mood to be only momentary, and the last word, as well as the first, of Ferishtah's Fancies to be "Take what is, trust what may be !' Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day, 1887 (Vol. XVI.), is Browning's penultimate volume, and, in conjunction with Asolando, the last of his works, it not merely closes, but completes with a full carillon the range of music in our poet's belfry. Echoes and repeats of almost all the varied harmonies that have ever been there sound in Parleyings, not excepting certain bells that have scarcely been stirred since Paracelsus and Sordello, though Browning's distinctively lyrical note is reserved to ring out clear and sweet in Asolando. It is true that occasionally in the Parleyings, as in Mandeville and Avison, the bells are muffled in the harshness of argument and the oft-told tale of optimism to which the years since The Ring and the Book have inured us. What is the connecting link of these seven colloquies, their Prologue, and their Epilogue? It seems to be a sense of the multiformity of life, a sense which ever widening experience would only accentuate, and to which Browning's dramatic imagination and increasing acquiescence in the fact of man's spiritual darkness converge. A conviction that in the world evil cannot be dissociated from good, and a confession of ultimate ignorance united to an unconquerable determination to exercise that provisional knowledge which leads human existence to the highest expression of itself in thought and deed run through each 'parleying' on art and life. Characteristically, the brilliant book opens with Apollo, the god or soul of poetry, and closes with Fust, the printer, who ministers to literature as Browning believes body ministers to soul. The poetic glory, however, which Browning puts into the gamut between Fust and Apollo, and not the familiar views, is the principal fact about the book. The serio-grotesque Introduction is circumstantially a Prologue in Hell to Alkestis, and really a summary of Browning's silver-lined-cloud philosophy of life. Browning purposely reduces the Fates to garrulous crones, far beneath Shakspere's 'weird sisters.' Sober, they deny life to be worth living; besotted, they pronounce it so well worth living that its triumph is absolute and unquestionable. It needs an earthquake to strike the mean, and convince these blind weavers, who were human for the nonce, that their shuttles "Weave living, not life sole and whole: as age-youth, So death completes living, shows life in its truth.” In other words, no human solution of life may conceit itself as final. At best, it is a crutch, with the uses and tacit assumption of one. With Bernard de Mandeville is the first 'parleying.' Browning, with his love of paradox and belief in the inextricableness of good from evil, naturally turns his attention to the half forgotten fabulist of The Grumbling Hive (1705). Yet the cynical, materialistic doctor, whose views coincide with all that Browning's philosophy disavows, is a curious supporter of a piece of transcendentalism, though this felt discrepancy does not affect the purpose of Browning's poem. The real 'parleying' is not with Mandeville, but with another, one who was 'more of a dynamic than a didactic force,' and the invocation of Mandeville's argumentative aid does not necessarily involve any thing beyond the train of ideas which the alternative title of The Bees (viz. Private Vices Public Benefits), freely interpreted, suggests to Browning. 6 With Daniel Bartoli does not even take its text from the invoked Jesuit writer. It is a fancy-freak by contrast born of' his long-winded stories, which might be read, were they not so ruinously full of all manner of superstitions. "Saint me no saints!" Browning virtually says to the ingenious Bartoli, "I will draw you a woman who outsaints them." Then follows a story which in treatment resembles Browning's The Glove. With Christopher Smart contains deeper harmonies. Smart's Song to David is the hint on which Browning writes, and he deals with the relation between the one perfect product, the 'single speech' which some men achieve and the mediocre residue of their lifework. The illustration of the jewel-like chapel amid the commonplaceness of the huge house, by which Browning introduces his subject, is a never to-be-forgotten treasure of imaginative criticism. Section ix. is, as Browning acknowledges, an explanation of which Smart could never have thought. Its idea is that economy exists in poetic production, that the vitalising, Adamic work of naming, which is the poet's supreme gift to the world, is a gift conditional on the use to which the world puts it. Only so much as can, or will, be utilised does the wise poet disburse. His treasures are, like God's revelation, sparingly given, and only on the understanding that they prick men on to advance. With George Bubb Dodington is a caustic mockreproof to a knavish fool, in this case the most crawling politician of Walpole's time. The Sludgelike course ironically recommended to him, which he was not artful enough to take, resembles that already outlined in the third stage of the Greek in Pietro of Abano. 'Inscrutableness is statecraft's highest card, and it takes more than ordinary guile to rule the masses who are already versed in all the commoner strategies of selfishness.' With Francis Furini primarily upholds the right of high Art to depict the nude. Baldinucci (of Privilege of Burial memory!), in his biography of the painter-priest, Furini, tells the well-known story of how, on his death-bed, the artist sought to destroy his pictures of undraped womanhood. "Nay, that, Furini, never I at least Mean to believe !" begins Browning, whose faculty for scorn and indigna tion is more directly shown here than in any other poem. His plea for the nude in Art is one with his reverence for God's best handiwork. An artist, he goes on to say, who would express spirit truthfully can only do so by painting flesh truthfully, since the whole body expresses the soul, which, bodiless, would be inexpressive. The more philosophical parts of the poem are linked to the rest by the relation between the study of the human form and the basis of 'Furini's' philosophy, selfconsciousness. The shade of the 'painter-theologian' asserts that this self-consciousness, or this fact of soul, is approached and known by studying the revealer and medium of soul, body. The design. and beneficence of which he becomes more deeply aware the closer he studies lead him on to recognise the 'out'-soul, God. Thus is life turned cosmos by 'Furini,' who dares the evolutionists to prove it on their showing any thing but chaos. The poem ends. with a lovely passage which is not exactly comparable with any other in Browning. It is as quiet and simple as it is great. With Gerard de Lairesse, the grandest and most significant of the 'parleyings,' addresses itself to the Dutch painter and writer on Art who in his blind age went about fancying Holland peopled with gods and goddesses. Browning challenges fantasy to match fact, and then enters the lists in the cause of reality against de Lairesse, who may reasonably be considered a champion of dreams. Browning, who |