For the explanation which he gives in Fifine at the Fair of his interest in the body, and the beauty of it is, that

'. . . . bodies show me minds,

And through the outward sign the inward grace allures.'

So the disregard of the form of his poems, in his eager haste to express the matter, is only a particular case of the general characteristic of Mr. Browning's mind, which leads him

'To bring the invisible full into play!

Let the visible go to the dogs-what matters ?'

And though we may regret that he has carried his principle so far as greatly to injure the poetical value of his writingsfor, after all, art is the expression of thought or emotion by means of form, which cannot therefore with impunity be neglected yet at the present time, when so much stress is laid on the mere mechanism of verse, and meaning is suffered to fall into the background, it is perhaps good that one of our greatest living poets should utter in every way a protest against the prevailing fashion, and stand forward as an obvious instance of the supremacy of matter over form.

Mere form by itself is capable of being brought to perfection by the artist, while the inner truth of things is an ideal to be striven after which can never be reached, and our apprehension of it, and our endeavours to present it as it is must always remain imperfect. So Mr. Browning's preference of matter to form is the result of what is perhaps the most fundamental characteristic of his mind, the belief that imperfection is a mark of progress, that man is superior to the beasts just because he is not made with all his powers complete for their work in his life, but must struggle onwards by means of failure in this world, to the perfection which can only be attained in the next. The thought, in various forms, recurs in almost every poem of any importance; and though it is only a very clear apprehension of the Christian truth, that this life is a time of probation, and that for man perfection would mean failure, for it would mean standing still, while the law of his life is progress, yet this truth is set in so many different lights, it is shown underlying so many of the problems of life, so essential to the right understanding of character and the due estimate of action, that we may consider it as the special lesson which it is given to Mr. Browning to teach us. Thus he applies it to art, and it forms the ground of the contrast already alluded to between the Greek and Italian art in 'Old Pictures at Florence :'

'Growth came when, looking your last on them all,
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day
And cried with a start-What if we so small
Be greater and grander the while than they!
Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature ?
In both, of such lower types are we
Precisely because of our wider nature ;
For time, theirs-ours, for eternity.

'To-day's brief passion limits their range;

It seethes with the morrow for us and more.

They are perfect-how else? they shall never change :
We are faulty-why not? we have time in store.

The Artificer's hand is not arrested

With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished:
They stand for our copy, and, once invested

With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.'

Therefore the outward beauty of art declined, for with this idea of growth in imperfection it became the object of the early painters to leave the ideal, to turn to man as he is, and show the soul, the new hopes' and 'new fears' shining 'through the flesh they fray.' The perfection of Greek art is a sign of its limitation :

6

'Shall Man, such step within his endeavour,

Man's face, have no more play and action
Than joy which is crystallized for ever,
Or grief, an eternal petrifaction?'

Again, he applies it to scholarship in the 'Grammarian's Funeral,' which, in spite of the painful grotesqueness of the form, is a grand declaration of the poet's belief in the dignity of a lofty ideal, in the vain effort to reach which life is spent :

before living he'd learn how to live

No end to learning :

Earn the means first-God surely will contrive

Use for our learning.

Others mistrust and say,

"But time escapes:

"Live now or never!"

He said, "What's time? Leave Now for dogs and apes,
Man has Forever."

'That low man seeks a little thing to do,
Sees it and does it :

This high man, with a great thing to pursue,
Dies ere he knows it.

That, has the world here-should he need the next,
Let the world mind him!

This, throws himself on God, and unperplexed,
Seeking shall find Him.'

This idea of man's superiority because of his imperfection is of course primarily a religious idea, but it is a proof of the manner in which Mr. Browning's religious convictions penetrate and inform his whole intellectual and emotional nature, that, whatever the subject, this doctrine seems to be the explanation of the problem or the climax of the argument. As we have seen it employed to express the proper aim of art and learning, so it enters into his view of love, supplementing its imperfections, explaining its difficulties, and raising it from an earthly and merely sensuous passion to a work worthy of man, who has Forever.' 'Dîs aliter visum,' turns mainly upon the application of this doctrine to love. The woman whom when young the elderly scholar had the opportunity of loving and marrying, rebukes him passionately ten years later for having missed it only because he was old, and she was far below him in education and intellect :

'You loved, with body worn and weak:
I loved, with faculties to seek :

Were both loves worthless since ill-clad ?

'Let the mere star-fish in his vault

Crawl in a wash of weed, indeed,
Rose-jacynth to the finger-tips:

He, whole in body and soul, outstrips

Man, found with either in default.

'But what's whole, can increase no more,

Is dwarfed and dies, since here's its sphere.'

The predominance of this idea in Mr. Browning is perhaps the explanation in part of the line which his poetical genius has taken in its development. As he himself expresses it:

'You saw me gather men and women,

Live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,
Enter each and all, and use their service,

Speak from every mouth-the speech, a poem.'

The greater number of his poems, and probably the most characteristic and the finest, are analyses of character either

His

in the form of dialogue or monologue by the characters themselves, or, more rarely, in the poet's own person. genius is essentially dramatic in one sense, namely, that he can leave his own personality to put himself into the position, or even into the very heart and soul of another person, ‘live or dead or fashioned by my fancy,' and in that position and with that other mind allow his intellect and his imagination to work as vigorously as if he was speaking his own sentiments in his own person. In this faculty he is, we venture to say, second to no poet, unless it be Shakspeare. Many can throw themselves into another character so as to represent it acting, talking, thinking with consistency and truth; and this is the power of the imagination. But Mr. Browning exerts rather what we may call the imaginative intellect; not only does he endow his characters with life and truth, but in their persons he carries on the subtlest trains of reasoning, starting however only from the premises which the person in question would naturally assume, and therefore not necessarily true, or in accordance with the poet's own belief, but only consistent t; and his imagination also seems to seize hold on their deepest emotions and give words to them with a power which, we repeat, is more nearly equal to Shakspeare's similar power than is that of any other poet. In The Last Ride Together,' for instance, the line

'Who knows but the world may end to-night?'

may for depth and vividness of imaginative power be compared with Macduff's 'He has no children,' which is Mr. Ruskin's highest instance of this kind of imagination. Again, for the more intellectual working of Mr. Browning's imagination, take the passage in Bishop Blougram's Apology,' in which he suddenly develops a theory of the purpose of evil, ingenious and impressive in itself, and at the same time perfectly consistent with the imaginary character of the bishop'Some think, Creation's made to show him forth : I say it's meant to hide him all it can, And that's what all this blessed evil's for.'

But in what is more strictly dramatic power, the power of representing action, Mr. Browning is notably deficient. The whole interest of his dramas or dramatic monologues lies in the varying states of mind of the characters represented. The action is nothing, and the personages are interesting to the poet, not because of what they do, but of what they think and feel. What he delights to analyse and to describe are the

subtle changes of feeling, the hidden trains of thought that are overlooked by most observers, but nevertheless give to action its real value; it is therefore immaterial to him whether the resulting action fails or succeeds; indeed, failure is often an indication of a loftier ideal than any which success has aimed at.

For thence-a paradox

Which comforts while it mocks,

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail;

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me ;

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

'Not on the vulgar mass

Called "work" must sentence pass,

Things done, that took the eye and had the price :

O'er which, from level stand,

The low world laid its hand,

Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice:

'But all the world's coarse thumb

And finger failed to plumb,

So passed in making up the main account;

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure

That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount :

'Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act,

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All, I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This, I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.'

This passage explains better than any other the poet's eagerness to analyse character, and his interest in the failures rather than the successes of his personages, real or imaginary, and the same explanation is given in a different way in Fifine at the Fair. In order to discover the real tendency of the faults and failures in human lives we must 'only get close enough.'

'And, consequent upon the learning how from strife

Grew peace-from evil, good-came knowledge that, to get
Acquaintance with the way o' the world, we must nor fret
Nor fume, on altitudes of self-sufficiency,

But bid a frank farewell to what-we think-should be,
And, with as good a grace, welcome what is—we find.'