waste places in which he himself seems never to have lingered. His imagination loves the larger possibilities offered it by faith. Yet the optimism of his watchword, "Trust God nor be afraid," is not really easy-going. Such a charge is effectually replied to in Red Cotton Night - Cap Country, cxxviii. Equally significant as a reply is Browning's comparison of faith to the angel Michael, with the snake, unbelief, beneath his foot, treading firmer, "because he feels it writhe." Browning is a later Coleridge, with a theological instinct less bounded and more acute than Coleridge's, manageable, not nebulous, thinking about men, not about thought. In another direction, some readers are disappointed to find certain characters, as in The Pope and the Net, dismissed without blame or punishment. Browning sympathises with energy of life, with life as life, and, keenly aware of life's complexity, he cannot constrain it or dogmatise about it in any narrow or restricted way. If he occasionally troubles us by his seeming sympathy with evil and mischief, it is of his dramatic imagination, like the Shaksperian artistry which joyed equally in presenting Iago and Desdemona. There is room in a great master for many theories, without his being himself bounded by any, nor is the consistency of Browning's philosophy marred, but rather strengthened, by his sufferance of evil.

4. Subjects. Browning cares far more for the individual than for men in masses. Unlike Shak

1 IV. 265, Bishop Blougram's Apology.

1

spere, he troubles little about national life. He
shows a growing indifference, which is half scorn,
for general movements. The collective progress of
the race and the material advancement of civilisation
do not swell his theme as they do Lord Tennyson's,
or intoxicate him as they do Whitman. In this re-
gard, a Wordsworthian aloofness characterises Brown-
ing. Indeed, Browning is in saneness and tonic effect,
and also, it must be said, in a tendency to prolixity,
Wordsworth's lineal descendant. The blazing ques-
tions of the day all seem to Browning to be more or
less beside the mark. 'Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau'
(XI. 162, 163) compares the socialistic and individual-
istic views to the disadvantage of the former, and in
Pacchiarotto Browning laughs at socialists' belief that
‘aims heavenly' can be ‘attained by means earthly.'
He rejoices in the impossibility, since he sees im-
perfection necessary to the world, and only personal
reform valuable. His favourite 'revolutionary' is
sober Pym. Browning's reply 2 to his question, "How
can I help England?"3 is not concerned with democratic
solutions. Like Chaucer, like Shakspere, though
perhaps from different causes, he does not love the
mob. There is very little of the fanatic or the
enthusiast about him. Responsibility and retribution
are his leading notes. He believes in 'war for hate
of war,' he glories in the failure of science to explain
1 Compare II. 36, 171. Paracelsus with XV. 242. Jochanan
Hakkadosh.
2 XIV. 203. La Saisiaz.

3 VI. 97. Home-Thoughts, from the Sea.
4 XI. 200. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

the facts of heredity,1 he upholds the punishment of death,2 finding in his Eschylus that blood is the inevitable price of blood, that "the killer has all to pay."

Against Vivisection Browning has directed two poems, Tray and Arcades Ambo. Similar in application are Donald and The Lady and the Painter. The other Animal Poems are How they brought the Good News and Muléykeh. Browning is always ready to speak for the speechless, and his references to animals are as observant as they are sympathetic. The idea of the hero, even a dog hero, is characteristic of

him.

4

Concerning children (with the exception of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, which was written expressly for a child), and the parental and filial relation, Browning has few specific poems: Pompilia's motherhood,5 in The Ring and the Book, is unsurpassed in our literature. Pompilia, with her babe, reflects the white and tender holiness of a Rafael Madonna. In Ivàn Ivanovitch, Browning speaks his mind on parental responsibility and the sacredness of motherhood, of which Dmitri's wife is the disgrace, as Pompilia is the exquisite example. "Womanliness means only motherhood," Browning says in The Inn Album.6 Halbert and Hob is the story of the terrible savagery

1 XI. 202, 203. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau.

2 See the Pope's reasons for pronouncing sentence on Guido in The Ring and the Book (X), and XV. 47. Ivan Ivanovitch.

8 XIII. 350. Agamemnon.

5 IX. 215-239. Pompilia.

4 XV. 57. Tray.

6 XII. 296.

, 1

and tardy softening of a grown-up son and his father. In Browning's Euripides there is a passage on fathers with their lads, in which Herakles naively describes men as 'the children-loving race. There are Strafford's care for his children, and the advocate's, Don de Archangelis, fussy fondness for his boy of the many diminutives,2 but, besides these, little or nothing on the subject of child-love in Browning's works. Browning has drawn a whole world of

women.

One-third of his poetry is on the subject of love, culminating in his personal expression about his wife. The numerous lyrics, scattered about, like jewels, in the hewn gold of his works, are sufficient to redeem him from the charge of constant difficulty and harshness, as, for instance, The Lost Mistress, Round us the wild creatures in Ferishtah, and Summum Bonum. Browning's essentially man-like imagination of woman is as subtle and free from commonplace as all his fancy is. He seems peculiarly attracted by an outwardly reserved, inwardly glowing disposition.3 From Pauline, up through Any Wife to any Husband, he loves to accentuate woman's best beauty, faithfulness. Men who can die for a principle are not more abundant in Browning than women who can die for a personality. He nobly vindicates women's friendship, women's belief in women, in Guendolen Tresham,*

1 XIII. 181.

2 IX. 242. The Ring and the Book.

3 VI. 125. My Star, XIV. 60. Magical Nature, XIV. 167. La Saisiaz (XIV. 211, 212. The Two Poets of Croisic and Asolando. 14. A Pearl, A Girl.)

4 IV. 45-51. A Blot in the 'Scutcheon.

fighting, like generous Beatrice, against men's cowardice and condemnation. In Bifurcation, Browning asserts that mutual love constitutes duty. The woman there called the love-forsaking path duty, but the responsibility of her lover's spoiled life lies at her door. The same idea is still more strikingly brought out in Cristina. Browning's handling of love in all its aspects is strong and healthful. To him, earthly marriage is the type and expression of the soul union which consecrates it. An impulse to protect, pity, and console, rather than to worship and take pride in, tinges Browning's vision of love, as in Jules and Phene and the song, "Give her but a least excuse," "1 and in the digression' in Sordello.2 This ministering love, the passion to serve, is also indicated in The Flight of the Duchess (V. 146). In simple little Pippa's reverie, love means to be cherished and safely folded with a protector's arm, and in A Woman's Last Word a woman's hope of love is the same. But, for all that, Browning maintains that only 'the weaker woman's-want' is to lean, the best women themselves uplift and sustain, so that all their love is a kind of motherhood. In Browning's earliest poem, the young poet's belief in love-Pauline's-saves him. Love, purity, devotion, these are the most divine things in the world, and so recognised in his heart of hearts by every character in Browning's works, even by the 1 III. 44-46. Pippa Passes. 2 I. 159-164. Sordello. 3 III. 11, 12. Pippa Passes.

3

4 XII. 155. Red Cotton Night-Cap Country, and XII. 295, 296. Inn Album.