There can be little doubt that he exercises enormous power over those who know him well, and to-night some of the causes of this power will be considered. But first it must be admitted that the nature of Mr. Browning's poetry is not such as to attract at first sight. It takes some time to grow accustomed to his queer choice of subjects, his rugged verse, his strange metaphors, his involved elliptical language. His grammatical peculiarities sorely puzzle the uninitiated, and add greatly to the difficulties which pervade the poems. Though these difficulties have been much overrated, there remains a standing, perhaps justifiable, complaint against him of great and unnecessary obscurity.

All sorts of reasons are given for his unintelligibility, but the most probable seems to be that he is unable to gauge the apprehending power of the ordinary mind. He does not puzzle us wilfully, but he has not learnt what people can and what they cannot be expected to understand, though he tells us that the poet should be so acquainted and in sympathy with the narrow comprehension of the average mind "as to be careful to supply it with no other materials than it can combine into an intelligible whole." Why then has he not measured our stupidity and respected it? Simply because he does not know how. For example, he explains that by the title of Bells and Pomegranates he had meant to convey "an endeavour towards something like an alternation, or mixture of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought." Then he adds, "I confess that, letting authority alone, I supposed the bare words, in such juxtaposition, would sufficiently convey the desired meaning." Does not this passage give an alarming idea of Mr. Browning's estimate of the capabilities of the average human mind?

As it is unlikely that he will make any fresh discoveries on this head, the only thing that remains is to try to train our intelligences to his style, a task which is well worth the arduous struggle it costs, and is, after a time, crowned with a rich reward.

Among Mr. Browning's merits, the one which particularly draws people to him is his strong, hopeful philosophy of life. It has been said that "he brings out of his individuality something which he does not receive from the age, and which he offers it as a gift." This "something" is the constructiveness of his teaching, as opposed to the destructiveness of the school of thought which prevails among people of culture, and to the general tendencies of an agnostic age. Mr. Browning, in his Essay on Shelley, says, "The best way of removing abuses is to stand fast by truth; truth is one, as they are manifold, and innumerable negative effects are produced by the upholding of one positive principle." Mr. Browning emphasizes our hopes rather than our fears, our certainties rather than our doubts, our ultimate triumph rather than our present failure. He considers light-heartedness and a power of making the best of things a test of intellectual strength.

He tells us in the Two Poets of Croisic that, in estimating the relative merits of two poets, we may ask as a final test

"Which one led a happy life?

If one did, over his antagonist

That yelled, or shrieked, or sobbed, or wept, or wailed,

Or simply had the dumps,-dispute who list,

I count him victor."

The basis of his invigorating tenets is the intense realization of a living God and a future life, given him by his "poet's faculty of seeing more clearly, widely, and deeply than the common eye."

To him failure is not irretrievable; it will one day be swallowed up in victory; nor is this life the only reason for work, progress, and development. Failure and imperfection are not only no blot on man, not only temporary and retrievable, they are the very signs of man's supremacy in creation. God being perfect, failure cannot be thought of in connection with Him; the beasts, being perfect in their

limited sphere, neither strive nor fail; but man, occupying a midway position, is capable of progress, and hence liable to failure.

True to his theory that all things work together for good, and that evil is but the grit that polishes the stone, Mr. Browning says of another of the shadows that fall across man's earthly path

"Why comes temptation but for man to meet

And master, and make crouch beneath his foot,
And so be pedestalled in triumph?"

It is impossible in so short a space to show how Mr. Browning triumphs over the various other human troubles which have most frequently inspired the poetic wail; but an extract from the Flight of the Duchess will show how he regards that part of life which may be either a "stumbling-block or a stepping-stone."

"So at the last shall come old age,

Decrepit as befits that stage;

How else wouldst thou retire apart

With the hoarded memories of thy heart,

And gather all to the very least

Of the fragments of life's earlier feast

Let fall through eagerness to find

The crowning dainties yet behind?
Ponder on the entire past

Laid together thus at last-
And the outline of the whole,-

Grandly fronts for once thy soul.

And then, as 'mid the dark, a gleam
Of yet another morning breaks,
And, like the hand which ends a dream,
Death, with the might of his sunbeam,
Touches the flesh, and the soul awakes,
Then "

One can hardly come to the close of this magnificent passage without feeling that the unseen world is about to be revealed, and experiencing a chill of disappointment when it stops short without telling the untellable.

This strong faith in the ultimate triumph of good and happiness might have made a smaller man unsympathetic; but Mr. Browning knows that, in spite of the glories which shall one day be revealed, sorrow and pain and sin are awful realities, and his heart goes out in tender sympathy with the keen, soul-piercing miseries with which the world abounds. The meanest created beings are to him full of interest and hidden capacity; he loves them one and all. The prominence which he gives to love is a beautiful part of his philosophy. He places it above knowledge, above power, or rather he knows it is the truest knowledge, the highest power.

This love of mankind accounts for the absence of bitterness or cynicism in Mr. Browning's writings. He can blame and rebuke, but cannot sneer. It is this that has enabled him to attain unparalleled excellence in the delineation of human character. Men will not show themselves to the cynic, to the railer.

The subordination of action to psychological analysis makes Mr. Browning's characters stand out clear and distinct as men whose dispositions prompt them not to do, but to be, this or that. How intensely individualized are the actors in The Ring and the Book, for example, and how deep is the sympathetic insight with which they are drawn! He never gives us either demons or angels, but men and women, good or bad according as they have allowed the demonic or angelic elements, which meet in all mankind, to gain the upper hand.

Probably no other poet, not wholly dramatic, has written so exclusively of animate as apart from inanimate nature. There are here and there grand

descriptions of some aspect of the sky or earth, but inanimate nature is only interesting to him as the sphere of being in which his human creations move. He finds his subjects in the world of men, and his method of describing them is as un-Wordsworthian as his method of dealing with nature. He paints man not as Wordsworth did, with tender, loving sympathy from without, but with the spontaneous self-revealment of personal identity; transferring himself into his being, thinking with his head, feeling with his heart, speaking with his lips, so that the word "I" recurs constantly in the pages of this least egotistical of poets. We should be thankful if he would become a little more egotistical, and at last return to his own identity, and tell us what he thinks of the great subjects of which he treats. Any one who had not read the first half of the Pacchiarotto volume, which, rightly or wrongly, is generally assumed to refer to his own relations to the public, would naturally suppose that we could easily piece together his opinions from his works; but in that book he explicitly denies our right to do so, and maintains that his works do not contain even the most elementary disclosures of himself.

"Here's my work; does work discover

What was rest from work-my life?
Did I live man's hater, lover?

Leave the world at peace or strife?

Call Earth ugliness or beauty?

See things here in large or small?

Use to pay its Lord my duty?

Use to own a Lord at all?

Blank of such a record truly."—At the Mermaid.

This is not a little puzzling. One would have said that these were just the things which spoke from every word of his writing. Are we to believe that he holds the views he has spent his life in advocating, or that his finest passages on man's destiny, duty, and privileges are no more than expressions of a high and pure mood of the creative mind dramatically stimulated? Surely not. Let us hold fast to the faith that, like many other disguises, his is not so impenetrable as he fancies, and let us trust him against himself, as he trusted Shelley, and believe that he is "the splendid spirit of his own best poetry." If he really means us to take him at his word, and accept as dramatic situations only passages referring to the nature of God's dealings with man, or man's relations to God, to his fellow, to his earthly state, his work and aspirations, he must wish to be considered as a great dramatist and thinker only, not as a teacher; for surely no one can be called a teacher who does not intellectually try to impart views that are his own. But the whole of his work contradicts this supposition. We cannot afford to give him up as a teacher in these days when signs are not wanting that England is ripe for another kind of guidance than that which she has welcomed for many a long year. Mr. Browning tells us that none can learn except the already taught; and no doubt this was the reason that while the morbid, unsatisfied, introspective, allquestioning spirit which enfeebled the middle decades of this century was at its height, England was little disposed to appreciate his writings. Mr. Browning attained fifty years ago to the ideas which are only just beginning to move the masses. Nations, like individuals, have their phases, and there is good cause to nope that our recent tendencies to mourn over all we have not is yielding to the healthier disposition to make the very utmost of what we have, and that "Despondency corrected" will be the motto of the future. We are now to a certain extent already taught, and are prepared for more teaching.

The best wish we can offer to the remaining years of the 19th century is, that future historians may be able to say that whereas Clough, Matthew Arnold, and Carlyle represented the philosophical and religious thought of its central period, Browning became the representative man of its close.

HEADS OF MR. JAMES THOMSON'S PAPER: "NOTES ON THE GENIUS OF ROBERT BROWNING.”

Note-I. The Number and Variety of Browning's Works, and the Amount and Variety of his knowledge.

II. The charge of Obscurity brought against Browning.

III. The charges of Harshness and of Affectation, the latter amounting only to a charge of Naturalness.

IV. The Activity and Rapidity of Browning's Intellect.

V. His Manliness.

VI. His Vitality.

VII. His Christianity.

MR. FURNIVALL said that he did not agree with Mr. Thomson as to Browning's Christianity. Mr. F. had once considered Browning a Christian poet, but had now come to the conclusion that he was a monotheist, with the deepest reverence for all that is noble and beautiful in Christianity.

He held that all the passages from Karshish, Saul, &c., usually cited to prove Browning a doctrinal Christian, were so plainly dramatic, so clearly belongd to the person for whom the poet was speaking, that he wonderd at their being brought forward to prove the poet's personal belief. The poem which decided the question was La Saisiaz, where Browning faced the difficulty and spoke for himself. In that there was no Christ, only God; no Trinity, but one God. A doctrinal Christian couldn't have written of his own faith, in such a poem, without putting his Binitarian or Trinitarian doctrine into it. In the earlier Shelley Essay of 1851-2, Browning no doubt spoke for himself too. In that he calld Christ a 'Divine Being', and said Shelley would ultimately become a Christian; but these expressions did not necessitate Christ's Godship, or Shelley's acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity. Moreover, on a subject like this, on which the thought of educated men had moved forward during the last 30 years, a man was to be judgd by his last utterances, not his first. On all points but this of Br.'s Christianity, Mr. F. agreed with Mr. Thomson's paper, which was as admirably exprest as conceivd, and had never been exceld-if it had ever been equald-by any other criticism on those of Browning's qualities with which it dealt.

THE CHAIRMAN said that both writers had commented on Browning's roughness. He likes better to "blow through brass than to breathe through silver." This is not affectation in him, but a part of his individuality. A writer is sometimes set down as affected because he is not conventional. A writer can only be true to himself when he writes in the only manner which is natural to him, whether that manner is or is not pleasing to conventional critics.

Speaking of Browning's wide knowledge, the Chairman quoted Mr. Ruskin's opinion that in twenty lines of The Bishop orders his Tomb at St. Praxed's Church there is more of the spirit of the Renaissance than in all that he himself has written.

It was in allusion to Mr. Browning's Bells and Pomegranates that Mrs. Browning, then Miss Barrett, had said,

"Or from Browning some 'Pomegranate,' which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity."

Is there not in the title an allusion to the high priest's robe?'

Every poet is not only a singer, but a rates. Thoughts beyond themselves are given to the inspired bards. Their words often mean more than they themselves can fully grasp.

Miss Lewis had commented on Browning's light-heartedness. It was capable of being illustrated from many passages of his writings, and not least from the beautiful opening passages in the grand poem of Saul. His sense of the beauty of human life, even taken by itself, is shown in Transcendentalism.

1 Surely see Browning's quotation from Vasari (?) in his Forewords to the last of the Bells and Pomegranates, 1845, in my Bibliography, p. 51.-F.

Again, in many of his poems we see the high faith that apparent failure may mean real success. This comes out likewise in A Grammarian's Funeral.

"This low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it;

Both the writers of the Papers had spoken of the poet's essential faith in the power and meaning of human nature. In Fra Lippo Lippi he speaks, in a passage of extreme splendour, of the great painter's catholicity of choice in his subjects, and how he painted all,

"From good old gossips coming to confess
Their cribs of barrel-droppings, candle-ends-
To the breathless fellow at the altar-foot,
Fresh from his murder, safe and sitting there
With the little children round him in a row
Of admiration, half for his beard and half
For that white anger of his victim's son,
Shaking a fist at him with one fierce arm,

Signing himself with the other because of Christ
(Whose sad face on the cross sees only this
After the passion of a thousand years)."

All are equally subjects for the pencil, and so all types of human life are equally the subject for the true poet's thoughts.

Much might be said on the remarkable poem the Ring and the Book. The Chairman would just comment on a single word of it, wherein there was the most wonderful compression of imagination. If imagination be what Coleridge called it, the esemplastic power, or power of fusing things into one, in that one word we have this fusing, for into it is compressed the heart and meaning of the whole poem. Dr. Farrar did not know whether this had been already noticed.' Guido, as he hears the officers approach, shrieks out ". . . . Christ, Maria, God, Pompilia, will you let them murder me?" He places in juxtaposition with the holiest names the name of his pure wife, and this flash of imagination fuses the poem into one great unity.

As to Mr. Browning's own beliefs and feelings, we have the witness of the poems in the Pacchiarotto volume that he does not consider we have any right to demand a setting forth of them. We have no right to inquire into any doctrinal or didactic peculiarities of his, for he does not wear his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at. The Chairman did not consider it fair to enter into the question as to what may be the poet's exact dogmatic belief. But if either part must be taken, he would take his poems of Saul and A Death in the Desert, and would be content to abide by these and by the words which close the Epistle of Karshish

"The very God,-think, Abib; dost thou think!

So the All-great were the All-loving too.