Chapter 13

THE INTERPRETER OF LIFE.

His voice sounds loudest and also clearest for the things that as a race we like best; ... the fascination of faith, the acceptance of life, the respect for its mysteries, the endurance of its charges, the vitality of the will, the validity of character, the beauty of action, the seriousness, above all, of great human passion.

--HENRY JAMES.

I.

The trend of speculative thought in Europe during the century which preceded the emergence of Browning may be described as a progressive integration along several distinct lines of the great regions of existence which common beliefs, resting on a still vigorous medievalism, thrust apart. Nature was brought into nearer relation with Man, and Man with God, and God with Nature and with Man. In one aspect, not the least striking, it was a "return to Nature"; economists from Adam Smith to Malthus worked out the laws of man's dependence upon the material world; poets and idealists from Rousseau to Wordsworth discovered in a life "according to nature" the ideal for man; sociologists from Hume to Bentham, and from Burke to Coleridge, applied to human society conceptions derived from physics or from biology, and emphasised all that connects it with the mechanical aggregate of atoms, or with the organism.

In another aspect it was a return to God. If the scientific movement tended to subjugate man to a Nature in which, as Laplace said, there was no occasion for God, Wordsworth saw both in Nature and in man a spirit "deeply interfused"; and the great contemporary school of German philosophy set all ethical thinking in a new perspective by its original handling of the old thesis that duty is a realisation of the will of God.

But, in yet another aspect, it was a return to Man. If Man was brought nearer to Nature and to God, it was to a Nature and to a God which had themselves acquired, for him, closer affinities with humanity. He divined, with Wordsworth, his own joy, with Shelley his own love, in the breathing flower; he saw with Hegel in the Absolute Spirit a power vitally present in all man's secular activities and pursuits. And these interpreting voices of poets and philosophers were but the signs of less articulate sensibilities far more widely diffused, which were in effect bringing about a manifold expansion and enrichment of normal, mental, and emotional life. Scott made the romantic past, Byron and Goethe, in their different ways, the Hellenic past, a living element of the present; and Fichte, calling upon his countrymen to emancipate themselves, in the name not of the "rights of men" but of the genius of the German people, uttered the first poignant recognition of national life as a glorious vesture arraying the naked body of the individual member, not an aggregate of other units competing with or controlling him.

In this complicated movement Browning played a very notable and memorable part. But it was one of which the first generation of his readers was entirely, and he himself to a great extent, unconscious, and which his own language often disguises or conceals. Of all the poets of the century he had the clearest and most confident vision of the working of God in the world, the most buoyant faith in the divine origin and destiny of man. Half his poetry is an effort to express, in endless variety of iteration, the nearness of God, to unravel the tangled circumstance of human life, and disclose everywhere infinity enmeshed amid the intricacies of the finite.

On the side of Nature his interest was less keen and his vision less subtle. His "visitations of the living God" came to him by other avenues than those opened by Wordsworth's ecstatic gaze, "in love and holy passion," upon outward beauty. Only limited classes of natural phenomena appealed to him powerfully at all, the swift and sudden upheavals and catastrophes, the ardours and accesses, the silence that thrills with foreboding and suspense. For continuities, both of the mechanical and the organic kind, he lacked sense. We have seen how his eye fastened everywhere upon the aspects of life least suggestive of either iron uniformity or harmonious evolution. The abrupt demarcations which he everywhere imposes or discovers were the symptom of a primitive ingrained atomism of thought which all the synthetic strivings of a God-intoxicated intellect could not entirely overcome.

II.

His metaphysical thinking thus became an effort to reconcile an all-embracing synthesis with a sense of individuality as stubborn and acute as ever man had. Body and Soul, Nature and Spirit, Man and God, Good and Evil, he presented now as co-operative or alien, now as hostile antagonists or antitheses. That their opposition is not ultimate, that evil is at bottom a form of good, and all finite existence a passing mode of absolute being, was a conviction towards which his thought on one side constantly strove, which it occasionally touched, but in which it could not securely rest. Possessed by the thirst for absoluteness, he vindicated the "infinity" of God and the soul by banishing all the "finiteness" of sense into a limbo of illusion. The infinite soul, imprisoned for life in a body which at every moment clogs its motion and dims its gaze, fights its way through the shows of sense,[124] "which ever proving false still promise to be true," until death opens the prison-gate and restores the captive to its infinity. Sorrow and evil were stains imposed by Time upon the white radiance of an eternal being; and Browning sometimes rose, though with a less sure step, to the dizzier height of holding Time itself to be unreal, and the soul's earthly life not an episode in an endless sequence, but a dream of progressive change imposed upon a changeless and timeless essence.

[Footnote 124: _Fifine at the Fair._]

But there were, as has been said, elements in Browning's mental make which kept this abstract and formal theory, fortified though it was by theological prepossessions, in check. His most intense consciousness, his most definite grip upon reality, was too closely bound up with the collisions and jostlings, the limits and angularities, of the world of the senses, for the belief in their illusoriness easily to hold its ground. This "infinite soul" palpably had its fullest and richest existence in the very heart of finite things. Wordsworth had turned for "intimations of immortality" to the remembered intuitions of childhood; Browning found them in every pang of baffled aspiration and frustrate will. Hence there arose in the very midst of this realm of illusion a new centre of reality; the phantoms took on solid and irrefragable existence, and refused to take to flight when the cock-crow announced that "Time was done, Eternity begun."

Body and Time had in general too strong a grip upon him to be resolved into illusion. His actual pictures of departed souls suggest a state very unlike that reversion of the infinite spirit which had been thrust upon Matter and distended in Time, to the timeless Infinitude it had forgone. It does not escape from Time, but only passes on from the limited section of Time known as life, into another section, without limit, known as Eternity. And if it escapes from Body, at least Browning represents his departed soul more boldly than any other modern poet in a garb of flesh. Evelyn Hope, when she wakens in another world, will find her unknown lover's leaf in her hand, and "remember, and understand."

And just as Matter and Time invade Browning's spiritual eternity, so his ideal of conduct for man while still struggling with finite conditions casts its shadow on to the state of immortal release. Two conceptions, in fact, of the life after death, corresponding to divergent aspects of his thought, contend in Browning's mind. Now it is a state of emancipation from earthly limits,--when the "broken arcs" become "perfect rounds" and "evil" is transformed into "so much good more," and "reward and repose" succeed the "struggles"[125] by which they have been won. But at times he startles the devout reader by foreshadowing not a sudden transformation but a continuation of the slow educative process of earth in a succession of preliminary heavens before the consummate state is reached. "Progress," in short, was too deeply ingrained in Browning's conception of what was ultimately good, and therefore ultimately real, not to find entrance into his heaven, were it only by some casual backdoor of involuntary intuition. Even in that more gracious state "achievement lacked a gracious somewhat"[126] to his indomitable fighting instinct.

[Footnote 125: _Saul_, xvii.]

[Footnote 126: _One Word More_.]

"Soul resteth not, and mine must still advance,"

he had said in _Pauline_, and the soul that ceased to advance ceased for Browning, in his most habitual mood, to exist. The "infinity" of the soul was not so much a gift as a destiny, a power of hungering for ever after an ideal completeness which it was indefinitely to pursue and to approach, but not to reach. Far from having to await a remote emancipation to become completely itself, the soul's supremest life was in its hours of heroic stress, when it kept some dragon of unbelief quiet underfoot, like Michael,

"Who stands calm, just because he feels it writhe."

It was at this point that the athletic energy of Browning's nature told most palpably upon the complexion of his thought. It did not affect its substance, but it altered the bearing of the parts, giving added weight to all its mundane and positive elements. It gave value to every challenging obstruction akin to that which allured him to every angular and broken surface, to all the "evil" which balks our easy perception of "good."[127] Above all, by idealising effort, it created a new ethical end which every strenuous spirit could not merely strive after but fulfil, every day of its mortal life; and thus virtually transferred the focus of interest and importance from "the next world's reward and repose" to the vital "struggles in this."

[Footnote 127: _Bishop Blougram_.]

Browning's characteristic conception of the nature and destiny of man was thus not a compact and consistent system, but a group of intuitions nourished from widely different regions of soul and sense, and undergoing, like the face of a great actor, striking changes of expression without material change of feature under the changing incidence of stress and glow. The ultimate gist of his teaching was presented through the medium of conceptions proper to another school of thought, which, like a cryptogram, convey one meaning but express another, He had to work with categories like finite and infinite, which the atomic habits of his mind thrust into exclusive opposition; whereas the profoundest thing that he had to say was that the "infinite" has to be achieved in and through the finite, that just the most definitely outlined action, the most individual purpose, the most sharply expressive thought, the most intense and personal passion, are the points or saliency in life which most surely catch the radiance of eternity they break. The white light was "blank" until shattered by refraction; and Browning is less Browning when he glories in its unbroken purity than when he rejoices in the prism, whose obstruction alone

"shows aright The secret of a sunbeam, breaks its light Into the jewelled bow from blankest white."[128]

[Footnote 128: _Deaf and Dumb_.]

We have now to watch Browning's efforts to interpret this profound and intimate persuasion of his in terms of the various conceptions at his disposal.[129]

[Footnote 129: On the matter of this section cf. Mr A.C. Pigou's acute and lucid discussions, _Browning as a Religious Teacher_, ch. viii. and ix.]

III.

Beside the soul, there was something else that "stood sure" for Browning--namely, God. Here, too, a theological dogma, steeped in his ardent mind, acquired a new potency for the imagination, and a more vital nexus with man and nature than any other poet of the century had given it. And here, too, the mystic and the positive strains of Browning's genius wrought together, impressing themselves equally in that wonderful Browningesque universe in which every germ seems to be itself a universe "needing but a look to burst into immense life," and infinity is ever at hand, behind a closed door. The whole of his theology was an attempt to express consistently two convictions, rarely found of the same intensity in the same brain, of the divineness of the universe and the individuality of man.

The mechanical Creator of Paley and the deists could never have satisfied him. From the first he "saw God everywhere." There was in him the stuff of which the "God-intoxicated" men are made, and he had moments, like that expressed in one of his most deliberate and emphatic personal utterances, in which all existence seemed to be the visible Face of God--

"Become my universe that feels and knows."[130]

[Footnote 130: _Epilogue_.]

He clearly strained towards the sublime pantheistic imaginings of the great poets of the previous generation,--Wordsworth's "Something far more deeply interfused," Shelley's "One spirit's plastic stress," and Goethe's _Erdgeist_, who weaves the eternal vesture of God at the loom of Time. The dying vision of Paracelsus is as sublime as these, and marks Browning's nearest point of approach to the ways of thought they embody. In all the vitalities of the world, from the uncouth play of the volcano to the heaven-and-earth transfiguring mind of man, God was present, sharing their joy. But even here the psychological barrier is apparent, against which all the surge of pantheistic impulse in Browning broke in vain. This God of manifold joys was sharply detached from his universe; he was a sensitive and sympathetic spectator, not a pervading spirit. In every direction human personality opposed rigid frontiers which even the infinite God could not pass, and no poet less needed the stern warning which he addressed to German speculation against the "gigantic stumble"[131] of making them one. The mystic's dream of seeing all things in God, the Hegelian thesis of a divine mind realising itself in and through the human, found no lodgment in a consciousness of mosaic-like clearness dominated by the image of an incisively individual and indivisible self. In later life the sharp lines which he drew from the first about individual personality became a ring-fence within which each man "cultivated his plot,"[132] managing independently as he might the business of his soul. The divine love might wind inextricably about him,[133] the dance of plastic circumstance at the divine bidding impress its rhythms upon his life,[134] he retained his human identity inviolate, a "point of central rock" amid the welter of the waves.[135] His love might be a "spark from God's fire," but it was his own, to use as he would; he "stood on his own stock of love and power."[136]

[Footnote 131: _Christmas-Eve._]

[Footnote 132: _Ferishtah_.]

[Footnote 133: _Easter-Day_.]

[Footnote 134: _Rabbi ben Ezra_.]

[Footnote 135: _Epilogue_.]

[Footnote 136: _Christmas-Eve_.]

IV.

In this sharp demarcation of man's being from God's, Browning never faltered. On the contrary, the individualising animus which there found expression impelled him to raise more formidable barriers about man, and to turn the ring-fence which secured him from intrusion into a high wall which cut off his view. In other words, the main current of Browning's thought sets strongly towards a sceptical criticism of human knowledge. At the outset he stands on the high _à priori_ ground of Plato. Truth in its fulness abides in the soul, an "imprisoned splendour," which intellect quickened by love can elicit, which moments of peculiar insight, deep joy, and sorrow, and the coming on of death, can release. But the gross flesh hems it in, wall upon wall, "a baffling and perverting carnal mesh,"[137] the source of all error. The process of discovery he commonly conceived as an advance through a succession of Protean disguises of truth, each "one grade above its last presentment,"[138] until, at the rare moment, by the excepted eye, the naked truth was grasped. But Browning became steadily more reluctant to admit that these fortunate moments ever occurred, that the Proteus was ever caught. Things would be known to the soul as they were known to God only when it was emancipated by death. Infinity receded into an ever more inaccessible remoteness from the finite. For the speaker in _Christmas-Eve_ man's mind was the image of God's, reflecting trace for trace his absolute knowledge; for Francis Furini the bare fact of his own existence is all he knows, a narrow rock-spit of knowledge enisled in a trackless ocean of ignorance. Thus for Browning, in differing moods and contexts, the mind of man becomes now a transparent pane, opening directly upon the truth as God sees it, now a coloured lens, presenting truth in blurred refraction, now an opaque mirror idly bodying forth his futile and illusive dreams.

[Footnote 137: _Paracelsus_.]

[Footnote 138: _Fifine_, cxxiv.]

These conflicting views were rooted in different elements of Browning's many-sided nature. His vivid intuition of his own self-consciousness formed a standing type of seemingly absolute immediate knowledge, to which he stubbornly clung. When the optimism of the "Head" was discredited, passion-fraught instinct, under the name of the Heart, came to the rescue, and valiantly restored its authority. On the other hand, a variety of subtle attractions drew him on to give "illusion" a wider and wider scope. Sheer joy in battle had no small share. The immortal and infinite soul, projected among the shows of sense, could not be expected to do its part worthily if it saw through them: it had to believe its enemies real enemies, and its warfare a rational warfare; it had to accept time and place, and good and evil, as the things they seem. To have a perfectly clear vision of truth as it is in God was to be dazzled with excess of light, to grope and fumble about the world as it is for man, like the risen Lazarus--

"witless of the size, the sum, The value in proportion of all things, Or whether it be little or be much."

The mystic who withdrew from the struggle with phantoms to gaze upon eternal realities was himself the victim of the worst illusions; while the hero who plunged into that struggle was training his soul, and thereby getting a grip upon ultimate truth. Thus Browning's passionate and reiterated insistence upon the illusiveness of knowledge was rooted in his inalienable faith in the worth and reality of moral conflict. The infinite soul realised itself most completely when it divested itself of the trappings of its infinity, and it worked out God's law most implicitly when it ignored God's point of view.

V.

Such a result could not be finally satisfying, and Browning's thought fastened with increasing predilection and exclusiveness upon one intense kind of vitality in which the hard antagonism of good and evil seems to be transcended, and that complete immersion of the soul in a nature not its own appears not as self-abnegation but as self-fulfilment. He did not himself use this phraseology about Love; it is that of a school to which he, at no time, it would seem, made any conscious approach. But it is clear that he found in the mysterious union and transfusion of diverse being which takes place in Love, as Hegel found in the union of opposites, the clue to the nature of reality, the very core of the heart of life. He did not talk of the union of opposites, but of "infinitude wreaking itself upon the finite." God himself would have been less divine, and so, as God, less real, had he remained aloof in lonely infinity instead of uniting himself with all creation in that love which "moves the world and the other stars"; the "loving worm," to quote his pregnant saying once more, were diviner than a loveless God. We saw how his theology is double-faced between the pantheistic yearning to find God everywhere and the individualist's resolute maintenance of the autonomy of man. God's Love, poured through the world, inextricably blended with all its power and beauty, thrilled with answering rapture by all its joy, and striving to clasp every human soul, provided the nearest approach to a solution of that conflict which Browning's mechanical metaphysics permitted. One comprehends, then, the profound significance for him of the actual solution apparently presented by Christian theology. In one supreme, crucial example the union of God with man in consummate love had actually, according to Christian belief, taken place, and Browning probably uttered his own faith when he made St John declare that

"The acknowledgment of God in Christ Acknowledged by thy reason solves for thee All questions in the earth and out of it."[139]

[Footnote 139: _Death in the Desert_. These lines, however "dramatic," mark with precision the extent, and the limits, of Browning's Christian faith. The evidence of his writings altogether confirms Mrs Orr's express statement that Christ was for him, from first to last, "a manifestation of divine love," by human form accessible to human love; but not the Redeemer of the orthodox creed.]

For to acknowledge this was to recognise that love was divine, and that mankind at large, in virtue of their gift of love, shared in God's nature, finite as they were; that whatever clouds of intellectual illusion they walked in, they were lifted to a hold upon reality as unassailable as God's own by the least glimmer of love. Whatever else is obscure or elusive in Browning, he never falters in proclaiming the absolute and flawless worth of love. The lover cannot, like the scientific investigator, miss his mark, he cannot be baffled or misled; the object of his love may be unworthy, or unresponsive, but in the mere act of loving he has his reward.

"Knowledge means Ever renewed assurance by defeat That victory is somehow still to reach; But love is victory, the prize itself."[140]

[Footnote 140: _Pillar of Sebzevir_.]

This aspect of Browning's doctrine of love, though it inspired some of his most exalted lyrics, throws into naked relief the dearth of social consciousness in Browning's psychology. Yet it is easy to see that the absolute self-sufficiency into which he lifted the bare fact of love was one of the mainsprings of his indomitable optimism. In Love was concentrated all that emancipates man from the stubborn continuities of Nature. It started up in corrupt or sordid hearts, and swept all their blind velleities into its purifying flame of passion--

"Love is incompatible With falsehood,--purifies, assimilates All other passions to itself."[141]

[Footnote 141: _Colombe's Birthday_.]

And the glimmer of soul that lurked in the veriest act of humanity the breath of love could quicken into pervading fire.[142] Love was only the most intense and potent of those sudden accesses of vitality which are wont, in Browning, suddenly to break like a flame from the straw and dross of a brutish or sophisticated consciousness, confounding foresight and calculation, but giving endless stimulus to hope. Even in the contact with sin and sorrow Browning saw simply the touch of Earth from which Love, like Antaeus, sprang into fuller being; they were the "dread machinery" devised to evolve man's moral qualities, "to make him love in turn and be beloved."[143]

[Footnote 142: _Fifine_.]

[Footnote 143: _The Pope_.]

But with all its insurgent emancipating vehemence Love was for Browning, also, the very ground of stable and harmonious existence, "the energy of integration," as Myers has finely said, "which makes a cosmos of the sum of things," the element of permanence, of law. True, its harmony was of the kind which admits discord and eschews routine; its law that which is of eternity and not of yesterday; its stability that which is only assured and fortified by the chivalry that plucks a Pompilia, or an Alcestis, from their legal doom. The true anarchist, as he sometimes dared to hint, was the cold unreason of duty which, as in _Bifurcation_, keeps lovers meant for each other apart. It is by love that the soul solves the problem--so tragically insoluble to poor Sordello--of "fitting to the finite its infinity," and satisfying the needs of Time and Eternity at once;[144] for Love, belonging equally to both spheres, can bring the purposes of body and soul into complete accord:

"Like yonder breadth of watery heaven, a bay And that sky-space of water, ray for ray And star for star, one richness where they mixed, As this and that wing of an angel, fixed Tumultuary splendours."

[Footnote 144: _Sordello, sub fin_.]

In a life thus thrilled into harmony heaven was already realised on earth; and Eternity itself could but continue what Time had begun. Death, for such a soul, was not an awaking, for it had not slept; nor an emancipation, for it was already free; nor a satisfying of desire, for the essence of Love was to want; it was only a point at which the "last ride together" might pass into an eternal "riding on"--

"With life for ever old, yet new, Changed not in kind but in degree, The instant made Eternity,-- And Heaven just prove that I and she Ride, ride together, for ever ride!"

VI.

No intellectual formula, no phrase, no word, can express the whole purport of those intense and intimate fusions of sensation, passion, and thought which we call poetic intuition, and which all strictly poetic "philosophy" or "criticism of life" is an attempt to interpret and articulate. Browning was master of more potent weapons of the strictly intellectual kind than many poets of his rank, and his work is charged with convictions which bear upon philosophic problems and involve philosophic ideas. But they were neither systematic deductions from a speculative first principle nor fragments of tradition eclectically pieced together; by their very ambiguity and Protean many-sidedness they betrayed that, however tinged they might be on the surface with speculative or traditional phrases, the nourishing roots sprang from the heart of joyous vitality in a primitive and original temperament. In Browning, if in any man, Joy sang that "strong music of the soul" which re-creates all the vitalities of the world, and endows us with "a new Earth and a new Heaven." And if joy was the root of Browning's intuition, and life "in widest commonalty spread" the element in which it moved, Love, the most intimate, intense, and marvellous of all vital energies, was the ideal centre towards which it converged. In Love, as Browning understood it, all those elementary joys of his found satisfaction. There he saw the flawless purity which rejoiced him in Pompilia's soul, which "would not take pollution, ermine-like armed from dishonour by its own soft snow." There he saw sudden incalculableness of power abruptly shattering the continuities of routine, throwing life instantly into a new perspective, and making barren trunks break into sudden luxuriance like the palm; or, again, intimately interpenetrating soul with soul,--"one near one is too far"; or entangling the whole creation in the inextricable embrace of God.

But if all his instincts and imaginative proclivities found their ideal in Love, they also insensibly impressed their own character upon his conception of it. The "Love" which has so deep a significance for Browning is a Love steeped in the original complexion of his mind, and bearing the impress of the singular position which he occupies in the welter of nineteenth-century intellectual history. His was one of the rare natures in which revolutionary liberalism and spiritual reaction, encountering in nearly equal strength, seem to have divided their principles and united their forces. Psychologically, the one had its strongest root in the temper which reasons, and values ideas; the other in that which feels, and values emotions. Sociologically, the one stood for individualism, the other for solidarity. In their ultimate presuppositions, the one inclined to the standpoint of the senses and experience; the other to a mostly vague and implicit idealism. In their political ideals, the one strove for progress, and for freedom as its condition; the other for order, and for active legal intervention as its safeguard.

In two of these four points of contrast, Browning's temperament ranged him more or less decisively on the Liberal side. Individualist to the core, he was conspicuously deficient in the kind of social mind which makes a poet the voice of an organised community, a nation, or a class. Progress, again, was with him even more an instinct than a principle; and he became the _vates sacer_ of unsatisfied aspiration. On the other hand, that he was not without elements of the temper which makes for order was shown by his punctilious, almost eager, observance of social conventions, and, in the last years of his life, by the horror excited in him by what he took to be the anarchy of Women's Suffrage and Home Rule. In the other two fields of opposition he belonged decisively to the spiritual and emotional reaction. Spirit was for him the ultimate fact of existence, the soul and God were the indissoluble realities. But his idealism was not potent and pure enough either to control the realist suggestions of his strong senses and energetic temperament, or to interpret them in its own terms. And in the conflict between reason and feeling, or, as he put it, between "head" and "heart," as sources of insight, and factors in human advancement, feeling found its most brilliant champion in Browning, and its most impressive statement in his doctrine of Love. An utilitarian reduction of welldoing to a distribution of properly calculated doses of satisfaction he dismissed with a scorn as derisive as Carlyle's; "general utility" was a favourite of "that old stager the devil."[145] Yet no critic of intellect ever used intellect more vigorously, and no preacher of the rights of the heart ever dealt less in flaccid sentiment. Browning was Paracelsus as well as Aprile, and sharply as he chose to dissever "Knowledge" and "Love," Love was for him never a foe of intellect, but a more gifted comrade who does the same work more effectively, who dives deeper, soars higher, welds more potently into more enduring unities, and flings upon dry hearts with a more infallible magic the seed of more marvellous new births. Browning as the poet of Love is thus the last, and assuredly not the least, in the line which handed on the torch of Plato. The author of the _Phoedrus_ saw in the ecstasy of Love one of the avenues to the knowledge of the things that indeed are. To Dante the supreme realities were mirrored in the eyes of Beatrice. For Shelley Love was interwoven through all the mazes of Being; it was the source of the strength by which man masters his gods. To all these masters of idealism Browning's vision of Love owed something of its intensity and of its range. With the ethical Love of Jesus and St Paul his affinities were more apparent, but less profound. For him, too, love was the sum of all morality and the root of all goodness. But it resembled more the joyous self-expansion of the Greek than the humility and self-abnegation of Christian love. Not the saintly ascetic nor the doer of good works, but the artist and the "lover," dominated his imagination when he wrote of Love; imbuing even God's love for the world with the joy of creation and the rapture of embrace. Aprile's infinite love for things impelled him to body them visibly forth. Deeper in Browning than his Christianity, and prior to it, lay his sense of immeasurable worth in all life, the poet's passion for being.

[Footnote 145: _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_.]

Browning's poetry is thus one of the most potent of the influences which in the nineteenth century helped to break down the shallow and mischievous distinction between the "sacred" and the "secular," and to set in its place the profounder division between man enslaved by apathy, routine, and mechanical morality, and man lifted by the law of love into a service which is perfect freedom, into an approximation to God which is only the fullest realisation of humanity.

INDEX.

Note--The names of the Persons are given in small capitals; titles of literary works in _italics_; other names in ordinary type; *black figures* indicate the more detailed references. Only the more important of the incidental quotations are included. Poems are referred to only under their authors' names.

AESCHYLUS, 215. ALLINGHAM, W., 87. American fame of Browning, 87. ARISTOPHANES, 77, 207 f. ARNOLD, M., 26. Asolo, 27, 50, 220, 232. _Athenæum, The_, 172, 251.

BALZAC, 42, 49, 86, 117. BARRETT, ELIZABETH. See Browning, E.B. BARTOLI, his _Simboli_, 27. BENCKHAUSEN, Russian Consul-General, 14. BÉRANGER, 86. BLAGDEN, ISA. See BROWNING, R., letters. BRONSON, Mrs ARTHUR, 220, 231. BRONTE, EMILY, her character "Heathcliff," 66. BROWNING, ROBERT (grandfather), 2. BROWNING, ROBERT (father), 3, 6, 18, 149 n., 173. BROWNING, ROBERT, cosmopolitan in sympathies, English by his art, 1, 2; his birth, 3; likeness to his mother, 4 n.; character of his home, 5; boyhood, 5, 6; early sense of rhythm, 7; reads Shelley, Keats, and Byron, 8 f.; journey to St Petersburg, 14; first voyage to Italy, 26 f.; second voyage to Italy, 61; correspondence with E.B. Barrett, 78; marriage, 81; settlement in Italy, 84; friendships and society at Florence, 84 f.; Italian politics, 88; Italian scenery, 91; Italian painting, 98 f.; and music, 103 f.; religion, 110 f.; his interpretation of _In a Balcony_, 145 n.; death of Mrs Browning, 147; return to London, 148; society, 150; summer sojourns in France, 153 f., 202 f.; in the Alps, 216; death of Miss Egerton-Smith, 216; Italy once more, 220; Asolo and Venice, 231 f.; death, 234. Works-- _Abt Vogler_, 71, *158* f. _Agamemnon_ (translation of), 215 f. _Andrea del Sarto_, 70 f., *100* f. _Another Way of Love_, 142. _Any Wife to Any Husband_, 140. _Appearances_, 212. _Aristophanes' Apology_, *206* f. _Artemis Prologizes_, 68, 190. _Asolando_, 220, *232* f. _At the Mermaid_, 211. _Bad Dreams_, 232. _Balaustion's Adventure_, 75, *190* f. _Baldinucci_, 214. _Bells and Pomegranates_, 16, 41 f., 74. _Bifurcation_, 213. _Bishop of St Praxed's, The_, 70, 113, 275. _Blot in the 'Scutcheon, A_, *52* f. _Blougram's Apology_, 14, 57, 60, 90, 113, *129* f., 277 f. _Boy and the Angel, The_, 113, 116. _By the Fireside_, 94, *135* f., 275. _Caliban upon Setebos_, *162* f. _Cavalier Tunes_, 67. _Childe Roland_, *95* f., 262 f. _Christmas-Eve and Easter Day_, 81, *114* f., 162. _Cleon_, 113, *126* f. _Clive_, 223. _Colombe's Birthday_, 53, *55* f. _Confessional, The_, 40, 66. _Cristina_, 48, *68* f. _Deaf and Dumb_, 295. _Death in the Desert, A_, 152, *160* f. _De Gustibus_, 90, 92, 254. _Dis Aliter Visum_, 152, 156. _Dramas_, 37 f. _Dramatic Idylls_, *221* f. _Dramatic Lyrics_, 38 f., *65* f., 79. _Dramatic Romances_, 38, 79. _Dramatis Personæ_, *151-168*, 213. _Echetlos_, 222. _Englishman in Italy, The_, 93. _Epilogue to Dramatis Personæ_, 154, *167* f., 296. _Epistle of Karshish, An_, 113, *123* f. _Eurydice to Orpheus_, 157. _Evelyn Hope_, 138, 293. _Fears and Scruples_, 212. _Ferishtah's Fancies_, *227* f. _Fifine at the Fair_, 92 f., 149, *197* f., 209, 242. _Flight of the Duchess, The_, *69* f., 199. _Flower's Name, The_, 68. _Forgiveness, A_, 213. _Fra Lippo Lippi_, 71, *101* f., 112. _Francis Furini_, 298. _Gerard de Lairesse_, 222. _Gismond_, 41, 57, 67. _Glove, The_, 69, *70*. _Grammarian's Funeral, The_, *109* f. _Guardian Angel, The_, 99. _Halbert and Hob_, *222*. _Helen's Tower_, sonnet, 188. _Heretic's Tragedy, A_, *128* f., 263. _Hervé Riel_, *189* f., 222. _Holy Cross Day_, 4 n., *128*. _Home Thoughts from Abroad_ (quoted), 265. _Home Thoughts from the Sea_, 26. _House_, 211. _How it Strikes a Contemporary_, 108 f. _How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix_, 27, 67, 222. _Hugues of Saxe Gotha, Master_, 71, *105* f., 113. _In a Balcony_, *143* f. _In a Gondola_, 67. _In a Year_, 140. _Incondita_, 8. _Inn Album, The_, 188, *208* f. _Instans Tyrannus_, 66, 90. _In Three Days_, 137, 141. _Italian in England, The_, 91. _Iván Ivánovitch_, 14, 221, *223*. _Ixion_, *225* f. _James Lee's Wife_, 153 f. _Jochanan Halkadosh_, 225. _Jocoseria_, *224* f. _Johannes Agricola_, 15 f. _King Victor and King Charles_, 15, *45*, 50. _Laboratory, The_, 38, 66. _La Saisiaz_, *216* f. _Last Ride Together, The_, 68, *138* f., 304. _Life in a Love_, 137. _Light Woman, A_, 142. _Lost Leader, The_, 66. _Lost Mistress, The_, 68, 156. _Love in a Life_, 137. _Luria_, 60, *61* f. _Madhouse Cells_, 16. _Martin Relph_, 222 f., 275. _Men and Women_, 25, 60, 72, 74, *87-147*, 152, 213. _Muleykeh_, 223. _My Last Duchess_, 66, 70, 213. _My Star_, 140. _Natural Magic_, 213. _Ned Bratts_, 222. _Never the Time and the Place_, 226. _Now_, 233. _Numpholeptos_, 213. _Old Pictures in Florence_, 90, 102 f. _One Way of Love_, 137. _One Word More_, 97 f., *146* f. _Pacchiarotto_, 109, 162, 188, *210* f. _Pan and Luna_, 248. _Paracelsus_, 16 f., 25, 29, 38, 42. _Parleyings with Certain People of Importance_, 229 f. _Patriot, The_, 90. _Pauline_, 11 f. _Pearl, a Girl, A_, 233. _Pheidippides_, 222. _Pictor Ignolus_, 70 f. _Pied Piper, The_, 71 f., 269. _Pippa Passes_, *49* f., 59, 79, 91, 151, 181. _Popularity_, 109. _Porphyria's Lover_, 16. _Pretty Woman, A_, 142. _Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau_, 14, *194* f. _Prospice_, 109, 157. _Rabbi ben Ezra_, 4 n., 109, *157* f. _Red-cotton Night-cap Country_, 90 (Miranda), 188, *203* f. _Return of the Druses, The_, 45, *46* f., 64. _Reverie_, 233. _Ring and the Book, The_, 151 f., *169-186*, 276 f. _Rudel_, 68. _Saint Martin's Summer_, 213. _Saul_, 48, *72* f., 113, *121* f. _Serenade at the Villa_, 137. _Shelley, Essay on_, 20, *106* f., 109 f. _Sibrandus Schafnaburgensis_, 67, 79. _Sludge, Mr, the Medium_, 90, *165* f. _Solomon and Balkis_, 225. _Sordello_, 15, *25* f., 238. _Soul's Tragedy, A_, 59 f. _Spanish Cloister, The_, 79. _Statue and the Bust, The_, 142, 213. _Strafford_, 15, 25, *42* f. _Summum Bonum_, 233. _Time's Revenges_, 66. _Toccata of Galuppi's, A_, 104 f.,153. _Too Late_, 153. _Transcendentalism_, 108. _Two in the Campagna_, 93, 134, *140*, 238. _Two Poets of Croisic, The_, *218* f. _Woman's Last Word, A_, 140. _Women and Roses_, 143. _Worst of It, The_, 156. _Youth and Art_, 152, 156. Letters, to E.B.B., 4 n., 6, 8, 49, 59 n., 62, 63, 65, 67, 72, 75, 78-83 passim, 85, 114 f., 241, 252 f., 283; to Miss Blagden, 153, 171, 173 n., 249; to Miss Flower, 43; to Miss Haworth, 26 n., 44, 237; to Ruskin, 237; to Aubrey de Vere, 247 n. BROWNING, ELIZABETH BARRETT MOULTON-BARRETT (wife). First allusion to Browning, 75; reads _Paracelsus_, 75 n.; her character, early life, and poetry, 76 f.; correspondence with Browning, 78 f.; marriage, 81; settlement in Italy, 84; friendships, society at Florence, 84 f.; death, 147; her relation to Pompilia, 180. _Aurora Leigh_, 81, 87, 151, 209. _Songs before Congress_, 90. _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, 87. _Casa Guidi Windows_, 90. Letters to R.B., 49, 65, 77 n., 78-83 _passim_, 114, 251. Letter to Ruskin, 77 n. Letters to others, 85, 89, 92, 99, 245. BROWNING, SARAH ANNA (mother), 4. BURNS, R., 40, 281. BYRON, LORD, 7, 8, 104, 198, 218, 263.

CARLYLE, THOMAS, 36, 42, 87, 150, 172, 230, 256, 307. _Carnival_, Schumann's, 202. Casa Guidi, 84 f., 97. CELLINI, BENVENUTO, 98. CHAUCER, G., 41. COLERIDGE, S. T., 8, 95 f., 134. CORNARO, CATHARINE, 50, 331. _Cornhill Magazine, The_, 190.

DANTE, 29 f., 33, 35, 66, 120 f, 261 f., 308. DICKENS, CHARLES, 42, 49. DOMETT, ALFRED (referred to), 99. DONNE, JOHN, 6, 254 n. Dulwich, 6, 49, 97.

EGERTON-SMITH, ANN, 216. EMERSON, R.W., 256. EURIPIDES, 173 n., 191, 208.

Fano, the Brownings at, 99. FAUCIT, HELEN (Lady Martin), 43. FICHTE, J.E., 288 f. FITZGERALD, EDWARD, 172, 188. Florence, 84 f. _passim._ FLOWER, ELIZA, 11, 43. FORSTER, JOHN, 42. FOX, W.J., 8, 14, 42, 86.

Germany. German strain in Browning, 4 n. GIOTTO, 99, 103. GOETHE, J.W. VON, 5, 288; _Faust_, 19, 31, 50, 198, 296; _Iphigenie_, 30 n.; _Metamorphose der Pflanzen_, 265; _Tasso_, 30; _Westöstlicher Divan_, 226. Greek, early studies in, 8. Gressoney, 226.

HAWORTH, EUPHRASIA FANNY, 27. HORNE, author of _Orion_, 80. HUGO, VICTOR, 86, 242.

IBSEN, H., _The Wild Duck_, 59.

JAMESON, ANNA, 84. Jews. Browning's attitude towards the Jewish race, 4 n. JONSON, BEN, 38, 214. _Junius, Letters of_, 6.

KEATS, J., 9, 73, 240 f., 254. KENYON, JOHN, 73, 78, 80, 82, 86.

LANDOR, W.S., 30 n., 40 f., 87 f., 96, 229. LEIGHTON, Sir FREDERIC, 71, 150. Lucca, the Brownings at, 92.

MACLISE, 67. MACREADY, 42 f., 32. MAETERLINCK, M., 144, 162 n. MALORY, 104. MEREDITH, Mr G., 168. Metres, Browning's, 186, 253, 261. MICHELANGELO, 103. MILL, JOHN STUART, 11 f. MILSAND, JOSEPH, 86, 188, 203, 230. MILTON, J., 71, 261. _Monthly Repository_, 14. MOXON, EDWARD, publisher, 59 n. MUSSET, ALFRED DE, 141 f.

NAPOLEON III., Emperor, 88 f., 194.

OSSIAN, 7.

PALESTRINA, 103. Paris, 85 f., 92, 106, 204. PAUL, SAINT, 308. PHELPS, actor, 58. Pisa, 84. PLATO, 12, 239, 307. PRINSEP, V., 150.

QUARLES, FRANCIS, 6.

Rezzonico Palace, 231. RIPERT-MONCLAR, COMTE AMÉDÉE DE, 17. Rome, the Brownings in, 87. ROSSETTI, D.G., 13 f., 86 f., 150. ROSSETTI, Mr W.M., 171 n. RUSKIN, JOHN, 77 n., 150, 237.

SAND, GEORGE, 85. SCHILLER, F., 70, 209. SCOTT, Sir W., 93. SHAKESPEARE, W., 65, 200, 211; _Romeo and Juliet_, 38; _The Tempest_, 50 f., 162 f.; _Loves Labour's Lost_, 56; _Hamlet_, 58; _Julius Cæsar_, 63; _Othello_, 62; _As You Like It_, 95. SHELLEY, P.B., 8, 9, 12 f., 20, 34, 90, 110 f., 183, 238, 240, 254, 257, 263, 271, 296. SMART, CHRISTOPHER, his _Song to David_, 72. SOUTHEY, R., 8. Spiritualism, 87. SWINBURNE, Mr A.C., 151.

TENNYSON, ALFRED LORD, 1, 19, 31, 86 f., 130, 150, 172, 175, 261 f. TENNYSON, FREDERICK, 150. THACKERAY, ANNIE (Mrs Ritchie), 203. THACKERAY, W.M., 150. TITTLE, MARGARET, the poet's grandmother, 3. TRELAWNEY, E.J., 61. _Trifler, The_, 15.

Venice, 27, 37. VERDI, 103. VILLON, 105. Virgil, Dante's, 30. Vocabulary, Browning's, 261. VOLTAIRE, 6.

WALPOLE, HORACE, 6. WIEDEMANN, WILLIAM, the poet's maternal grandfather, 4. WISEMAN, CARDINAL, 130. WOOLNER, 150. WORDSWORTH, 8, 32, 93 f., 244, 264, 268, 273, 284.

York (a horse), 27.

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