surely more than the poet of the Idyls of the | probabilities, or criticism, to sift and tell King in common with the artist of the the truth, are failures; our human speech is Wandering Jew. But though Mr. Browning naught, our human testimony false;" but has no conventional coarseness, yet he is “art remains the one way possible hardly enough on his guard against manOf speaking truth," nerism. Mannerism of thought is more or less inseparable from individuality of character; but mannerism of representation is a routine unworthy of a great artist. No good painter would paint all his reds with vermilion; Mr. Browning can never see the colour without talking of blood. With him a crimson sun-set is blood-red, tulips are bubbles of blood. If he introduces us to anything painted red, he must hasten to assure us that it is not painted with blood, as if that thought was an inevitable temptation and the first suggestion of Satan. The satirical element in Mr. Browning's mind is strong; but he is too serious a theologian and moralist to be a genuine satirist. His humour lacks not only the keen edge and fine incisiveness, but the playful and careless dallying, of satire. Satire should appeal to the inner consciousness of the person satirized; he should be made to feel, not only that the cap was made to his measure, but that it fits him. It would be too great a stretch of imagination to suppose that any prelate could ever in his inmost heart have recognised Blougram's apology as correctly representing his own moral situation. This, and several similar poems, wherein the speaker is introduced dragging to public light hidden tendencies and byways of thought which he could scarcely see clearly enough to confess to himself, are beyond the range of satire, and come within the category of casuistry. And they assume quite a prophetic character, when we remember the assumptions and pretensions of the poet. For Mr. Browning, in analysing as he does the processes and the characters of men's minds, attributes to himself a kind of infallibility, which ought to be enough to make his judgments haunt his victims like an evil conscience. After giving us his theory of dead fact restored to life by the alloy of poetical fiction, he asks whether this fiction is truth: "Are means to the end themselves in part the end? Is fiction which makes fact alive fact too?" He gives no very coherent answer to the question; but he makes it very evident that he considers that the artist is the real and only truth-teller. For him the fictions of art, combined with the facts of nature, are of a higher grade of truth than the facts by themselves. Moreover, all human attempts, by means of logic or theories of It at least, he adds modestly, to mouths like If he thought doubt would do the next age good, 'Tis pity he died unapprised what birth The alloy which attributes an elaborate theory to a historical person, followed by the spirit of acid which washes out the fiction with an "if," is perhaps the most noteworthy exhibition of this typical process of ringmaking to be found in the whole poem. tion of modern civilisation in the Syllabus | rity of friends enough to encourage him, of Pius IX.; nor, without a kind of presenti- while the majority of foes have at last ment of Hegel's doctrine of the genesis of chastened him into tolerable sobriety. In being out of not-being, would he have formu- deference to them he has, as it were, cast lated his fine theory of the restoration of his skin, and has made an effort for which faith in the latter days through the antago- he clearly anticipated the rare success it has nism of doubt. The poet knows how far he gained, the success of pleasing his revilers is here wandering from probability; and be- and turning them into admirers. Perhaps fore the end of the poem he harks back to the spirt of acid which he speaks of is this this supposed Papal doctrine, and says,- suppression of the individual and secret perfound to be incommunicable, and the deter sonality which, after so many efforts, he has mination only to communicate so much of himself as he can render intelligible in the common tongue. But it was not only the wish to tell his dreams in his own dreamlanguage which made him hard to be understood his theory of metaphor, and his involved grammar, added the difficulties of construction to the difficulties of interpreta tion. His character led him to the uncouthness and abruptness of a style full of breaches and pitfalls, just as his appreciation of the value of what he had to communicate led him into amplification and repetition, and the spreading of his thoughts prosaically thin over his poetical pages. He is not a poet who sings by ear only; and he thoroughly well knew what he was doing when he wove the loose texture of his style. It was the proper raiment of his thoughts. He is too good a critic, and has too habitually criticised himself, not to be entirely conscious of the coarse grain of his composition. He wished to impose himself his own views, his own language, his own sense of the beautiful and the congruous, his own appreciation of himself and others-upon his audience. Knowing well what he did, but not knowing what he could do best, he always tried to be a dramatist; but he is, and ever will be, a critical poet. The au thor is never off the scene. Like Thackeray, he is always commenting on the sayings and doings and meanings of his dramatic personages. And when he is not formally doing so his readers feel that the process is still going on underground. He is his own chorus, the ideal spectator of his own dra mas; and the chorus is often, perhaps generally, more important than the dialogue. The artistic truth, then, which is brought out in such an exhibition of a historical character, is not historical truth or verity of fact, but that verity of congruity which allows one to say that if it was not so it ought to have been so. By this rule, the artist shows us not what a man was, but what he ought to have been, in order to place him in conformity, not with the moral law, but with the artist's ideal. For, after all, the truth which the artist contends for is his own ideal-himself. Much must be forgiven to genius; the superior man may well be sup. posed to have also a superior Ego, besides higher motives to thrust his own personality upon others. But the man of genius should be the first to find out that of all human qualities personality is at once the most familiar and the least communicable, that a man's intercourse with himself, if it is the first object of his own intelligence, is the last object for the intelligence of other people. He that speaketh in this unknown tongue edifieth himself, for in the spirit he speaketh mysteries; but he is a barbarian to others. He speaks, but says nothing; his puzzling no-meaning is as hopeless an enigma as a bankrupt's books. There are thoughts which are not transferable, autochthons that can only live where they are born, and cannot be naturalized in another soil. The youth of genius often makes volcanic efforts to colonize with such thoughts. The effort is excellent to teach him negatively the limits of his power; but its positive results are worthless. Mr. Browning continued his youth far into his age, and for too long a time gave too many occasions to ask whether his lines were philosophy gone mad or madness philosophizing. But there were always oases in his desert; and they gained him a mino Such appear to be a few of the main characteristics of the poet who infuses his surplusage of soul into the tale told in the The Ring and the Book. And they show how it is that, in spite of his theological bias and undeniable Christianity, he is acceptable to the materialistic and positivist thought of the day. The man whose imagination can interpret the soul of brute matter seems to show to other imaginations how thought and soul may be only secretions of matter specially organized, while his decided con tempt for reason in comparison with the sentiments must endear him to all friends of Comte's law, "que l'esprit doit être subordonné au cœur.' " If we turn to the form into which he has moulded his story, we must be struck with a novelty which has at the same time the merit of simplicity and obvious naturalness. In some respects the design follows the plan of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales; there is a similar prologue, which introduces to the reader the narrators of the poem, followed by a series of cantos or idyls, in which each of them tells his tale. But Mr. Browning's design has a more compressed unity than Chaucer's; for in the twelve books of this poem there is only one complete action, one tune, the subject of twelve variations. He has a theory that the life of a fact consists in the variety of ways in which it is regarded. A truth in which all are agreed gradually fades and dies. A living fact looks differently to each beholder. The "variance and eventful uniof opinion regarding it make up its thread of life; and therefore the poet, who has to quicken a dead fact, must, as it were, throw its carcass into the arena to be fought over and dragged hither and thither by the lions of thought. ty "See it for yourselves, This man's act, changeable because alive." The poet has forgotten to tell us how it is that human speech and human judgment, which he thinks are naught, and which prove their naughtiness by their inconstancy, are able by this very inconstancy to rise to the most sublime function of humanity-poetical creation. But perhaps this is only one instance out of many where our weakness is our strength. Perhaps generalization rests on confusion of memory and forgetfulness of special details; and the absence of logical accuracy and metaphysical abstraction may be a condition for the picturesqueness of metaphor and abundance of imagery which distinguish the poet. It is however a truth, that facts, as mirrored in men's minds, are infinitely variable; and it is this changeableness which makes judicial investigations. so interesting, and makes it possible to write a great poem on the present plan. To tell the same story in the same way a dozen times over would be to overdo the loquacious imbecility of Mrs. Quickly or Juliet's nurse. But, in its place, repetition is one of the fundamental laws of art. As nature begins with uniform repetition, and ends with differentiated repetition, so does art. Indeed, a scale of arts might be constructed on this principle. The less articulate and intellectual the art is, the more readily it ad mits simple repetition, even in its highest works. In music, the repetition of the tune, the subject, or the figure, is one of the most imperative rules of the art. In Beethoven's pastoral symphony a single bar is repeated ten times successively; fugues, imitations, variations, figures of accompaniment, are all instances of the same law. In architecture, the ranges of repeated members-arcades, columns, pinnacles, the arrangement of the elevation, where mass answers to mass, and tower is flanked with tower-are examples of repetition as simple as that of music. When we advance to the higher efforts of sculpture, painting, and poetry, we find the repetitions veiled, as they are in the differ.entiated segments of a highly organized vertebrate, though in their lower examplesthe frieze, the arabesque, the ballad with its burden-we find the same simplicity as in the less articulate arts. But the same rule of repetition holds good throughout; all the subtleties of rhythm, proportion, and measured flow, depend on the law of repetition and variation. One of the most honoured traditions of the Elizabethan dramatists was the composite plot, in which the subsidiary action answered to the main one as its supplement, its contradictory, or its parody. Much of the stereoscopic solidity of their work may be due to this binocular vision which they afford us of it. The law of repetition applies not only to the creation but to the enjoyment of art. A thing of beauty is a joy forever, not for a moment merely, like a peach, which is eaten and done with; the picture, the play, the poem, is visited and revisited, heard and reheard, read and re-read, by the same people, and by their children, generation after generation. Raphael never wearied of repeating his Madonnas, the public have never grown tired of gazing on them. Poet after poet, tragedian after tragedian, has taken up the same tale; and the masterpieces of literature have been written on stock stories, familiar as nursery tales. If Mr. Browning's design is new, it is founded on old analogies, and obeys a well-known law. If Another trait of this poem is its hybrid character. Mr. Browning, in his essays to be a dramatist, bas gradually been sliding back till he has landed in the archaic simplicity of Thespis. His drama is long monologue, only made dramatic by faithfully portraying the actual and present workings of the speaker's passions and intellect. But this vitality at once gives the monologue or the narrative a lyric character. The monologues are dramatic, because the speakers are placed in dramatic situations, where the event depends upon their suasive power. They are narrative; for they set before us the history, not the actual development, of an event. But they are eminently lyric, because their chief interest is reflective, lying not in the deed or narrative itself, but in the psychological states of the speakers, and in the various hues which the history assumes when refracted through their various minds. It is with reason then that the poet makes an invocation to lyric love the posy of his ring. This invocation has been everywhere quoted, and everywhere read, rather, probably, for its music than for its intelligence; for it can hardly speak plainly except to those who know the poem. The poet gazes on lyric love, half angel and half bird; and as he gazes its form becomes transfigured, and it seems to be a lost companion, whose presence was once his best gift of song. He still gazes, and the well-known features are glorified into those of the Redeemer, dropping down "to toil for man, to suffer or to die.' For to him, poetry, love, and religion, are but three aspects of one great creative force, not logic or reason, though he identifies it with the Logos, but "all a wonder and a wild desire," a pure passion, which he enthrones as Queen of man and the world. Lyric love accepts not the world as it is; that is the dramatist's realm. The dramatist knows that "there is no art To find the mind's construction in the face," there is no opposition between being and "That night and next day did the gaze endure In that instant he learns her whole charac- "Falseness cannot come from thee; for thon look'st Modest as Justice, and thou seem'st a palace For the crowned Truth to dwell in.” In the same way Pompilia knows Caponsacchi at a glance; his face is sufficient refutation of all scandal against him: "Thus I know and so employs himself in exposing the contradiction between the mask and the brain beneath it. But lyric love spurns this world, feathered with deceitful promises and false truths, and makes to itself another world, where the inside corresponds to the outside, where the face is the mind, and the grace of the body is the shadow of the grace This love at first sight is but one stone of of the soul. Such a world is the ideal of the temple of Lyric Love. The whole conart; for art itself is but the expression of stitutes a complete philosophy, distilled from truth in its most natural symbols. Its pro- Plato, and coming down to us in a succesblem is to make the invisible visible, and give articulate voice to the mute feelings of sion of poets, of whom Dante, Petrarch, the heart. Shapes and colours, and sounds chief. It is a philosophy which does not fit and Shakespeare in his sonnets, are the and words, are its only materials. With these it has to express the shapeless, colour- things as they are, but perhaps would fit less, inaudible, inarticulate motions of the them if they were as they ought to be. If mind; and therefore, in the interests of its applied to life, it sets it to a higher pitch, translates it to a more refined language, own life, it has to assume a constant relationship, even an identity, between the con-presenting it not as it is, but "as you like vex and concave of its world. Words be- it," as it may be supposed to go on in the come things, colours become moral qualities; mythical forest of Arden. It lends itself to the face is no longer merely the index of the the drama, and produces a Romeo and Juliet. heart, but becomes the heart itself. In the It is the poet's means for raising man above lyric world of art himself. It is the idealism which, joined to the realism of natural representation, gives re "What the breast forges, that the tongue an elevation more than human to human life must vent; "" and human energy. The passion which it deifies is not blind human craving, but an ideal passion endowed with intuition, and freed from the roundabout processes of our interpretative reason and inferential logic. Inspired with this, the poet's heroic men and women rise superior to all the thralls of blind passion, to the calculating pursuers of pleasure or interest, to the astute politicians who direct the storm and thrive on others' ruin. The lyric love with which they are inspired makes them examples to follow, touchstones of right and wrong, ideals to guide our judgments, models of martyrdom, and of the supreme happiness of suffering and passion. bited the action of the heroic will or the individual prudence. There is no reason why some of the persons of a drama should not be collective corporations, organized aggregates of men; and there is no reason why these composite persons should not be truly poetical. The people is in its way a poet. To it we owe proverbs and ballads. It seizes on skeletons of facts, and, like a poet, projects its "surplusage of soul "into them, giving them its own colouring, and making them "alive" with its own fictions. On the narrow basis of a telegram it can set up a tower of Babel huge enough to cast a shadow over a whole empire. It can be as wayward and wilful as a baby; it can also be patient and persevering as a spider. As the poet strives to enter into the minds of his heroes, to possess himself of their springs of action, to think and feel in their grooves, so, when he makes public opinion his hero, he can possess himself of its national spirit, of its corporate logic, and represent collective humanity as easily as he can represent individuals. Collective humanity individualizes itself in the average man, and in him manifests its way of looking at things. And in an age of democratic advance the average man's toe comes so near the heel of the hero that he galls his kibe. Some people think that the day of novelists has passed its me Lyric art, in embodying this ideal, has to deal with many other things besides lyric love. Like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, it has to be the supposed spectator of all that happens, and to convey to the spectator of the play a lyrical and poetical expression of the emotions which he ought to feel. It contrasts not only the doings of men with the lyric ideal, but much more their feelings. It has to trace the various ways in which Job's comforters judge him, and to judge their judgments. The Greek chorus represented a whole population; and Mr. Browning introduces populations--half Rome, and the other half Rome-delivering their sentiments upon the actors and action of his story. In this again his ideal ap-ridian, and that the sun of journalists is proaches that of the earliest Greek drama. There is no such popular running commentary on the action in Shakespeare, except sometimes in the observations of the fool or clown. We know of nothing quite like it in modern literature, except perhaps the social opinion which comes in as Chorus in George Eliot's novels, and gives the judgment of the Raveloe alehouse or the Florentine barber's shop upon the action and persons of the history. The parliamentary and representative fancy that makes an idyl of popular opinion, though a novelty, is yet an advance in the grooves of the great movement of thought. When philosophical criticism regards the hero of literature simply as the spokesman of his age, it proposes to writers the problem of making the characters they invent not individual and idiosyncratic, but samples of common opinion. We have indeed crowds and mobs and citizens in Shakespeare; but they are rather yielding material in the hands of the individual demagogue or orator than masters of the situation. Public opinion has now become a constraining force, as often directing as following those whose hands turn the wheels of society and the State. Literature can represent all that is, and after a time will be able to embody public opinion as poetically as it has exhi about to rise. For society, they suppose, is Men |