by Göttingen professors, upon the august fabric of the Church, with its creeds and dogmas, and formularies, and paraphernalia, this fortress will stand forever, and mankind will forever seek and find refuge in it. The poem entitled Cleon bears the intimation (there's nothing directly expressed thereupon), that Christianity is something distinct from, and beyond, whatever the highest civilization of the world, the civilization of Greece, attained to before Christ. Through him the world obtained a new truth-no conviction gained of an old one merely, made intense by a fresh appeal to the faded sense." Cleon, the poet, writes to Protos in his Tyranny (that is, in the Greek sense, Sovereignty). Cleon must be understood as representing the ripe, composite result, as an individual, of what constituted the glory of Greece-her poetry, sculpture, architecture, painting, and music, and also her philosophy. He acknowledges the gifts which the King has lavished upon him. By these gifts we are to understand the munificent national patronage accorded to the arts. "The master of thy galley still unlades gift after gift; they block my court at last and pile themselves along its portico royal with sunset, like a thought of thee." By the slave women that are among the gifts sent to Cleon, seems to be indicated the degradation of the spiritual by its subjection to earthly ideals, as were the ideals of Greek art. This is more particularly indicated by the one white she-slave, the lyric woman, whom further on in his letter, Cleon promises the King he will make narrate (in lyric song we must suppose) his fortunes, speak his great words, and describe his royal face. He continues, that in such an act of love,—the bestowal of princely gifts upon him whose song gives life its joy,-men shall remark the King's recognition of the use of life-that his spirit is equal to more than merely to help on life in straight ways, broad enough for vulgar souls, by ruling and the rest. He ascribes to the King, in the building of his tower (and by this must be understood the building up of his own selfhood), a higher motive than work for mere work's sake,-that higher motive being, the luring hope of some eventual rest atop of it (the tower), whence, all the tumult of the building hushed, the first of men may look out to the east.1 1 Tennyson uses a similar figure in The Two Voices. The speaker, who is meditating whether "to be or not to be," says: "Were this not well, to bide mine hour, The ruined tower is his own dilapidated self-hood, whence he takes his outlook upon the world. Pompilia, and the Pope, are each curious and subtle and varied exponents of the workings, without the guidance of instinct at the heart V (Sordello, p. 179), of the prepossessed, prejudiced intellect, and of the sources of its swerving into error. What is said of the "feel after the vanished truth" in the monologue entitled Half Rome-the speaker being a jealous husband-will serve to characterize, in a general way," the feel after truth" exhibited in the other monologues: "honest enough, as the way is all the same, harbouring in the centre of its sense a hidden germ of failure, shy but sure, should neutralize that honesty and leave that feel for truth at fault, as the way is too. Some prepossession such as starts amiss, by but a hair's-breadth at the shoulder-blade, the arm o' the feeler, dip he ne'er so brave; and so leads waveringly, lets fall wide o' the mark his finger meant to find, and fix truth at the bottom, that deceptive speck." The poet could hardly have employed a more effective metaphor in which to embody the idea of mental swerving. The several monologues all going over the same ground, are artistically justified in their exhibiting, each of them, a quite distinct form of this swerving. For the ultimate purpose of the poet, it needed to be strongly emphasized. The student of the poem is amazed, long before he gets over all these monologues, at the Protean capabilities of the poet's own intellect. takes all conceivable attitudes toward the case, and each seems to be a perfectly easy one. These monologues all lead up to the great moral of the poem, which is explicitly set forth at the end, namely, "that our human speech is naught, our human testimony false, our fame and human estimation, words and wind. Why take the artistic way to prove so much? Because, it is the glory and good of Art, that Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth, to mouths like mine, at least. How look a brother in the face and say, Thy right is wrong, eyes hast thou yet art blind, thine ears are stuffed and stopped, despite their length: and, oh, the foolishness thou countest faith! Say this as silvery as tongue can troll-the anger of the man may be endured, the shrug, the disappointed eyes of him are not so bad to bear-but here's the plague, that all this trouble comes of telling truth, which truth, by when it reaches him, looks false, seems to be just the thing it would supplant, nor recognizable by whom it left while falsehood would have done the work of truth. But Art, -wherein man nowise speaks to men, only to mankind,-Art may tell a truth obliquely, do the thing shall breed the thought," that is, bring what is implicit within the soul, into the right attitude to become explicit -bring about a silent adjustment through sympathy induced by the concrete; in other words, prepare the way for the perception of the ་ truth" do the thing shall breed the thought, nor wrong the thought missing the mediate word;" meaning, that Art, so to speak, is the word made flesh,—is the truth, and, as Art, has nothing directly to do with the explicit. "So may you paint your picture, twice show truth, beyond mere imagery on the wall,—so, note by note, bring music from your mind, deeper than ever the Andante dived,—so write a book shall mean beyond the facts, suffice the eye and save the soul beside." And what is the inference the poet would have us draw from this passage? It is, that the life and efficacy of Art depends on the personality of the artist, which "has informed, transpierced, thridded and so thrown fast the facts else free, as right through ring and ring runs the djereed and binds the loose, one bar without a break."1 And it is really this fusion of the artist's soul, which kindles, quickens, informs those who contemplate, respond to, reproduce sympathetically within themselves the greater spirit which attracts and absorbs their own. The work of Art is apocalyptic of the artist's own personality. It cannot be impersonal. As is the temper of his spirit, so is, must be, the temper of his Art product.2 Titus Andronicus could not have been written by Shakspere. Even if he had written it as a burlesque of such a play as Marlow's Jew of Malta, he could not have avoided some revelation of that sense of moral proportion which is omnipresent in his Plays. But there's no Shakspere in Titus Andronicus. Are we not certain of what manner of man Shakspere was from his Works (notwithstanding that critics are ever asserting their impersonality)-far more certain than if his biography had been written by one who knew him all his life, and sustained to him the most intimate relations? We know Shakspere, or, he can be known, if the requisite conditions are met, better, perhaps, than any other great author that ever lived-know, ir the deepest sense of the word, in a sense other than that in which we know Dr. Johnson, through Boswell's Biography. The moral proportion which is so signal a characteristic of his Plays could not have been imparted to them by the conscious intellect. It was shed from his /x spiritual constitution. By "speaking truth" in Art's way, Browning means, inducing a right attitude toward, a full and free sympathy with, the True, which is a far more important and effective way of speaking truth than delivering truth in re. A work of Art, worthy of the name, need not be true to fact, but must be true in its spiritual attitude, and being thus true, it will tend to induce a corresponding attitude in those who do fealty tỏ The Ring and the Book. 2 "And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem."-Milton's Apology for Smectymnuus. it It will have the influence, though in an inferior degree, it may be, of a magnetic personality. Personality is the ultimate source of spiritual quickening and adjustment. Literature and all forms of Art are but the intermediate agencies of personalities. The artist cannot be separated from his art. As is the artist so must be his art. The aura, so to speak, of a great work of Art, must come from the artist's own personality. The spiritual worth of Shakspere's Winter's Tale is not at all impaired by the fact that Bohemia is made a maritime country, that Whitsun pastorals and Christian burial, and numerous other features of Shakspere's own age, are introduced into pagan times, that Queen Hermione speaks of herself as a daughter of the Emperor of Russia, that her statue is represented as executed by Julio Romano, an Italian painter of the 16th century, that a puritan sings palms to hornpipes, and, to crown all, that messengers are sent to consult the oracle of Apollo, at Delphi, which is represented as an island! All this jumble, this gallimaufry, I say, does not impair the spiritual worth of the play. As an Art-product, it invites a rectified attitude toward the True and the Sweet. If we look at the letter of the trial scene in The Merchant of Venice, it borders on the absurd; but if we look at its spirit, we see the Shaksperian attitude of soul which makes for righteousness, for the righteousness which is inherent in the moral constitution of the universe. The inmost, secretest life of Shakspere's Plays came from the personality, the inmost, secretest life, of the man Shakspere. We might, with the most alert sagacity, note and tabulate and aggregate his myriad phenomenal merits as a dramatic writer, but we might still be very far from that something back of them all, or rather that immanent something, that mystery of personality, that microcosmos, that "inmost centre, where truth abides in fullness," as Browning makes Paracelsus characterize it, "constituting man's self, is what Is,” as he makes the dying John characterize it, in A Death in the Desert, that "innermost of the inmost, most interior of the interne," as Mrs. Browning characterizes it, "the hidden Soul," as Dallas characterizes it, which is projected into, and constitutes the soul of, the Plays, and which is reached through an unconscious and mystic sympathy on the part of him who habitually communes with and does fealty to them. That personality, that living force, coöperated spontaneously and unconsciously with the conscious powers, in the creative process; and when we enter into a sympathetic communion with the concrete result of that creative process, our own mysterious personalities, being essentially identical with, though less quickened than, Shakspere's, respond, though it may be but feebly, to his. This response is the highest result of the study of Shakspere's works. The dramas are really means to this end. It is a significant fact that Shaksperian critics and editors, for nearly two centuries, have been a genus irritabile, to which genus Shakspere himself certainly did not belong. The explanation may partly be, that they have been too much occupied with the letter, and have fretted their nerves in angry dispute about readings and interpretations; as theologians have done in their study of the sacred records, instead of endeavouring to reach, through the letter, the personality of which the letter is but a manifestation more or less imperfect. To know a personality is, of course, a spiritual knowledge-the result of sympathy, that is, spiritual responsiveness. Intellectually it is but X little more important to know one rather than another personality. The highest worth of all great works of genius is due to the fact that they are apocalyptic of great personalities. Art says, as the Divine Person said, whose personality and the personalities fashioned after it, have transformed and moulded the ages, "Follow me!" Deep was the meaning wrapt up in this command: it was, Do as I do, live as I live, not from an intellectual perception of the principles involved in my life, but through a full sympathy, through the awakening, vitalizing, actuating power of the incarnate Word. Art also says, as did the voice from the wilderness, inadequately translated, "Repent ye, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." (Μετανοεῖτε ἤγγικε γὰρ ἡ Βασιλεία τῶν οὐρανῶν.) Rather, be transformed, or, as De Quincey puts it, "Wheel into a new centre your spiritual system; geocentric has that system been up to this hourthat is, having earth and the earthly for its starting-point; henceforward make it heliocentric (that is, with the sun, or the heavenly, for its principle of motion)." The poetry of Browning everywhere says this, and says it more emphatically than that of any other poet in our literature. It says everywhere, that not through knowledge, not through a sharpened intellect, but through repentance, in the deeper sense to which I have just alluded, through conversion, through wheeling into a new centre its spiritual system, the soul attains to saving truth. Salvation with him means that revelation of the soul to itself, that awakening, quickening, actuating, attitude-adjusting, of the soul, which sets it gravitating toward the Divine. Browning's idea of Conversion is, perhaps, most distinctly expressed in a passage in the Monologue of the Canon Caponsacchi, in The Ring and the Book, wherein he sets forth the circumstances under which his |