"He ignores the function of poetry, which is to see beauty, and to create it: for he places utility above grace, truth above all beauty. He drags human squalor on to the scene because he recognizes its existence. The world of the poet's fancy, that world into which he was born, does not exist for him. He spoils his art as well as his life, carving back to bull what another had carved into a sphinx."

"How are such proceedings to be dealt with? They appeal to the mob. The mob is not to be swayed by polished arguments or incidental hints. We don't scare sparrows with a Zeus' head, though the eagle may recognize it as his lord's. A big Priapus is the figure required."

"And this," so Aristophanes resumes his defence, "comedy supplies. Comedy is the fit instrument of popular conviction: and the wilder, the more effective: since it is the worship of life, of the originative power of nature; and since that power has lawlessness for its apparent law. Even Euripides, with his shirkings and his superiority, has been obliged to pay tribute to the real. He could not shake it off all at once. He tacked a Satyric play to some five of his fifty trilogies: and if this was grim enough at first, he threw off the mask in Alkestis, showing how one could be indecent in a decent way."[44]

For the reasons above given, which he farther expands and illustrates, Aristophanes chooses the "meaner muse" for his exponent. "And who, after all, is the worse for it? Does he strangle the enemies of the truth? No. He simply doses them with comedy, i.e. with words. Those who offend in words he pays back in them, exaggerating a little, but only so as to emphasize what he means; just as love and hate use each other's terms, because those proper to themselves have grown unmeaning from constant use. And what is the ground of difference between Balaustion and himself? Slender enough, in all probability, as he could show her, if they were discussing the question for themselves alone. As it is, Euripides has attacked him in the sight of the mob. His defence is addressed to it: he uses the arguments it can understand. It does not follow that they convey a literal statement of his own views. Euripides is not the only man who is free from superstition. He too on occasion can show up the gods;" and he describes the manner in which he will do this in his next play. All that is serious in the Apology is given in the concluding passage. "Whomever else he is hard upon, he will level nothing worse than a harmless parody at Sophocles, for he has no grudge against him:—

'He founds no anti-school, upsets no faith, But, living, lets live,' (vol. xiii. p. 110.)

And all his, Aristophanes', teaching is this:—

'... accept the old, Contest the strange! acknowledge work that's done, Misdoubt men who have still their work to do!' (p. 111.)

He has summed up his case. Euripides must own himself beaten. If Balaustion will not admit the defeat, let her summon her rosy strength, and do her worst against his opponent."

Balaustion pauses for a moment before relating her answer to this challenge: and gives us to understand that, in thus relieving her memory, she is reproducing not only this special experience, but a great deal of what she habitually thinks and feels; thus silencing any sense of the improbable, which so lengthened an argument accurately remembered, might create in the reader's mind.

Her tone is at first deprecating. "It is not for her, a mere mouse, to argue on a footing of equality with a forest monarch like himself. It is not for her to criticize the means by which his genius may attain its ends. She does not forget that the poet-class is that essentially which labours in the cause of human good. She does not forget that she is a woman, who may recoil from methods which a man is justified in employing. Lastly, she is a foreigner, and as such may blame many things simply because she does not understand them. She may yet have to learn that the tree stands firm at root, though its boughs dip and dance before the wind. She may yet have to learn that those who witness his plays have been previously braced to receive the good and reject the evil in them, like the freshly-bathed hand which passes unhurt through flame. She may judge falsely from what she sees."

"But," she continues,[45] "let us imagine a remote future, and a far-away place—say the Cassiterides[46]—and men and women, lonely and ignorant—strangers in very deed—but with feelings similar to our own. Let us suppose that some work of Zeuxis or Pheidias has been transported to their shores, and that they are compelled to acknowledge its excellence from its own point of view—its colouring true to nature, though not to their own type—its unveiled forms decorous, though not conforming to their own standard of decorum. Might they not still, and justly, tax it on its own ground with some flaw or incongruity, which proved the artist to have been human? And may not a stranger, judging you in the same way, recognize in you one part of peccant humanity, poet 'three parts divine' though you be?"

"You declare comedy to be a prescriptive rite, coeval in its birth with liberty. But the great days of Greek national life had been reached when comedy began. You declare also that you have refined on the early practice, and imported poetry into it. Comedy is therefore, as you defend it, not only a new invention, but your own. And, finally, you declare your practice of it inspired by a fixed purpose. You must stand or fall by the degree in which this purpose has been attained."

"You would, by means of comedy, discredit war. Do you stand alone in this endeavour?" And she quotes a beautiful passage from 'Cresphontes,' a play written by Euripides for the same end. "And how, respectively, have you sought your end? Euripides, by appealing to the nobler feelings which are outraged by war; you, by expatiating on the animal enjoyments which accompany peace. The 'Lysistrata' is your equivalent for 'Cresphontes.' Do you imagine that its obscene allurements will promote the cause of peace? Not till heroes have become mean voluptuaries, and Cleonymos,[47] whom you yourself have derided, becomes their type."

"You would discredit vice and error, hypocrisy, sophistry and untruth. You expose the one in all its seductions, and the other in grotesque exaggerations, which are themselves a lie; showing yourself the worst of sophists—one who plays false to his own soul."

"You would improve on former methods of comedy. You have returned to its lowest form. For you profess to strike at folly, not at him who commits it: yet your tactics are precisely to belabour every act or opinion of which you disapprove, in the form of some one man. You pride yourself, in fact, on giving personal blows, instead of general and theoretical admonitions; and even here you seem incapable of hitting fair; you libel where you cannot honestly convict, and do not care how ignoble or how irrelevant the libel may be. Does the poet deserve criticism as such? Does he write bad verse, does he inculcate foul deeds? The cry is, 'he cannot read or write;' 'he is extravagant in buying fish;' 'he allows someone to help him with his verse, and make love to his wife in return;' 'his uncle deals in crockery;' 'his mother sold herbs' (one of his pet taunts against Euripides); 'he is a housebreaker, a footpad, or, worst of all, a stranger;'"—a term of contempt which, as Balaustion reminds him has been repeatedly bestowed upon himself.

"What have you done," she continues, "beyond devoting the gold of your genius to work, which dross, in the person of a dozen predecessors or contemporaries, has produced as well. Pun and parody, satire and invective, quaintness of fancy, and elegance, have each had its representative as successful as you. Your life-work, until this moment, has been the record of a genius increasingly untrue to its better self. Such satire as yours, however well intended, could advance no honest cause. Its exaggerations make it useless for either praise or blame. Its uselessness is proved by the result: your jokes have recoiled upon yourself. The statues still stand which your mud has stained; the lightning flash of truth can alone destroy them. War still continues, in spite of the seductions with which you have invested peace. Such improvements as are in progress take an opposite direction to that which you prescribe. Public sense and decency are only bent on cleansing your sty."

And now her tone changes. "Has Euripides succeeded any better? None can say; for he spoke to a dim future above and beyond the crowd. If he fail, you two will be fellows in adversity; and, meanwhile, I am convinced that your wish unites with his to waft the white sail on its way.[48] Your nature, too, is kingly." She concludes with a tribute to the "Poet's Power," which is one with creative law, above and behind all potencies of heaven and earth; and to that inherent royalty of truth, in which alone she could venture to approach one so great as he. He too, as poet, must reign by truth, if he assert his proper sway.

"Nor, even so, had boldness nerved my tongue, But that the other king stands suddenly In all the grand investiture of death, Bowing your knee beside my lowly head— Equals one moment!" (vol. xiii. p. 144.)

Then she bids him "arise and go." Both have done homage to Euripides.

"Not so," he replies; "their discussion is not at an end. She has defended Euripides obliquely by attacking himself. Let her do it in a more direct fashion." This leads up to what seems to her the best defence possible: that reading of the "Herakles" which the entrance of Aristophanes had suspended. Its closing lines set Aristophanes musing. The chorus has said:

"The greatest of all our friends of yore, We have lost for evermore!" (p. 231.)

"Who," he asks, "has been Athens' best friend? He who attracted her by the charm of his art, or he who repelled her by its severity?" He answers this by describing the relative positions of himself and Euripides in an image suggested by the popular game of Cottabos.[49] "The one was fixed within his 'globe;' the other adapted himself to its rotations. Euripides received his views of life through a single aperture, the one channel of 'High' and 'Right.' Aristophanes has welcomed also the opposite impressions of 'Low' and 'Wrong,' and reproduced all in their turn. Some poet of the future, born perhaps in those Cassiterides, may defy the mechanics of the case, and place himself in such a position as to see high and low at once—be Tragic and Comic at the same time. But he meanwhile has been Athens' best friend—her wisest also—since he has not challenged failure by attempting what he could not perform. He has not risked the fate of Thamyris, who was punished for having striven with the higher powers, as if his vision had been equal to their own."[50] And he recites a fragment of song, which Mr. Browning unfortunately has not completed, describing the fiery rapture in which that poet marched, all unconscious, to his doom. Some laughing promise and prophecy ensues, and Aristophanes departs, in the 'rose-streaked morning grey,' bidding the couple farewell till the coming year.

That year has come and gone. Sophocles has died: and Aristophanes has attained his final triumph in the "Frogs"—a play flashing with every variety of his genius—as softly musical in the mystics' chorus as croaking in that of the frogs—in which Bacchus himself is ridiculed, and Euripides is more coarsely handled than ever. And once more the voice of Euripides has interposed between the Athenians and their doom.[51] When AEgos Potamos had been fought, and Athens was in Spartan hands, Euthykles flung the "choric flower" of the "Electra" in the face of the foe, and

"... because Greeks are Greeks, though Sparte's brood, And hearts are hearts, though in Lusandros' breast, And poetry is power,...." (p. 253.)

the city itself was spared. But when tragedy ceased, comedy was allowed its work, and it danced away the Piraean bulwarks, which were demolished, by Lysander's command, to the sound of the flute.

And now Euthykles and Balaustion are nearing Rhodes. Their master lies buried in the land to which they have bidden farewell; but the winds and waves of their island home bear witness to his immortality: for theirs seems the voice of nature, re-echoing the cry, "There are no gods, no gods!" his prophetic, if unconscious, tribute to the One God, "who saves" him.

Balaustion has no genuine historic personality. She is simply what Mr. Browning's purpose required: a large-souled woman, who could be supposed to echo his appreciation of these two opposite forms of genius, and express his judgments upon them. But the Euripides she depicts is entirely constructed from his works; while her portrait of Aristophanes shows him not only as his works reflect, but as contemporary criticism represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious and social change. Aristophanes was a believer in the value of conservative ideas, though not himself a slave to them. He was also a great poet, though often very false to his poetic self. Such a man might easily fancy that one like Euripides was untrue to the poetry, because untrue to the joyousness of existence; and that he shook even the foundations of morality by reasoning away the religious conceptions which were bound up with natural joys. The impression we receive from Aristophanes' Apology is that he is defending something which he believes to be true, though conscious of defending it by sophistical arguments, and of having enforced it by very doubtful deeds; and we also feel that from his point of view, and saving his apparent inconsistencies, Mr. Browning is in sympathy with him. At the same time, Balaustion's rejoinder is unanswerable, as it is meant to be; and the double monologue distinguishes itself from others of the same group, by being not only more dramatic and more emotional, but also more conclusive; it is the only one of them in which the question raised is not, in some degree, left open.

The poem bristles with local allusions and illustrations which puzzle the non-classical reader. I add an explanatory index to some names of things and persons which have not occurred in my brief outline of it.

Vol. xiii. p. 4. Kore. (Virgin.) Name given to Persephonee. In Latin, Proserpina.

P. 6. Dikast and Heliast. Dicast=Judge, Heliast=Juryman, in Athens.

P. 7. 1. Kordax-step. 2. Propulaia. (Propylaia.) 1. An indecent dance. 2. Gateway of the Acropolis. 3. Pnux. (Pnyx.) 4. Bema. 3. Place for the Popular Assembly. 4. Place whence speeches were made.

P. 8 Makaria. Heroine in a play of Euripides, who killed herself for her country's sake.

P. 10. 1. Milesian smart-place. 2. Phrunikos. (Phrynicus.) 1. The painful remembrance of the capture of Miletus. 2. A dramatic poet, who made this capture the subject of a tragedy, "which, when performed (493), so painfully wrung the feelings of the Athenian audience that they burst into tears in the theatre, and the poet was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000 drachmai, as having recalled to them their own misfortunes."[52] He is derided by Aristophanes in the "Frogs" for his method of introducing his characters.

P. 12. Amphitheos, Deity, and Dung. A character in the Acharnians of Aristophanes—"not a god, and yet immortal."

P. 14. 1. Diaulos. 2. Stade. 1. A double line of the Race-course. 2. The Stadium, on reaching which, the runner went back again.

P. 16. City of Gapers. Nickname of Athens, from the curiosity of its inhabitants.

P. 17. Koppa-marked. Race-horses of the best breed were marked with the old letter Koppa.

P. 18. Comic Platon. The comic writer of that name: author of plays and poems, not THE Plato.

P. 21. Salabaccho. Name of a courtesan.

P. 30. Cheek-band. Band worn by trumpeters to support the cheeks. Cuckoo-apple. Fruit so-called=fool-making food. Threttanelo, Neblaretai. Imitative sounds: 1. Of a harp-string. 2. Of any joyous cry. Three-days' salt-fish slice. Allowance of a soldier on an expedition. (It was supposed that at the end of this time he could forage for himself.)

P. 31. Goat's breakfast and other abuse. Indecent allusions, to be fancied, not explained.

P. 32. Sham Ambassadors. Characters in the Acharnians. Kudathenian. Famous Athenian. Pandionid. Descendant of Pandion, King of Athens. Goat-Song. Tragoedia—Tradegy. It was called goat-song because a goat-skin, probably filled with wine, was once given as a prize for it. The expression occurs in Shelley.

P. 33. Willow-Wicker Flask. Nickname of the poet it is applied to, a toper.

P. 36. Lyric Shell or Tragic Barbiton. Lesser and larger lyre.

P. 38. Sousarion. Susarion of Megara, inventor of Attic comedy. Chionides. His successor.

P. 39. Little-in-the-Fields. The Dionysian Feast; a lesser one than the City Dionysia.

P. 40. Ameipsias. A comic poet, contemporary with Aristophanes, whose two best plays he beat.

P. 42. Iostephanos. "Violet-crowned," name of Athens. Kleophon. A demagogue of bad character, attacked by Aristophanes as profligate, and an enemy of peace. Kleonumos. A similar character; also a big fellow, and great coward.

P. 43. Telekleides. Old comic poet, on the same side as Aristophanes. Mullos and Euetes. Comic poets who revived the art of comedy in Athens after Susarion.

P. 44. Morucheides. Son of Morychus—like his father, a comic poet and a glutton. Sourakosios. Another comic poet.

P. 46. Trilophos. Wearer of three crests on his helmet.

P. 47. Ruppapai. Word used by the crew in rowing—hence, the crew itself.

P. 49. Free dinner in the Prutaneion. (Prytaneion.) Such was accorded to certain privileged persons. Ariphrades. A man of infamous character, singer to the harp: persistently attacked by Aristophanes. Karkinos. Comic actor: had famous dancing sons.

P. 50. Exomis. A woman's garment. Parachoregema. Subordinate chorus, which sings in the absence of the principal one. Aristullos. Bad character satirized by Aristophanes, and used in one of his plays as a travesty of Plato. This incident, and Plato's amused indifference, are mentioned at p. 137 of the Apology.

P. 51. Murrhine, Akalantis. Female names in the Thesmophoriazusae. New Kalligeneia. Name given to Ceres, meaning, "bearer of lovely children." The Toxotes. A Syrian archer in the "Thesmophoriazusae." The Great King's Eye. Mock name given to an ambassador from Persia in the Acharnians. Kompolakuthes. Bully-boaster: with a play on the name of Lamachus.

P. 52. Silphion. A plant used as a relish. Kleon-Clapper. Corrector of Kleon.

P. 54. Trugaios. Epithet of Bacchus, "vintager;" here name of a person in the comedy of "Peace." Story of Simonides. Simonides, the lyric poet, sang an ode to his patron, Scopas, at a feast; and as he had introduced into it the praises of Castor and Pollux, Scopas declared that he would only pay his own half-share of the ode, and the Demi-gods might pay the remainder. Presently it was announced to Simonides that two youths desired to see him outside the palace; on going there he found nobody, but meanwhile the palace fell in, killing his patron. Thus was he paid.

P. 58. Maketis. Capital of Macedonia.

P. 60. Lamachos. General who fell at the siege of Syracuse; satirized by Aristophanes as a brave, but boastful man.

P. 67. Sophroniskos' Son. Socrates.

P. 74. Kephisophon. Actor, and friend of Euripides; enviously reported to help him in writing his plays.

P. 79. Palaistra. A wrestling-school, or place of exercise.

P. 82. San. Letter distinguishing race-horses. Thearion's Meal-Tub Politics. Politics of Thearion the baker. Pisthetarios. Character in the "Birds," alias "Mr. Persuasive." Strephsiades. Character in the "Clouds."

P. 83. Rocky ones. Epithet given to the Athenians.

P. 85. Promachos. Champion.

P. 86. The Boule. State Council. Prodikos. Prodicus. A Sophist, satirized in the "Birds" and "Clouds."

P. 87. Choes. Festival at Athens. "The Pitchers."

P. 89. Plataian help. The Plataeans sent a thousand well appointed warriors to help at Marathon. The term stands for timely help.

P. 94. Plethron square. 100 feet square.

P. 98. Palaistra tool. Tool used at the Palaistra, or wrestling school: in this case the strigil.

P. 99. Phales. Iacchos. Two epithets of Bacchus—the former indecent.

P. 112. Kinesias. According to Aristophanes, a bad profligate lyric poet, notable for his leanness.

P. 113. Rattei. Like "Neblaretai," an imitative or gibberish word expressing joyous excitement. Aristonumos. Sannurion. Two comic poets, the latter ridiculed by Aristophanes for his leanness.

P. 124. Parabasis. Movement of the chorus, wherein the Coryphoeus came forward and spoke in the poet's name.

P. 128. Skiadeion. Sunshade. Parasol.

P. 129. Theoria. Opora. Characters in the Eirene or "Peace:" the first personifying games, spectacles, sights; the second, plenty, fruitful autumn, and so on.

P. 133. Philokleon. Lover of Kleon. (Cleon.) Bdelukleon. Reviler of Kleon.

P. 135. Logeion. Front of the stage occupied by the actors.

P. 137. Kukloboros-roaring. Roaring like the torrent Cycloborus (in Attica).

P. 140. Konnos. The play by Ameipsias which beat the "Clouds." Euthumenes. One who refused the pay of the comic writers, while he tripled that of those who attended at the Assembly. Argurrhios. As before. Kinesias. As before.

P. 144. Triballos. A supposed country and clownish god.

P. 172. Propula. (Propyla.) Gateway to the Acropolis.

P. 248. Elaphebolion month. The "Stag-striking" month.

P. 249. Bakis prophecy. Foolish prophecies attributed to one Bacis, rife at that time; a collective name for all such.

P. 255. Kommos. General weeping—by the chorus and an actor.

"FIFINE AT THE FAIR."

"Fifine at the Fair" is a defence of inconstancy, or of the right of experiment in love; and is addressed by a husband to his wife, whose supposed and very natural comments the monologue reflects. The speaker's implied name of Don Juan sufficiently tells us what we are meant to think of his arguments; and they also convict themselves by landing him in an act of immorality, which brings its own punishment. This character is nevertheless a standing puzzle to Mr. Browning's readers, because that which he condemns in it, and that which he does not, are not to be distinguished from each other. It is impossible to see where Mr. Browning ends and where Don Juan begins. The reasoning is scarcely ever that of a heartless or profligate person, though it very often betrays an unconsciously selfish one. It treats love as an education still more than as a pleasure; and if it lowers the standard of love, or defends too free an indulgence in it, it does so by asserting what is true for imaginative persons, though not for the commonplace: that whatever stirs even a sensuous admiration appeals also to the artistic, the moral, and even the religious nature. Its obvious sophistries are mixed up with the profoundest truths, and the speaker's tone has often the tenderness of one who, with all his inconstancy, has loved deeply and long. We can only solve the problem by referring to the circumstances in which the idea of the poem arose.

Mr. Browning was, with his family, at Pornic many years ago, and there saw the gipsy who is the original of Fifine. His fancy was evidently sent roaming, by her audacity, her strength—the contrast which she presented to the more spiritual types of womanhood; and this contrast eventually found expression in a poetic theory of life, in which these opposite types and their corresponding modes of attraction became the necessary complement of each other. As he laid down the theory, Mr. Browning would be speaking in his own person. But he would turn into someone else in the act of working it out—for it insensibly carried with it a plea for yielding to those opposite attractions, not only successively, but at the same time; and a modified Don Juan would grow up under his pen, thinking in some degree his thoughts, using in some degree his language, and only standing out as a distinctive character at the end of the poem. The higher type of womanhood must appear in the story, at the same time as the lower which is represented by Fifine; and Mr. Browning would instinctively clothe it in the form which first suggested or emphasized the contrast. He would soon, however, feel that the vision was desecrated by the part it was called upon to play. He would disguise or ward it off when possible: now addressing Elvire by her husband's mouth, in the terms of an ideal companionship, now again reducing her to the level of an every-day injured wife; and when the dramatic Don Juan was about to throw off the mask, the flickering wifely personality would be extinguished altogether, and the unfaithful husband left face to face with the mere phantom of conscience which, in one sense, Elvire is always felt to be. This is what actually occurs; and only from this point of view can we account for the perpetual encroaching of the imaginary on the real, the real on the imaginary, which characterizes the work.

A fanciful prologue, "Amphibian," strikes its key-note. The writer imagines himself floating on the sea, pleasantly conscious of his bodily existence, yet feeling unfettered by it. A strange beautiful butterfly floats past him in the air; her radiant wings can be only those of a soul; and it strikes him that while the waves are his property, and the air is hers, hers is true freedom, his only the mimicry of it. He sees little to regret in this, since imagination is as good as reality; and Heaven itself can only be made up of such things as poets dream. Yet he knows that his swimming seems but a foolish compromise between the flight to which he cannot attain, and the more grovelling mode of being which he has no real wish to renounce; and he wonders whether she, the already released, who is upborne by those sunlit wings, does not look down with pity and wonder upon him. So also will Elvire, though less dispassionately, watch the intellectual vagaries of her Don Juan, which embrace the heavens, but are always centred in earth. This prologue is preceded by a quotation from Moliere's "Don Juan," in which Elvire satirically prescribes to her lover the kind of self-defence—or something not unlike it—which Mr. Browning's hero will adopt.

Don Juan invites his wife to walk with him through the fair: and as he points out its sights to her, he expatiates on the pleasures of vagrancy, and declares that the red pennon waving on the top of the principal booth sends an answering thrill of restlessness through his own frame. He then passes to a glowing eulogium on the charms of the dark-skinned rope-dancer, Fifine, who forms part of the itinerant show.

Elvire gives tokens of perturbation, and her husband frankly owns that as far as Fifine is concerned, he cannot defend his taste: he can scarcely account for it. "Beautiful she is, in her feminine grace and strength, set forth by her boyish dress; but with probably no more feeling than a sprite, and no more conscience than a flower. It is likely enough that her antecedents have been execrable, and that her life is in harmony with them." Still, he does not wish it supposed that he admires a body without a soul: and he tries to convince himself that Fifine, after all, is not quite without one. "There is no grain of sand on the sea-shore which may not, once in a century, be the first to flash back the rising sun; there can be no human spirit which does not in the course of its existence greet the Divine light with one answering ray."

But no heavenly spark can be detected in Fifine; and he is reduced to seeking a virtue for her, a justification for himself, in that very fact. If she has no virtue, she also pretends to none. If she gives nothing to society, she asks nothing of it. His fancy raises up a procession of such women as the world has crowned: a Helen, a Cleopatra, some Christian saint; he bids Elvire see herself as part of it—as the true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece, contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy—and be satisfied that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs. Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own, he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Dore's; but which, if threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million Dores, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love—in other words—by the artist soul within him."

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it cannot be retraced to them. It is a fancy created by fact, as flame by fuel; no more identical with it. The fancy is not on that account a delusion. It is the vision of ideal truth: the recognition by an inner sense of that which does not exist for the outer. That is why hearts choose each other by help of the face, and why they choose so diversely. The eye of love, which again is the eye of art, reads soul into the features, however incomplete their expression of it may be. It reconstructs the ideal type which nature has failed to carry out.

He illustrates this by means of three faces roughly sketched in the sand. At first sight they are grotesque and unmeaning. Yet a few more strokes of the broken pipe which is serving him as a pencil, will give to two of these a predominating expression; convert the third into a likeness of Elvire.

"These completing touches represent the artist's action upon life. By this method Don Juan has been enabled on a former occasion, to complete a work of high art. A block of marble had come into his possession, half shaped by the hand of Michael Angelo.

"... One hand,—the Master's,—smoothed and scraped That mass, he hammered on and hewed at, till he hurled Life out of death, and left a challenge: for the world, Death still,—...." (vol. xi. p. 260.)

Not death to him: for as he gazed on the rough-hewn block, a form emerged upon his mental sight—a form which he interpreted as that of the goddess Eidothee.[53] And as his soul received it from that of the dead master, his hand carried it out."

Mr. Browning's whole theory of artistic perception is contained in the foregoing lines; but he proceeds to enforce it in another way. "The life thus evoked from death, the beauty from ugliness, is the gain of each special soul—its permanent conquest over matter. The mode of effecting this is the special secret of every soul; and this Don Juan defines as its chemic secret, the law of its affinities, the law of its actions and reactions. Where one, he says, lights force, another draws forth pity; where one finds food for self-indulgence, another acquires strength for self-sacrifice. One blows life's ashes into rose-coloured flame, another into less heavenly hues. Love will have reached its height when the secret of each soul has become the knowledge of all; and the many-coloured rays of individual experience are fused in the white light of universal truth."

Here again Don Juan imagines a retort. Elvire makes short work of his poetic theories, and declares that this professed interest in souls is a mere pretext for the gratification of sense. "Whom in heaven's name is he trying to take in?" He entreats music to take his part. "It alone can pierce the mists of falsehood which intervene between the soul and truth. And now, as they stroll homewards in the light of the setting sun, all things seem charged with those deeper harmonies—with those vital truths of existence which words are powerless to convey. Elvire, however, has no soul for music, and her husband must have recourse to words."

The case between them may, he thinks, be stated in this question, "How do we rise from falseness into truth?" "We do so after the fashion of the swimmer who brings his nostrils to the level of the upper air, but leaves the rest of his body under water—by the act of self-immersion in the very element from which we wish to escape. Truth is to the aspiring soul as the upper air to the swimmer: the breath of life. But if the swimmer attempts to free his head and arms, he goes under more completely than before. If the soul strives to escape from the grosser atmosphere into the higher, she shares the same fate. Her truthward yearnings plunge her only deeper into falsehood. Body and soul must alike surrender themselves to an element in which they cannot breathe, for this element can alone sustain them. But through the act of plunging we float up again, with a deeper disgust at the briny taste we have brought back; with a deeper faith in the life above, and a deeper confidence in ourselves, whom the coarser element has proved unable to submerge."

"Suppose again, that as we paddle with our hands under water, we grasp at something which seems a soul. The piece of falsity slips through our fingers, but by the mechanical reaction just described, it sends us upwards into the realm of truth. This is precisely what Fifine has done. Of the earth earthy as she is, she has driven you and me into the realms of abstract truth. We have thus no right to despise her" This discourse is interrupted by a contemptuous allusion to a passage in "Childe Harold," (fourth canto), in which the human intelligence is challenged to humble itself before the ocean.

Elvire is still dissatisfied. The suspicious fact remains, that whatever experience her husband desires to gain, it is always a woman who must supply it. This he frankly admits; and he gives his reason. "Women lend themselves to experiment; men do not. Men are egotists, and absorb whatever comes in their way. Women, whether Fifines or Elvires, allow themselves to be absorbed. You master men only by reducing yourself to their level. You captivate women by showing yourself at your best. Their power of hero-worship is illustrated by the act of the dolphin, 'True woman creature,' which bore the ship-wrecked Arion to the Corinthian coast. Men are not only wanting in true love: their best powers are called forth by hate. They resemble the vine, first 'stung' into 'fertility' by the browsing goat, which nibbled away its tendrils, and gained the 'indignant wine' by the process. In their feminine characteristics Elvire stands far higher than Fifine; but Fifine is for that very reason more useful as a means of education; for Elvire may be trusted implicitly; Fifine teaches one to take care of himself. They are to each other as the strong ship and the little rotten bark." This comparison is suggested by a boatman whom they lately saw adventurously pushing his way through shoal and sandbank because he would not wait for the tide.

Don Juan begs leave to speak one word more in defence of Fifine and her masquerading tribe; it will recall his early eulogium on her frankness. "All men are actors: but these alone do not deceive. All you are expected to applaud in them is the excellence of the avowed sham."

Don Juan has thus developed his theory that soul is attainable through flesh, truth through falsehood, the real through what only seems; and, as he thinks, justified the conclusion that a man's spiritual life is advanced by every experience, moral or immoral, which comes in his way. He now relates a dream by which, as he says, those abstract reflections have been in part inspired; in reality, it continues, and in some degree refutes them. The dream came to him this morning when he had played himself to sleep with Schumann's Carnival; having chosen this piece because his brain was burdened with many thoughts and fancies which, better than any other, it would enable him to work off; and as he tells this, he enlarges on the faculty of music to register, as well as express, every passing emotion of the human soul. He notes also the constant recurrence of the same old themes, and the caprice of taste which strives as constantly to convert them into something new.

The dream carries him to Venice, and he awakes, in fancy, on some pinnacle above St. Mark's Square, overlooking the Carnival. Here his power of artistic divination—alias of human sympathy, is called into play; for the men and women below him all wear the semblance of some human deformity, of some animal type, or of some grotesque embodiment of human feeling or passion. He throws himself into their midst, and these monstrosities disappear. The human asserts itself; the brute-like becomes softened away; what imperfection remains creates pity rather than disgust. He finds that by shifting his point of view, he can see even necessary qualities in what otherwise struck him as faults.

Another change takes place: one felt more easily than defined; and he becomes aware that he is looking not on Venice, but on the world, and that what seemed her Carnival is in reality the masquerade of life. The change goes on. Halls and temples are transformed beneath his gaze. The systems which they represent: religions, philosophies, moralities, and theories of art, collapse before him, re-form and collapse again. He sees that the deepest truth can only build on sand, though itself is stationed on a rock; and can only assert its substance in the often changing forms of error. The vision seems to declare that change is the Law of Life.

"Not so," it was about to say. "That law is permanence." The scene has resembled the forming and reforming, the blending and melting asunder of a pile of sunset clouds. Like these, when the sun has set, it is subsiding into a fixed repose, a stern and colourless uniformity. Temple, tower, and dwelling-house assume the form of one solitary granite pile, a Druid monument. This monument, as Mr. Browning describes it,[54] consists really of two, so standing or lying as to form part of each other. The one cross-shaped is supposed to have been sepulchral, or in some other way sacred to death. The latter, on which he mainly dwells, was, until lately, the centre of a rude nature-worship, and is therefore consecrated to life. It symbolizes life in its most active and most perennial form. It means the force which aspires to heaven, and the strength which is rooted in the earth. It means that impulse of all being towards something outside itself, which is constant amidst all change, uniform amidst all variety. It means the last word of the scheme of creation, and therefore also the first. It repeats and concludes the utterance already sounding in the spectator's ear:—

"... 'All's change, but permanence as well.' —Grave note whence—list aloft!—harmonics sound, that mean: Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and between Each, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence. The individual soul works through the shows of sense, (Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true) Up to an outer soul as individual too; And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed, And reach at length 'God, man, or both together mixed,'"[55] (p. 332.)

The condition of this monument, its history, the conjectures to which it has given rise, are described in a humorous spirit which belies its mystic significance; but that significance is imbedded in the very conception of the poem, and distinctly expressed in the author's subsequent words. The words which I have just quoted contain the whole philosophy of "Fifine at the Fair" as viewed on its metaphysical side. They declare the changing relations of the soul to some fixed eternal truth foreshadowed in the impulses of sense. They are the burden of Don Juan's argument even when he is defending what is wrong. They are the constantly recurring keynote of what the author has meant to say.

Don Juan draws also a new and more moral lesson from this final vision of his dream. "Inconstancy is not justified by natural law, for it means unripeness of soul. The ripe soul evolves the Infinite from a fixed point. It finds the many in the one. Elvire is the one who includes the many. Elvire is the ocean: while Fifine is but the foam-flake which the ocean can multiply at pleasure. Elvire shall henceforth suffice to him."

But here, as elsewhere, he makes a great mistake: that of confusing nature with the individual man. Her instability supplied him with no excuse for being inconstant, and her permanence gives him no motive for constancy; and he proves this in another moment by breaking bounds no longer in word only, but in deed. It turns out that he had put gold as well as silver into Fifine's tambourine. The result, intended or not, has been a letter slipped into his hand. He claims five minutes to go and "clear the matter up;" exceeds the time, and on returning finds his punishment in an empty home.

This at least, we seem intended to infer. For Elvire has already startled him by assuming the likeness of a phantom, and he gives her leave, in case he breaks his word, to vanish away altogether. The story ends here; but its epilogue "The Householder" depicts a widowed husband, grotesquely miserable, fetched home by his departed wife; and his identity with Don Juan seems unmistakable. This scene is more humorous than pathetic, as befits the dramatic spirit of the poem; but the most serious purport and most comprehensive meaning of "Fifine at the Fair" are summed up in its closing words. The "householder" is composing his epitaph, and his wife thus concludes it: "Love is all, and Death is nought."

"PRINCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANGAU, SAVIOUR OF SOCIETY."

"Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" is a defence of the doctrine of expediency: and the monologue is supposed to be carried on by the late Emperor of the French, under this feigned name. Louis Napoleon is musing over past and present, and blending them with each other in a waking dream. He seems in exile again. But the events of his reign are all, or for the most part behind him, and they have earned for him the title of "inscrutable." A young lady of an adventurous type has crossed his path, in the appropriate region of Leicester Square. Some adroit flattery on her side has disposed him to confidence, and he is proving to her, over tea and cigars, that he is not so "inscrutable" after all; or, if he be, that the key to the enigma is a simple one. "This wearer of crinoline seems destined to play Oedipus to the Sphinx he is supposed to be;" or better still, as he gallantly adds, the "Lais" for whose sake he will unveil the mystery unasked. The situation he thus assumes is not dignified; but as Mr. Browning probably felt, his choice of a confidante suits the nature of what he has to tell, as well as the circumstances in which he tells it. Politically, he has lived from hand to mouth. So in a different way has she. A very trifling incident enables him to illustrate his confession, which will proceed without interruption on the listener's part.

They are sitting at a table with writing materials upon it. Among these lies a piece of waste-paper. Prince Hohenstiel descries upon it two blots, takes up a pen, and draws a line from one to the other. This simple, half-mechanical act is, as he declares, a type of his whole life; it contains the word of the enigma. His constant principle has been: not to strive at creating anything new; not to risk marring what already existed; but to adapt what he found half made and to continue it. In other words, he has been a sustainer or "saviour," not a reformer of society.

Many pages are devoted to the statement and vindication of this fact, and they contain everything that can be said, from a religious or practical point of view, in favour of taking the world as we find it. Prince Hohenstiel's first argument is: that he has not the genius of a reformer, and it is a man's first duty to his Creator to do that only which he can do best; his second: that sweeping reforms are in themselves opposed to the creative plan, because they sacrifice everything to one leading idea, and aim at reducing to one pattern those human activities which God has intended to be multiform; the third and strongest: that the scheme of existence with all its apparent evils is God's work, and no man can improve upon it. There have been, he admits, revolutions in the moral as well as the physical world; and inspired reformers, who were born to carry them on; but these men are rare and portentous as the physical agencies to which they correspond, and whether "dervish (desert-spectre), swordsman, saint, lawgiver," or "lyrist," appear only when the time is ripe for them. Meanwhile, the great machine advances by means of the minute springs, the revolving wheel-work, of individual lives. Let each of these be content with its limited sphere. God is with each and all.

And Prince Hohenstiel has another and still stronger reason for not desiring to tamper with the existing order of things. He finds it good. He loves existence as he knows it, with its mysteries and its beauties; its complex causes and incalculable effects; the good it extracts from evil; the virtue it evolves from suffering. He reveres that Temple of God's own building, from which deploys the ever varying procession of human life. If the temple be intricate in its internal construction, if its architectural fancies impede our passage; if they make us stumble or even fall; his invariable advice is this: "Throw light on the stumbling-blocks; fix your torch above them at such points as the architect approves. But do not burn them away." He considers himself therefore, not a very great man, but a useful one: one possessing on a small scale the patience of an Atlas, if not the showy courage of a Hercules: one whose small achievements pave the way for the great ones.

Thus far the imaginary speaker so resembles Mr. Browning himself, that we forget for the moment that we are not dealing with him; and his vicarious testimony to the value of human life lands him, at page 145, in a personal protest against the folly which under cover of poetry seeks to run it down. He lashes out against the "bard" who can rave about inanimate nature as something greater than man; and who talks of the "unutterable" impressions conveyed by the ocean, as greater than the intelligence and sympathy, the definite thoughts and feelings which can be uttered. The lines from "Childe Harold" which will be satirized in "Fifine at the Fair" are clearly haunting him here. But we shall now pass on to more historic ground.

It is a natural result of these opinions that Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau regards life as the one boon which contains every other; and that the material prosperity of his people has been the first object by which his "sustaining" policy was inspired. He does not deny that even within the limits thus imposed, some choice of cause or system seemed open to him. "It seemed open to him to choose between religion and free-thought, between monarchy and government by the people: and to throw his energies entirely into one scale or the other, instead of weighting one and the other by turns. It could justly have been urged that the simpler aim is included in the more complex, and that he would promote the interests of his subjects by serving them from the wider, rather than from the narrower point of view."

"But what is true in theory is not always so in practice. He has loved a cause, and believed in it—the cause of united Italy; and so long as he was free to express sympathy with this—so long, his critics say, as he was a mere voice, with air to float in, and no obstacle to bar his way—he expressed it from the bottom of his soul. But with the power to act—with the firm ground wheron to act—came also the responsibilities of action: the circumstance by which it must be controlled. He saw the wants of his people; the eyes which craved light alone, and the mouths which craved only bread. He felt that the ideal must yield to the real, the remote to what was near; and the work of Italian deliverance remained incomplete. It was his very devotion to the one principle which brought the reproach of vacillation upon him."

"He broke faith with his people too"—so his critics continue—"for he supplied food to their bodies; but withheld the promised liberties of speech and writing which would have brought nourishment to their souls."

And again he answers that he gave them what they wanted most. He gave them that which would enable them to acquire freedom of soul, and without which such freedom would have been useless.

He concedes something, however, to reformers by declaring, as his final excuse, that he would not have thus yielded to circumstances if the average life of man were a hundred years instead of twenty; for, given sufficient time, all adverse circumstance may be overcome. "The body dies if it be thwarted. Mind—in other words, intellectual truth—triumphs through opposition. Envy, hatred, and stupidity, are to it as the rocks which obstruct the descending stream, and toss it in jewelled spray above the chasm by which it is confined. Abstract thinkers have therefore their rights also; and it is well that those, in some respects, greater and better men than he, who are engaged in the improvement of the world, should find success enough to justify their hopes; failure enough to impose caution on their endeavours."

The Prince confesses once for all, that since improvement is so necessarily limited; since the higher life is incompatible with life in the flesh: he is content to wait for the higher life and make the best he can of the lower. But if anyone declares that this quiescent attitude means indolence or sleep, his judgment is on a par with that which was once passed on the famous statue of the Laocoon. Some artist had covered the accessories of the group, and left only the contorted central figure, with nothing to explain its contortions. One man said as he looked upon it,

"... I think the gesture strives Against some obstacle we cannot see." (p. 172.)

Every other spectator pronounced the "gesture" a yawn.

Prince Hohenstiel gives us a second proof that he is not without belief in the ideal. He accepts the doctrine of evolution: though not in its scientific sense. He likes the idea of having felt his way up to humanity (as he now feels his way in it) through progressive forms of existence; he being always himself, and nowise the thing he dwelt in. He likes to account in this manner for the feeling of kinship which attracts him to all created things. It also completes his vision of mankind as fining off at the summit into isolated peaks, but held together at the base by its common natural life; and thus confirms him in the impression that the personal needs and mutual obligations of the natural life are paramount.

As he concludes this part of his harangue, an amused consciousness steals over him that he has been washing himself very white; and that his self-defence has been principally self-praise—at least, to his listener's ears. So he proceeds to show that his arguments were just, by showing how easily, being blamed for the one course of action, he might have been no less censured for the opposite. He imagines that his life has been written by some romancing historian of the Thiers and Victor Hugo type; and that in this version, practical wisdom, or SAGACITY, is made to suggest everything which he has really done, while he unwisely obeys the dictates of ideal virtue and does everything which he did not.

Hohenstiel-Schwangau (France) had made him her head-servant: president of the assembly which she had elected to serve her; and he knew that his fellow-servants were working for their own ends, while he alone was faithful to his bond. He, doubtless, had his dreams, conjured up by SAGACITY, of pouncing upon the unfaithful ones, denouncing them to his mistress, the State, and begging her to allow him to do their work as well as his own, till such time as the danger was past, and her desire for a more popular government could be fulfilled. But in so doing he would have deceived her, and he chose the truth. He knew that he had no right to substitute himself for the multitude, his knowledge for their ignorance, his will for theirs; since wise and foolish were alike of God's creating, and each had his own place and purpose in the general scheme. (Here and through the following pages, 176-7, the real and the imaginary Prince appear merged into each other.) He performed his strict duty, and left things to their natural course.

His position grew worse and worse. His fellow-servants made no secret of their plans—to be carried into execution when his time of service should have expired, and his controlling hand been removed from them. Each had his own mine of tyranny—whether Popedom, Socialism, or other—which he meant to spring on the people fancying itself free. The Head Servant was silent. They took fright at his silence. "It meant mischief." "It meant counterplot." "It meant some stroke of State." "He must be braved and bullied. His re-election must be prevented; the sword of office must be wrested from his grasp."

At length his time expired, and then he acted and spoke. He made no "stroke of State." He stepped down from his eminence; laid his authority in the people's hand; proved to it its danger, and proposed that Hohenstiel-Schwangau should give him the needful authority for protecting her. The proposal was unanimously accepted; and he justified his own judgment and that of his country by chastising every disturber of the public peace, and reducing alike knaves and fools to silence and submission. But now SAGACITY found fault: "he had not taken the evil in time; he might have nipped it in the bud, and saved life and liberty by so doing: he had waited till it was full grown, and the cost in life and liberty had been enormous." He replied that he had been checked by his allegiance to the law; and that rather than strain the law, however slightly, he was bound to see it broken.

And so, the record continues, he worked and acted to the end. He had received his authority from the people; he governed first for them. (Here again, and at the following page 184, we seem to recognize the real Hohenstiel or Louis Napoleon, rather than the imaginary.) He walked reverently—superstitiously, if spectators will—in the path marked out for him, ever fearing to imperil what was good in the existing order of things; but casting all fear aside when an obvious evil cried out for correction. Hohenstiel-Schwangau—herself a republic—had attacked the liberties of Rome, and destroyed them with siege and slaughter. On his accession to power, he found this "infamy triumphant."

SAGACITY suggested that he should leave it untouched. "It was no work of his; he was not answerable for its existence. It had its political advantages for his own country."

But he would not hear of such a course. There was a canker in the body politic, requiring to be cut out; and he cut it out: though the patient roared, the wound bled, and the operator was abused by friend and foe.

"Why so rough and precipitate?" again SAGACITY interposed, "though the right were on your side? Why not temporize, persuade, even threaten, before coming to blows?"

"Yes," was the reply, "and see the evil strengthen while you look on."

SAGACITY defended her advice on larger grounds; and here too he was at issue with her. Hohenstiel-Schwangau had a passion for fighting. She would fight for anything, or for nothing, merely to show that she knew how. Give her a year's peace after any war, and she was once more ready for the fray. Prince Hohenstiel and SAGACITY both agreed that this evil temper must be destroyed; but SAGACITY advised him to undermine—Prince Hohenstiel chose to combat it.

SAGACITY said, "Here is an interval of peace. Prolong it, make it delightful; but do so under cover of intending to cut it short. If you would induce a fierce mountain tribe to come down from its fortress and settle in the plain, you do not bid it destroy the fortress. You bid it enjoy life in the city, and remember that it runs no risk in doing so, because it has its fortress to fall back upon at the first hint of danger. And the time will come when it can hear with equanimity that the fortress has gone to ruin, and that fighting is no longer in fashion. The mountain tribe will have learned to love the fatness of the valley, while thinking of those mother ribs of its mountain fastness which are ever waiting to prop up its life. Just so put a wooden sword into the hand of the Hohenstieler, and let him brag of war, learning meanwhile the value of peace."

"Not so," the Prince replied; "my people shall not be cheated into virtue. Truth is the one good thing. I will tell them the truth. I will tell them that war, for war's sake, is damnable; that glory at its best is shame, since its image is a gilded bubble which a resolute hand might prick, but the breath of a foolish multitude buoys up beyond its reach." "And what," he asked, "is the glory, what the greatness, which this foolish nation seeks? That of making every other small; not that of holding its place among others which are themselves great. Shall such a thing be possible as that the nation which earth loves best—a people so aspiring, so endowed; so magnetic in its attraction for its fellow-men—shall think its primacy endangered because another selects a ruler it has not patronized, or chooses to sell steel untaxed?"

"But this does not mean that Hohenstiel is to relinquish the power of war. The aggressiveness which is damnable in herself is to be condemned in others, and to be punished in them. Therefore, for the sake of Austria who sins, of Italy who suffers, of Hohenstiel-Schwangau who has a duty to perform, the war which SAGACITY deprecates must be waged, and Austria smitten till Italy is free."

"At least," rejoins SAGACITY, "you secure some reward from the country you have freed; say, the cession of Nice and Savoy; something to satisfy those at home who doubt the market-value of right and truth."

"No," is the reply, "you may preach that to Metternich and remain with him." And so the Prince worked on; determined that neither fear, nor treachery, nor much less blundering, on his part, should imperil the precarious balance of the world's life.

Once more, and for the last time, SAGACITY lifts up her voice. "You were the fittest man to rule. Give solidity to your life's work by leaving a fit successor to carry it on. Secure yourself this successor in a son. The world is open to you for the choice of your bride."

And again the ideal Prince retorts on the suggestion. "The fit successor is not secured in this way. All experience proves it. The spark of genius is dropped where God will. It may find hereditary (hence accumulated) faculties ready to be ignited. It may fire the barren rock." And, changing the metaphor,

"... The seed o' the apple-tree Brings forth another tree which bears a crab: 'Tis the great gardener grafts the excellence On wildings where he will." (p. 203.)

He ends by calling up the vision of an Italian wayside temple, in which, as the legend declares, succession was carried on after a very different principle. Each successive high priest has become so by murdering his predecessor, his qualification being found in that simple fact; or in the qualities of cunning or courage of which it has been the test.[56]

And now the dream is lived through, and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau awakens in his own palace: not much better pleased with his own plain speaking than with the imaginary heroics of Messrs. Hugo and Thiers. "One's case is so much stronger before it is put into words. Motives which seem sufficient in the semi-darkness of one's own consciousness, are so feeble in the light of day. When we reason with ourselves, we subordinate outward claims without appearing to do so: since the necessity of making the best of life for our own sake supplies unconsciously to ourselves the point of view from which all our reasonings proceed. When forced to think aloud, we stoop to what is probably an untruth. We say that our motives were—what they should have been; what perhaps we have fancied them to be."

These closing pages convey the author's comment on Prince Hohenstiel's defence. They present it, in his well-known manner, as what such a man might be tempted to say; rather than what this particular man was justified in saying. But he takes the Prince's part in the lines beginning,

"Alack, one lies oneself Even in the stating that one's end was truth," (p. 209.)

for they farther declare that though we aim at truth, our words cannot always be trusted to hit it. The best cannon ever rifled will sometimes deflect. Words do this also. We recognize the conviction of the inadequacy of language which was so forcibly expressed in the Pope's soliloquy in "The Ring and the Book," but in what seems a more defined form.

"BISHOP BLOUGRAM'S APOLOGY."

"Bishop Blougram's Apology" is a defence of religious conformity in those cases in which the doctrines to which we conform exceed our powers of belief, but ate not throughout opposed to them; its point of view being that of a Roman Catholic churchman, who has secured his preferment by this kind of compromise. It is addressed to a semi-freethinker, who is supposed to have declared that a man who could thus identify himself with Romish superstitions must be despised as either knave or fool; and Bishop Blougram has undertaken to prove that he is not to be thus despised; and least of all by the person before him.

The argument is therefore special-pleading in the full sense of the word; and it is clear from a kind of editor's note with which the poem concludes, that we are meant to take it as such. But it is supposed to lie in the nature of the man who utters, as also in the circumstance in which it is uttered: for Bishop Blougram was suggested by Cardinal Wiseman;[57] and the literary hack, Gigadibs, is the kind of critic by whom a Cardinal Wiseman is most likely to be assailed: a man young, shallow, and untried; unused to any but paper warfare; blind to the deeper issues of both conformity and dissent, and as much alive to the distinction of dining in a bishop's palace as Bishop Blougram himself. The monologue is spoken on such an occasion, and includes everything which Mr. Gigadibs says, or might say, on his own side of the question. We must therefore treat it as a conversation.

Mr. Gigadibs' reasoning resolves itself into this: "he does not believe in dogmas, and he says so. The Bishop cannot believe in them, but does not say so. He is true to his own convictions: the Bishop is not true to his." And the Bishop's defence is as follows.

"Mr. Gigadibs aims at living his own life: in other words, the ideal life. And this means that he is living no life at all. For a man, in order to live, must make the best of the world he is born in; he must adapt himself to its capabilities as a cabin-passenger to those of his cabin. He must not load himself with moral and intellectual fittings which the ship cannot carry, and which will therefore have to be thrown overboard. He (the Bishop) has chosen to live a real life; and has equipped himself accordingly."

"And, supposing he displays what Mr. Gigadibs considers the courage of his convictions, and flings his dogmas overboard,—what will he have gained? Simply that his uncertainty has changed sides. Believing, he had shocks of unbelief. Disbelieving, he will have shocks of belief (note a fine passage, vol. iv. p. 245): since no certainty in these matters is possible."

"But," says Gigadibs; "on that principle, your belief is worth no more than my unbelief."

"Yes," replies the Bishop, "it is worth much more in practice, if no more in theory. Life cannot be carried on by negations. Least of all will religious negations be tolerated by those we live with. And the more definite the religion affirmed, the better will the purposes of life be advanced by it."

"Not those of a noble life," argues Gigadibs, "nor in the judgment of the best men. You are debasing your standard by living for the many fools who cannot see through you, instead of the wiser few who can."

To which the Bishop replies that he lives according to the nature which God has given him, and which is not so ignoble after all; and that he succeeds with wise men as well as with fools, because they do not see through him either: because their judgment is kept in constant suspension as to whether he can believe what he professes or cannot; whether, in short, he is a knave or a fool. The proposition is vividly illustrated; and a few more obvious sophistries complete this portion of the argument.

Gigadibs still harps upon the fact that conformity cannot do the work of belief; and the Bishop now changes his ground. "He conforms to Christianity in the wish that it may be true; and he thinks that this wish has all the value of belief, and brings him as near to it as the Creator intends. The human mind cannot bear the full light of truth; and it is only in the struggle with doubt and error that its spiritual powers can be developed." He concedes, in short, that he is much more in earnest than he appeared; and the concession is confirmed when he goes on to declare that we live by our instincts and not by our beliefs. This is proved—he alleges—by such a man as Gigadibs, who has no warrant in his belief for living a moral life, and does so because his instincts compel it. Just so the Bishop's instincts compel a believing life. They demand for him a living, self-proving God (here the doctrine of expediency re-asserts itself), and they tell him that the good things which his position confers are the gift of that God, and intended by Him for his enjoyment. "You," he adds, "who live for something which never is, but always is to be, are like a traveller, who casts off, in every country he passes through, the covering that will be too warm for him in the next; and is comfortable nowhen and nowhere."

One of his latest arguments is the best. Gigadibs has said: "If you must hold a dogmatic faith, at all events reform it. Prune its excrescences away."

"And where," he retorts, "am I to stop, when once that process has begun? I put my knife to the liquefaction,[58] and end, like Fichte, by slashing at God Himself. And meanwhile, we have to control a mass of ignorant persons whose obedience is linked to the farthest end of the chain (to the first superstition which I am called upon to lop off). We have here again a question of making the best of our cabin-fittings, the best of the opportunities which life places to our hand." In conclusion, he draws a contemptuous picture of the obscure and inconsequent existence which Gigadibs accepts, as the apostle without genius and without enthusiasm, of what is, if it be one at all, a non-working truth.

Gigadibs is silenced, and, as it proves, impressed; but the Bishop is too clever to be very proud of his victory; for he knows it has been a personal, much more than a real one. His strength has lain chiefly in the assumption (which only the entire monologue can justify or even convey) that his opponent would change places with him if he could; and he knows that in arguing from this point of view he has been only half sincere. His reasonings have been good enough for the occasion. That is the best he can say for them.

MR. SLUDGE, THE MEDIUM.

"Sludge, the Medium," is intended to show that even so ignoble a person as a sham medium may have something to say in his own defence; and so far as argument goes, Sludge defends himself successfully on two separate lines. But in the one case he excuses his imposture: in the other, he in great measure disproves it. And this second part of the monologue has been construed by some readers into a genuine plea for the theory and practice of "spiritualism." Nothing, however, could be more opposed to the general tenour of Mr. Browning's work. He is simply showing us what such a man might say in his own behalf, supposing that the credulity of others had tempted him into a cheat, or that his own credulity had made him a self-deceiver; or, what was equally possible, in even the present case, that both processes had gone on at the same time. The amount of abstract truth which the monologue is intended to convey is in itself small, and more diluted with exaggeration and falsehood than in any other poem of this group.

Sludge has been found cheating in the house of his principal patron and dupe. The raps indicating the presence of a departed mother have been distinctly traced to the medium's toes. There is no lying himself out of it this time, so he offers to confess, on condition that the means of leaving the country are secured to him. There is a little bargaining on this subject, and he then begins:—

"He never meant to cheat. It is the gentlefolk who have teased him into doing it; they would be taken in. If a poor boy like him tells a lie about money, or anything else in which they are 'up,' they are ready enough to thrash it out of him; but when it is something out of their way, like saying: he has had a vision—he has seen a ghost—it's 'Oh, how curious! Tell us all about it. Sit down, my boy. Don't be frightened, &c. &c.;' and so they lead him on. Presently he is obliged to invent. They have found out he is a medium. A medium he has got to be. 'Couldn't you hear this? Didn't you see that? Try again. Other mediums have done it, perhaps you may.' And, of course, the next night he sees and hears what is expected of him."

"He gets well into his work. He sees visions; peeps into the glass ball; makes spirits write and rap, and the rest of it. There is nothing to stop him. If he mixes up Bacon and Cromwell, it only proves that they are both trying to speak through him at once. If he makes Locke talk gibberish, and Beethoven play the Shakers' hymn, and a dozen other such things: 'Oh! the spirits are using him and suiting themselves out of his stock.' When he guesses right, it shows his truth. When he doesn't, it shows his honesty. A hit is good and a miss is better. When he boggles outright, 'he is confused with the phenomena.' And when this has gone on for weeks, and he has been clothed and cosseted, and his patrons have staked their penetration upon him; how is he to turn round and say he has been cheating all the time? 'I should like to see you do it!' It isn't that he wouldn't often have liked to be in the gutter again!"

This amusing account is diversified with expressions of Sludge's hearty contempt for all the men and women he has imposed upon: above all, for their absurd fancy that any scrap of unexpected information must have come to him in a supernatural way. "As if a man could hold his nose out of doors, and one smut out of the millions not stick to it; sit still for a whole day, and one atom of news not drift into his ear!" This idea recurs in various forms.

Well! he owns that he has cheated; and now that he has done so, he is not at all sure that it was all cheating, that there wasn't something real in it after all. "We are all taught to believe that there is another world; and the Bible shows that men have had dealings with it. We are told this can't happen now, because we are under another law. But I don't believe we are under another law. Some men 'see' and others don't, that's the only difference. I see a sign and a message in everything that happens to me; but I take a small message where you want a big one. I am the servant who comes at a tap of his master's knuckle on the wall; you are the servant who only comes when the bell rings. Of course I mistake the sign sometimes. But what does that matter if I sometimes don't mistake? You say: one fact doesn't establish a system. You are like the Indian who picked up a scrap of gold, and never dug for more. You pick up one sparkling fact, and let it go again. I pick up one such, then another and another, and let go the dirt which makes up the rest of life."

Sludge combats the probable objection that the heavenly powers are too great, and he is too small for the kind of services he expects of them. Everything, he delares, serves a small purpose as well as a great one. Moreover, nothing nowadays is small. It is at all events the lesser things and not the greater which are spoken of with awe. The simple creature which is only a sac is the nearest to the creative power; and since also man's filial relation to the Creator is that most insisted on, the more familiar and confiding attitude is the right one.

He lastly declares and illustrates his view that many a truth may stagnate for want of a lie to set it going, and thinks it likely enough that God allows him to imagine he is wielding a sham power, because he would die of fright if he knew it was a real one. He adds one or two somewhat irrelevant items to his defence; then finding his patron unconvinced, discharges on him a volley of abuse, and decides to try his luck elsewhere. "There must be plenty more fools in other parts of the world."

ARGUMENTATIVE POEMS CONTINUED.

(REFLECTIONS.)

To the second class of these poems, which are of the nature of reflections, belong—taking them in the order of their importance:—

"Christmas-Eve and Easter-Day." (1850.) "La Saisiaz." (1878.) "Cleon." ("Men and Women.") (1855.) "An Epistle containing the strange medical experience of Karshish, the Arab physician." ("Men and Women.") (1855.) "Caliban upon Setebos; or Natural Theology in the Island." (Dramatis Personae.) (1864.)

CHRISTMAS-EVE AND EASTER-DAY are two distinct poems, printed under this one head: and each describing a spiritual experience appropriate to the day, and lived through in a vision of Christ. This vision presents itself to the reader as a probable or obvious hallucination, or even a simple dream; but its utterances are more or less dogmatic; they contain much which is in harmony with Mr. Browning's known views; and it is difficult at first sight to regard them in either case as proceeding from an imaginary person who is only feeling his way to the truth. This, however, they prove themselves to be.

The first poem is a narrative. Its various scenes are enacted on a stormy Christmas Eve; and it opens with a humorous description of a little dissenting chapel, supposed to stand at the edge of a common; and of the various types of squalid but self-satisfied humanity which find their spiritual pasture within its walls. The narrator has just "burst out" of it. He never meant to go in. But the rain had forced him to take shelter in its porch, as evening service was about to begin: and the defiant looks of the elect as they pushed past him one by one, had impelled him to assert his rights as a Christian, and push in too. The stupid ranting irreverence of the pastor, and the snuffling satisfaction of the flock, were soon, however, too much for him, and in a very short time he was again—where we find him—out in the fresh night air.

Free from the constraint of the chapel, he takes a more tolerant view of what he has seen and heard there. He gives the preacher credit for having said a great deal that was true, and in the manner most convincing to the already convinced who were assembled to hear him. For his own part, he declares, Nature is his church, as she has been his teacher; and he surrenders himself with a joyful sense of relief to the religious influences of the solitude and the night: his heart glowing with the consciousness of the unseen Love which everywhere appeals to him in the visible power of the Creator. Suddenly a mighty spectacle unfolds itself. The rain and wind have ceased. The barricade of cloud which veiled the moon's passage up the western sky has sunk riven at her feet. She herself shines forth in unbroken radiance, and a double lunar rainbow, in all its spectral grandeur, spans the vault of heaven. There is a sense as of a heavenly presence about to emerge upon the arc. Then the rapture overflows the spectator's brain, and the Master, arrayed in a serpentining garment, appears in the path before him.

But the Face is averted. "Has he despised the friends of Christ? and is this his punishment?" He prostrates himself before Him; grasps the hem of the garment; entreats forgiveness for what was only due to the reverence of his love, to his desire that his Lord should be worshipped in all spiritual beauty and truth.

The Face turns towards him in a flood of light. The vesture encloses him in its folds, and he is borne onwards till he finds himself at Rome, and in front of St. Peter's Church. He sees the interior without entering. It swarms with worshippers, packed into it as in the hollow of a hive. All there is breathless expectation, ecstatic awe; for the mystery of the mass is in process of consummation, and in another moment the tinkling of the silver bell will announce to the prostrate crowd the actual presence of their Lord; will open to them the vision of the coming heavenly day. Here, too, is faith, though obscured in a different manner. Here, too, is love: the love which in bygone days hurled intellect from its throne, and trampled on the glories of ancient art—which instructed its votaries to feel blindly for its new and all-sufficient life, as does the babe for its mother's breast—which consecrates even now the deepest workings of the heart and mind to the service of God. And Christ enters the Basilica, into which, after a momentary doubt, he himself follows Him.

They float onwards again, and again he is left alone but for the hem of the garment; for Christ has entered the lecture-hall of a rationalistic German professor, and into this He will not bid His disciple follow Him; but the interior of the building is open, as before, to the disciple's mental sight. The lecturer is refreshing his hearers' convictions by an inquiry into the origin of the Christian Myth and the foundation of fact on which it rests; and he arrives at the conclusion that Christ was a man, but whose work proved Him all but Divine; His Gospel quite other than those who heard it believed, but in value nearly the same.

The spectator begins musing on the anomalies of this view. "Christ, only a man, is to be reverenced as something more. On what ground?—The ground of intellect?—Yet he teaches us only what a hundred others have taught, without claiming to be worshipped on account of it—The ground of goodness?—But goodness is due from each man to his fellows; it is no title to sovereignty over them." And he thus sums up his own conviction. "He may be called a saint who best teaches us to keep our lives pure; he a poet whose insight dims that of his fellow-men. He is no less than this, though guided by an instinct no higher than that of the bat; no more, though inspired by God. All gifts are from God, and no multiplying of gifts can convert the creature into the Creator. Between Him who created goodness, and made it binding on the conscience of man: and him who reduces it to a system, of which the merits may be judged by man: lies the interval which separates Nature, who decrees the circulation of the blood, from the observer Harvey, who discovered it. One man is Christ, another Pilate; beyond their dust is the Divinity of God."

"And the 'God-function' with regard to virtue was first to impress its truths on every human breast; and secondly, to give a motive for carrying them out; and this motive could be given only by one, who, being life's Lord, died for the sake of men. Whoever conceives this love, and takes this proof to his heart, has found a new motive, and has also gained a truth."

But Christ lingers within the hall "Is there something after all in that lecture which finds an echo in the Christian soul? Yes, even there. There is the ghost of love, if nothing more, in the utterance of that virgin-minded man, with the 'wan, pure look,' and the frail life burning itself away in the striving after truth. For his critical tests have reduced the pearl of price to ashes, and yet left it, in his judgment, a pearl; and he bids his followers gather up their faith as an almost perfect whole; go home and venerate the myth on which he has experimented, adore the man whom he has proved to be one. And if his learning itself be loveless, it may claim our respect when a tricksy demon has let it loose on the Epistles of St. Paul, as it claims our gratitude when expended on secular things. It is at least better than the ignorance which hates the word of God, if it cannot wholly accept it; while these, his disciples, who renounce the earth, and chain up the natural man on a warrant no more divine than this, are by so much better than he who at this moment judges them. Let them carry the doctrine by which they think themselves carried, as does the child his toy-horse. He will not deride nor disturb them."

The subject of these experiences has reached a state of restful indifference. "He will adhere to his own belief, and be tolerant towards his neighbour's: since the two only differ as do two different refractions of a single ray of light. He will study, instead of criticizing, the different creeds which are fused into one before the universal Father's throne."

But this is not the lesson he has been intended to learn. The storm, breaking out afresh, catches up and dashes him to the ground, while the vesture, which he had let slip during his last musings, recedes swiftly from his sight. Then he knows that there is one "way," and he knows also that he may find it; and in this new conviction he regains his hold of the garment, and at one bound has reentered the little chapel, which he seems never indeed to have left. The sermon is ending, and he has heard it all. He still appreciates its faults of matter and manner; but he no longer rejects the draught of living water, because it comes to him with some taste of earth. What the draught can do is evidenced by those wrecks of humanity which are finding renewal there. There his choice shall rest; for, nowhere else, so he seems to conclude, is the message of Love so simply and so directly conveyed.

A great part of the narrative is written in a humorous tone, which shows itself, not only in thought and word, but in a jolting measure, and even grotesque rhymes. The speaker desires it to be understood that he is not the less in earnest for this apparent "levity;" and the levity is quite consistent with religious seriousness in such a person as the poem depicts. But, as I have shown, it is alone enough to prove that the author is not depicting himself. The poem reflects him more or less truly in the doctrine of Divine Love, the belief in personal guidance, and the half-contemptuous admiration with which the speaker regards those who will mortify the flesh in obedience to a Christ-man. But it belies the evidence of his whole work when, as in Section XVII., it represents moral truth as either innate to the human spirit, or directly revealed to it; and we shall presently notice a still greater discrepancy which it shares with its companion poem.[59]

"Easter-Day"[60] deals with the deeper issues of scepticism and faith; and opens with a dialogue in which the two opposite positions are maintained. Both speakers start from the belief in God, and the understanding that Christianity is unproved; but the one accepts it in faith: the other regards it as, for the time being, negatived.

The man of faith begins by exclaiming, how hard it is to be (practically) a Christian; and how disproportionate to our endeavour is our success in becoming so. The sceptic replies that to his mind the only difficulty is belief. "Let the least of God's commands be proved authentic: and only an idiot would shrink from martyrdom itself, with the certain bliss that would reward it." The man of faith, who is clearly the greater pessimist of the two, thinks the world too full of suffering to be placed, by any knowledge, beyond the reach of faith—beyond the necessity of being taken upon trust. And his adversary concedes that absolute knowledge would—where it was applicable—destroy its own end. In social life, for instance, it would do away with all those acts of faith, those instinctive judgments and feelings, which are the essence of life. But he thinks one may fairly desire a better touchstone for the purposes of God than human judgment or feeling; and that, if we cannot know them with scientific certainty, one must wish the balance of probability to lie clearly on one side.

The man of faith is of opinion that this much of proof exists for everyone who chooses to seek it. "The burning question is how we are to shape our lives. For himself he is impelled to follow the Christian precept, and renounce the world." The sceptic denies that God demands such a sacrifice, and sees only man's ingratitude in the impression that He does so. The man of faith admits that it would be hard to have made the sacrifice, and be rewarded only by death; while the many unbelievers who have virtually made it for one or other of the hobbies which he describes, have at least its success to repay them. But even so, he continues, he would have chosen the better part; for he would have chosen Hope,—the hope which aspires to a loftier end. "His opponent, it is true, hopes also; but his hopes are blind. They are not those of St. Paul, but those which, according to AEschylus, the Titan gave to men, to spice therewith the meal of life, and prevent their devouring it in too bitter haste; and if hope—or faith—is meant to be something more than a relish...!"

The opponent protests against this attack upon the "trusting ease" of his existence, and declares that his interlocutor is not doing as he would be done by. Whereupon the first speaker relates something which befell him on the Easter-Eve of three years ago, and which startled him out of precisely such a condition.

He was crossing the common, lately spoken of by their friend, and musing on life and the last judgment: when the following question occured to him: what would be his case if he died and were judged at that very moment? "From childhood," he continues, "I have always insisted on knowing the worst; and I now plunged straight into the recesses of my conscience, prepared for what spectre might be hidden there. But all I encountered was common sense, which did its best to assure me that I had nothing to fear: that, considering all the difficulties of life, I had kept my course through it as straight, and advanced as rapidly as could be expected." (More reflections, half serious half playful ensue.) "Suddenly I threw back my head, and saw the midnight sky on fire. It was a sea of fire, now writhing and surging; now sucked back into the darkness, now overflowing it till its rays poured downwards on to the earth. I felt that the Judgment Day had come. I felt also, in that supreme moment of consciousness, that I had chosen the world, and must take my stand upon the choice. I defended it with the courage of despair. 'God had framed me to appreciate the beauties of life; I could not put the cup untasted aside; He had not plainly commanded me to do so; He knew how I had struggled to resign myself to leaving it half full; Hell could be no just punishment for such a mood as that.'"

"Another burst of fire. A brief ecstasy which confounded earth and heaven. Then ashes everywhere. And amid the wreck—like the smoke pillared over Sodom—mantled in darkness as in a magnific pall which turned to grey the blackness of the night—pity mingled with judgment in the intense meditation in which his gaze was fixed—HE stood before me. I fell helpless at His feet. He spoke:

'The judgment is past; dispensed to every man as though he alone were its object. Thy sin has been the love of earth. Thou hast preferred the finite to the infinite—the fleshly joys to the spiritual. Be this choice thy punishment. Thou art shut out from the heaven of spirit. The earth is thine for ever.'"

"My first impulse was one of delighted gratitude. 'All the wonders—the treasures of the natural world, are mine?'"

"'Thine,' the Vision replied,'if such shows suffice thee; if thou wilt exchange eternity for the equivalent of a single rose, flung to thee over the barrier of that Eden from which thou art for ever excluded.'"

"'Not so,' I answered. 'If the beauties of nature are thus deceptive, my choice shall be with Art—art which imparts to nature the value of human life. I will seek man's impress in statuary, in painting....'"

"'Obtain that,' the Vision again rebuked me, 'the one form with its single act, the one face with its single look: the failure and the shame of all true artists who felt the whole while they could only reproduce the part.'"

And again the Vision expatiates on the limited nature of the earthly existence—the limited horizon which reduces man to the condition of the lizard pent up in a chamber in the rock—the destined shattering of the prison wall which will quicken the stagnant sense to the impressions of a hitherto unknown world—the spiritual hunger with which the saints, content in their earthly prison, still hail the certainty of deliverance.

"'Let me grasp at Mind,' I then entreated,—'whirl enraptured through its various spheres. Yet no. I know what thou wilt say. Mind, too, is of the earth; and all its higher inspirations proceed from another world—are recognized as doing so by those who receive them. I will catch no more at broken reeds. I will relinquish the world, and take Love for my portion. I will love on, though love too may deceive me, remembering its consolations in the past, struggling for its rewards in the future.'"

"'AT LAST,' the Vision exclaimed, 'thou choosest LOVE. And hast thou not seen that the mightiness of Love was curled inextricably about the power and the beauty which attached thee to the world—that through them it has vainly striven to clasp thee? Abide by thy choice. Take the show for the name's sake. Reject the reality as manifested in Him who created, and then died for thee. Reject that Tale, as more fitly invented by the sons of Cain—as proving too much love on the part of God.'"

"Terrified and despairing, I cowered before Him, imploring the remission of the sentence, praying that the old life might be restored to me, with its trials, its limitations; but with their accompanying hope that it might lead to the life everlasting."

"When I 'lived' again, the plain was silvered over with dew; the dawn had broken."

Looking back on this experience, the narrator is disposed to regard it as having been a dream. It has nevertheless been a turning-point in his existence; for it has taught him to hear in every blessing which attaches him to the earth, a voice which bids him renounce it. And though he still finds it hard to be a Christian, and is often discouraged by the fact, he welcomes his consciousness of this: since it proves that he is not spiritually stagnating—not cut off from the hope of heaven.

Mr. Browning is, for the time being, outside the discussion. His own feelings might equally have dictated some of the arguments on either side; and although he silences the second speaker, he does not mean to prove him in the wrong. He is at one with the first speaker, when he suggests that certainty in matters of belief is no more to be desired than to be attained; but that personage regards uncertainty as justifying presumptions of a dogmatic kind; while its value to Mr. Browning lies precisely in its right to exclude them. And, again; while the value of spiritual conflict is largely emphasized in his works, he disagrees with the man of faith in "Easter-Day" as with the dogmatic believer in "Christmas-Eve," as to the manner in which it is to be carried on. According to these the spirit fights against life: according to him it fights in, and by means of, its opportunities. From his point of view human experience is an education: from theirs it is a snare.

So much of personal truth as these poems contain will be found re-stated in "La Saisiaz," written twenty-eight years later, and which impresses on it the seal of maturer thought and more direct expression.

"LA SAISIAZ" (Savoyard for "The Sun") is the name of a villa among the mountains near Geneva, where Mr. Browning, with his sister and a friend of many years standing, spent part of the summer of 1877. The poem so christened is addressed to this friend, and was inspired by her death: which took place with appalling suddenness while they were there together. The shock of the event re-opened the great questions which had long before been solved by Mr. Browning's mind: and within sight of the new-made grave, he re-laid the foundations of his faith, that there is another life for the soul.

The argument is marked by a strong sense of the personal and therefore relative character of human experience and knowledge. It accepts the "subjective synthesis" of some non-theistic thinkers, though excluding, of course, the negations on which this rests; and its greater maturity is shown by the philosophic form in which the author's old religious doctrine of personal (or subjective) truth has been re-cast. He assumes here, it is true, that God and the soul exist. He considers their existence as given, in the double fact that there is something in us which thinks or perceives,[61] and something outside and beyond us, which is perceived by it; and this subject and object, which he names the Soul and God, are to him beyond the necessity of farther proof, because beyond the reach of it. He might therefore challenge for his conclusions something more than an optional belief. He guards himself, nevertheless, against imposing the verdict of his own experience on any other man: and both the question and the answer into which the poem resolves itself begin for his own spirit and end so.