs. However true all this may be, it does not seem to account for any double action of the poet. The alloy is added by one act. An apprentice in the art will make this alloy so personal that the dramatic element will be nil; each speaker will only be a mask to conceal the poet's face, not his voice. A great artist will make the alloy entirely impersonal, and will allow it to contain none of the elements of his own biography. But whatever alloy the poet first contributes remains in the perfect poem, unless he writes it all over again. There are not two distinct acts-first of infusing surplusage of soul, and next of washing it away. Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Browning seems, of set purpose, to let an element of incompleteness, or even error, remain in his similes. An amusing instance occurs in Bottini's speech, where he tells a

very good story of the apostles Peter, John, and Judas. It is somewhat of an anticlimax when, in the application, the faithful apostles stand for two knaves, and the traitor for the hero whose conduct Bottini is defending.

Allied with the incompleteness of his more elaborate similes is the indirectness of his passing metaphors. As he gives life to his story, so he wishes also his diction to be alive and liquid; and to effect this he does not kill and anatomize his images, and make a cabinet of the bits, but gives each in its natural and living totality, even though it may be too great or too little for the matter in hand. As the Chinese represents a foreign word, not by any alphabetical spelling, but by a combination of the nearest syllables which his monosyllabic dictionary contains, so Mr. Browning communicates his ideas, not by images which have been worn down to mere symbols and abstract words, but by whole pictures. It is as if he tried to represent a circle with a number of rough sticks. He could only make a polygon, each side of which would be represented by a most unmathematical piece of rusticity. And this inadequacy of representation he seems to accept, not as a painful necessity, but as a condition of poetical beauty. He compels his eye to view things askance. His metaphors, which are his new words, are generally one-sided and incomplete; so are his poems. The concluding canto of the present poem is like the conclusion of a firework-an empty tube and a stick. It will not do to say of this poem that the end crowns the work; a better motto would be—

"Acribus initiis, incurioso fine."

He leaves his work to end in a flourish, like a torso in arabesque. And this gives his poetry an appearance of coarseness of design and execution. There is nothing like vulgarity in it, if vulgarity is a conventional coarseness; nor is his coarseness one of ex aggeration, like that of the flabby imitators of Rubens: it is rather akin to the coarseness of the earlier Flemings, in pictures of martyrdoms or of the last judgment. They ransack Noah's ark for monstrous reptiles, obscene birds, poisonous insects, hogs and hyænas, each of which suggests some special ugliness and wickedness, and which altogether make a very grotesque, but a very effective sugges tion of hell. Or, to come down to later days, his coarseness is something like that of Gustave Doré, who made a mistake in choosing the sculptured and classical imagery of Mr. Tennyson to illustrate, rather than the Rembrandt - like obscurities of Mr. Browning. The poet of Childe Roland has

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