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in those seemingly careless and too rugged lines of his. (Quotation from S. Praxed's Church.) I know no other piece of modern English, prose or poetry, in which there is so much told, as in these lines, of the Renaissance spirit, — its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin. It is nearly all that I said of the central Renaissance in thirty pages of the 'Stones of Venice' put into as many lines, Browning's being also the antecedent work." ('M. P.' iii. 377-379.) This subject, which is too technical to be more than just touched now, is however of vital importance, as lying at the root of our whole estimate of Browning. When we consider that he is ever making incandescent, visible, and illuminating, as by powerful electric current, the dark line of conscience running through all the workings of genius, and asserting painting, music, and poetry to be but three allied forms of one spirit, the Art of Expression or Intimation from soul to soul:

("Art was given for that:

God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out." Fra Lippi.)

how far are we authorized in applying the moral philosopher's test to his own art? Are we to consider all his poems finished works of art, each in proportion to its ideal? Certainly not by the test of smoothness, or finish as many would call it. For there is an art-canon in that capital

verse,

"Grand rough old Martin Luther

Bloomed fables, flowers on furze:
The better the uncouther:
Do roses stick like burrs ?"

The poems already named, Ben Ezra, Abt Vogler, Childe Roland, Paracelsus, Caliban, Holy Cross Day, The Heretic's Tragedy, no one could deny to be carefully-wrought works of art. There is further quite a revelation, especially for the "pickers up of learning's crumbs," in the numerous alterations, which must needs suggest carefulness of reconsideration, and elaboration, in some poems; in the niceness which could change lepidoptera to coleoptera in Easter Day, 6; and especially in that industrious collection of changes made by the devotedness of Mr. Furnivall and others from Sordello. But if, on this theory, which he himself has gauged in the Dedication of Sordello, we are to consider all the later works equally works of art, each according to its kind, free of mere defiance of stupid criticism, free of entanglement in the webs of his own extraordinary facilities: then, it may be, we have even yet much to learn, as I have already hinted, about the elasticity, comprehensiveness, possible development and even generosity, to be allowed to the word Poetry, adorning as it does the brows of gods and men, the

heads of chirping cicale and many drowsy insects secular and religious. I would presume to deprecate as untrue rather than ungenerous Mr. W. Bagehot's comparisons of grotesque with pure art and ornate. Holy Cross Day is chosen, with Caliban, to illustrate "not the success of grotesque art but the nature of it." Under which of the three epithets are we to range criticism which concludes an estimate of Browning with three-fourths of the Pied Piper as “the best and most satisfactory instance" Caliban is selected, to be called "not a normal type but an abnormal specimen." I wish this were true. Why, Shakespeare's Caliban is a higher type of humanity, as possible to rise, than Trinculo who has sunk into low habits as vile as the bog. I fear there are whole tribes of Calibans, not only in still-vext Bermoothes. There is a Caliban in each of us. Browning could not have painted that picture without the touch of Caliban which makes the whole world kin. Ask Mr. Charles Darwin about this!

3. Christianity. I must claim for Browning the distinction of being pre-eminently the greatest Christian poet we have ever had. Not in a narrow dogmatic sense, but as the teacher who is as thrilledthrough with all Christian sympathies as with artistic or musical. A man whose very genius is to identify himself, for the nonce, with each human soul he enters, and makes to speak to us, must necessarily find his profoundest, fullest harmony in souls alive with Christian faith and experience, questions and conflicts. I hold very light that solicitude to know and tabulate what his own system of truth is. I cannot sympathize with the intrusive deduction as to what Browning himself is. "The longer I live," says Jean Paul, "the more I find I have to determine to unlearn systems." "Je länger ich lebe, desto mehr yerlern' ich das Gelernte, nämlich die Systeme." (December, 1820. 'Wahrheit aus J. P.'s Leben,' ii. 140.) He could not adopt a character, and would not select it, unless he could become one with it by inward affinity. How can you get at Shakespeare who is as truly Falstaff as he is King Lear; Iago as much as Othello? He is humanity. So is Browning religion: with all forms of art, philosophy, and experience as her ministers. It would be astounding to observe how utterly ignored he is in this his deepest innermost being (as far as it is revealed to us as his very self) were it not that we are fully, however painfully, aware, of the petty antipathies, the poor miserable sufficiency of intelligence, and the feeble reiterations of truisms or sentimentalities, that myriads of sincere Christian people allow in their favourite religious literature. Well may M. Arnold say that poetry is a monument of a nation's strength, religious poetry of a nation's weakness. What do the childlike worshippers of Keble, Cowper, Dr. Watts, know of Browning, or

even of Blake? The Church never did know its most glorious sons, since it first stoned the prophets, till now that it extols the vapid, thin, milkand-water runlets called religious poetry. How much might be burnt with impunity to make a light to read Christmas Eve and Easter Day by Browning himself, by-the-bye, speaks in that. The incomparable sermon on the charity that dare not condemn any school of religious thought, lest it lose eternal hold on the salvation of the Vest; the preference, worthy of the firmest believer in Christian doctrine, for Zion Chapel or superstitious Rome over the negative vacuum of the learned skeptic, and the splendid consummation of E. Day so closely resembling the well-known crisis in Faust: these are the grandest special tributes poet ever brought to Christianity.

In this spiritual relation, and also for another reason, I may observe here, we might arrange an impressive little selection of descriptive pieces; descriptive of objects in nature. First and foremost of these would be the sublime description of the lunar rainbow (Ch. Eve, 6 and 7), although the actual detail has been called in question of "the seven proper colours chorded." I could hardly believe that so infallible an observer as he is would run so flagrant a risk, if this were indeed beyond the bounds of possibility. There, the transition from apparition to imagination,

"Whose foot shall I see emerge?"

is worthy of Moses or Ezekiel. I have never seen it noticed how this finally merges into what rather belongs to the aurora borealis. We must have seen the pictures, many of us have seen the reality, “of the sight, Of a sweepy garment vast and white, With a hem that I could recognize." This is most beautifully interwoven with the account of the woman who touched the hem of Christ's garment; and is retained as the emblem of saving correspondence with heaven, throughout the poem, and in several other places. It may be worth while to observe how similarly Goethe employs the same emblem for Faust, as the corporeal Helena vanishes and her clothes pass into clouds. (2 Part, Act iii. Sc. 4.) Then the astonishingly graphic description of the sunset sky with its black and ruddy ripples infinite over the whole dome of heaven, in Easter Day, 15. How often have we seen that sky since, as not even Ruskin had opened our eyes to observe!

It is Paracelsus as alter Luther, who is unfolded, aspiring, failing, attaining; not the charlatan that any one may despise. However utterly different from Tennyson's two sonnets on Lazarus in 'In Memoriam,' the strange experience of the Arab Physician is no less magnificent a monument in honour of John xi. The finely-introduced comparison of the blue-flowering borage, and the involuntary dominance of that BROWNING, 2.

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overwhelming thought which is like the moon heaving along the tide before the sun rises in the morning as light:

"The very God! think Abib: dost thou think?

So the All-great were the All-loving too !"

is of the very highest order both of meditation and of composition. Closely resembling that is the dazzled bewilderment of Cleon in the blaze of nobler truth than Athens ever taught, which he cannot reject and yet cannot receive. These are two admirably pourtrayed instances of the way in which Christian truth wrought in the minds of the intellectual, while it simply converted simpler minds to the faith. Which of us ever preached such a sermon on doing God's will, as The Boy and the Angel? It is having revealed to us the working of a human soul to the truest advantage of our own, if we go with John to the close of his century of a life of love, to that "thought extracted from a world of thinking" (Bp. Gambold), God is love; or listen to the persiflage of B. Blougram; or point the rebuke to the lust of gold with the Legend of Pornic; or arouse the listless indolence of dilettanti professing Christians by the unexpected moral of The Statue and the Bust. The most beautiful of all his lyrical romances is Saul. In a word, the religious poetry, as I may perhaps call it, as distinct from the art-poetry and the metaphysical-narrative, ought to startle Christian people into elevation and gratitude. It is a fact that cannot be slurred over, that our two great poets maintain their dominion over the affections of their countrymen, not by sheer power of thinking, mere granite depths and height of mind; but by the relation of their main convictions to Christian truth, to holy and eternal emotions, to the moral workings of the heart and conscience; whether in Paracelsus, or the Artist, or Fifine, or In Memoriam. Intellectual subtlety and pre-eminence, on Shelley's ground of denial and antipathy, could not attain, not to say retain, the hold they have upon us. It is the high priest of religious life whose beautiful garment is fringed with Bells and Pomegranates (Exod. xxviii. 33, 34). The emblem is first taken from Aaron's robe: although I don't see that noticed anywhere. Take away the religious tissue from Browning's tapestry, with its vast variety of figures, and almost every one would be a caput mortuum. But lest the designation Christian should seem too exclusive, we may say that his whole soul is orbed round the central thought of God, and man's relation to God. He is as suffused with the thought of God, as Spinoza was: or

"As saffron tinges flesh, blood, bones, and all."

Not only in Pope Theocrite, but in Instans Tyrannus, Andrea del Sarto as much as Saul, The Grammarian, and on to the arraignment of the soul before the last judgment-seat in Easter Day, the

relation to God is the consummated impression left. And this is the inmost secret of another element that has received more attention. Because God is ever revealing and hiding Himself, beaming out and withdrawing behind impenetrable cloud, therefore all mental workings are traced on towards eternity, never ending in to-day and to-day's thought. Time and eternity are not "lumped together." Only bunglers lug in eternity, and scatter the huge word about "like lumps of marl on a barren moor, encumbering what it is not in their power to fertilize." But they are interwoven, or so subtly interlinked, that the soul's working is a sort of golden chain traced from its anchoring in the hidden depths of the soul, onwards towards the throne of God. It is intimated as running into the infinite, though not in all cases tracked along the same distance thitherward. This is one chief secret

of Browning's being the poet not only of religious, but of thoughtful, persons; and of the intense sympathy we have with him; and of his being essentially an exponent of the best movements of English mind in this age. Without that he could not be so. Shelley might have become so, had he lived as Browning suggests; but he did not. Still, it is by no means necessary to agree with Browning's over-specialized religious views. Certainly all here present cannot do so.

Finally among the objects which I anticipate as of real value to us who gratefully reverence Browning, because we feel so deeply indebted to the

"Poet whose thoughts enrich the blood of the world,"

and also to those whose mere ignorance of him without prejudice has left them hitherto strangers to his wealth, are such as these:

A separate treatment of special poems which need a key; being enigmatical, as Childe Roland; or

66 'a pomegranate full of many kernels,"

as Sordello; or requiring a pilot through the metaphysical high seas, as The Ring and the Book. Treatises on his humour: his attitude towards science: the poems of a class, as Music, Painting, Art: or the Love Poems, as Mr. Nettleship has already written. (Although, I can almost wish sometimes Love had never been specialized for poets, or cast her sun-suffused cloud around their clear minds; were it not for such glow as of that beautiful and touching invocation, Ring and Book, Part I.) And next, short introductions to such poems as hardly require a separate treatment, giving the "Argument" as it is called. And then a Lexicon of names, remote allusions, learned things fetched from somewhere in the universe where he has been, and other mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been. A devoted admirer of Jean Paul did that very

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