It has come to be a matter of course that some new book on Browning shall appear with every season. Already the number of these manuals has grown so large that any one interested in critical literature finds he must devote a whole corner of his library to them—where, the cynical may add, they are better lodged than in his brain. To name only a few of the more recent publications: there was Stopford Brooke's volume, which partitioned the poet's philosophy into convenient compartments, labelled nature, human life, art, love, etc. Then came Mr. Chesterton, with his biting paradoxes and his bold justification of Browning's work, not as it ought to be, but as it is. Professor Dowden followed with what is, on the whole, the best vade mecum for those who wish to preserve their enthusiasm with a little salt of common sense; and, latest of all, we have now a critical study[7] by Prof. C. H. Herford, of the University of Manchester, which once more unrolls in all its gleaming aspects the poet's "joy in soul." Two things would seem to be clear from this succession of commentaries: Browning must need a deal of exegesis, and he must be a subject of wide curiosity. Now obscurity and popularity do not commonly go together, and I fail to remember that any of the critics named has paused long enough in his own admiration to explain just why Browning has caught the breath of favour; in a word, to answer the question: Why is Browning popular?

There is, indeed, one response to such a question, so obvious and so simple that it might well be taken for granted. It would hardly seem worth while to say that despite his difficulty Browning is esteemed because he has written great poetry; and in the most primitive and unequivocal manner this is to a certain extent true. At intervals the staccato of his lines, like the drilling of a woodpecker, is interrupted by a burst of pure and liquid music, as if that vigorous and exploring bird were suddenly gifted with the melodious throat of the lark. It is not necessary to hunt curiously for examples of this power; they are fairly frequent and the best known are the most striking. Consider the first lines that sing themselves in the memory:

there needs no cunning exegete to point out the beauty of these. Their rhythm is of the singing, traditional kind that is familiar to us in all the true poets of the language; the harmony of the vowel sounds and of the consonants, the very trick of alliteration, are obvious to the least critical; yet withal there is that miraculous suggestion in their charm which may be felt but cannot be converted into a prosaic equivalent. They stand out from the lines that precede and follow them in The Ring and the Book, as differing not so much in degree as in kind; they are lyrical, poetical, in the midst of a passage which is neither lyrical nor, precisely speaking, poetical. Elsewhere the surprise may be on the lower plane of mere description. So, throughout the peroration of Paracelsus, despite the glory and eloquence of the dying scholar's vision, one feels continually an alien element which just prevents a complete acquiescence in their magic, some residue of clogging analysis which has not quite been subdued to poetry—and then suddenly, as if some discordant instrument were silenced in an orchestra and unvexed music floated to the ear, the manner changes, thus:

And, take his works throughout, there is a good deal of this writing which has the ordinary, direct appeal to the emotions. Yet it is scattered, accidental so to speak; nor is it any pabulum of the soul as simple as this which converts the lover of poetry into the Browningite. Even his common-sense admirers are probably held by something more recondite than this occasional charm.

says Bishop Blougram, and the attraction of Browning to many is just watching what may be called his acrobatic psychology. Consider this same Bishop Blougram's Apology, in some respects the most characteristic, as it is certainly not the least prodigious, of his poems. "Over his wine so smiled and talked his hour Sylvester Blougram"—talked and smiled to a silent listener concerning the strange mixture of doubt and faith which lie snugly side by side in the mind of an ecclesiastic who is at once a hypocrite and a sincere believer in the Church. The mental attitude of the speaker is subtile enough in itself to be fascinating, but the real suspense does not lie there. The very balancing of the priest's argument may at first work a kind of deception, but read more attentively and it begins to grow clear that no man in the wily bishop's predicament ever talked in this way over his wine or anywhere else. And here lies the real piquancy of the situation. His words are something more than a confession; they are this and at the same time the poet's, or if you will the bishop's own, comment to himself on that confession. He who talks is never quite in the privacy of solitude, nor is he ever quite conscious of his listener, who as a matter of fact is not so much a person as some half-personified opinion of the world or abstract notion set against the character of the speaker. And this is Browning's regular procedure not only in those wonderful dramatic monologues, Men and Women, that form the heart of his work, but in Paracelsus, in The Ring and the Book, even in the songs and the formal dramas.

Perhaps the most remarkable and most obvious example of this suspended psychology is to be found in The Ring and the Book. Take the canto in which Giuseppe Caponsacchi relates to the judges his share in the tangled story. It is clear that the interest here is not primarily in the event itself, nor does it lie in that phase of the speaker's character which would be revealed by his confession before such a court as he is supposed to confront. The fact is, that Caponsacchi's language is not such as under the circumstances he could possibly be conceived to use. As the situation forms itself in my mind, he might be in his cell awaiting the summons to appear. In that solitude and uncertainty he goes over in memory the days in Arezzo, when the temptation first came to him, and once more takes the perilous ride with Pompilia to Rome. He lives again through the great crisis, dissecting all his motives, balancing the pros and cons of each step; yet all the time he has in mind the opinion of the world as personified in the judges he is to face. The psychology is suspended dexterously between self-examination and open confession, and the reader who accepts the actual dramatic situation as suggested by Browning loses the finest and subtlest savour of the speech. In many places it would be simply preposterous to suppose we are listening to words really uttered by the priest.

no, those words were never spoken in the ears of a sceptical, worldly tribunal; they belong to the most sacred recesses of memory; yet at the same time that memory is coloured by a consciousness of the world's clumsy judgment.

It would be exaggeration to say that all Browning's greater poems proceed in this involved manner, yet the method is so constant as to be the most significant feature of his work. And it bestows on him the honour of having created a new genre which follows neither the fashion of lyric on the one hand nor that of drama or narrative on the other, but is a curious and illusive hybrid of the two. The passions are not uttered directly as having validity and meaning in the heart of the speaker alone, nor are they revealed through action and reaction upon the emotions of another. His dramas, if read attentively, will be found really to fall into the same mixed genre as his monologues. And a comparison of his Sordello with such a poem as Goethe's Tasso (which is more the dialogue of a narrative poem than a true drama) will show how far he fails to make a character move visibly amid opposing circumstances. In both poems we have a contrast of the poetical temperament with the practical world. In Browning it is difficult to distinguish the poet's own thought from the words of the hero; the narrative is in reality a long confession of Sordello to himself who is conscious of a hostile power without. In Goethe this hostile power stands out as distinctly as Tasso himself, and they act side by side each to his own end.

There is even a certain significance in what is perhaps the most immediately personal poem Browning ever wrote, that One Word More which he appended to his Men and Women. Did he himself quite understand this lament for Raphael's lost sonnets and Dante's interrupted angel, this desire to find his love a language,

It would seem rather the uneasiness of his own mind when brought face to face with strong feeling where no escape remains into his oblique mode of expression. And the man Browning of real life, with his training in a dissenting Camberwell home and later his somewhat dapper acceptance of the London social season, accords with such a view of the writer. It is, too, worthy of note that almost invariably he impressed those who first met him as being a successful merchant, a banker, a diplomat—anything but a poet. There was passion enough below the surface, as his outburst of rage against FitzGerald and other incidents of the kind declare; but the direct exhibition of it was painful if not grotesque.

Yet in this matter, as in everything that touches Browning's psychology, it is well to proceed cautiously. Because he approached the emotions thus obliquely, as it were in a style hybrid between the lyric and the drama, it does not follow that his work is void of emotion or that he questioned the validity of human passion. The very contrary is true. I remember, indeed, once hearing a lady, whose taste was as frank as it was modern, say that she liked Browning better than Shakespeare because he was more emotional and less intellectual than the older dramatist. Her distinction was somewhat confused, but it leads to an important consideration; I do not know but it points to the very heart of the question of Browning's popularity. He is not in reality more emotional than Shakespeare, but his emotion is of a kind more readily felt by the reader of to-day; nor does he require less use of the intellect, but he does demand less of that peculiar translation of the intellect from the particular to the general point of view which is necessary to raise the reader into what may be called the poetical mood. In one sense Browning is nearly the most intellectual poet in the language. The action of his brain was so nimble, his seizure of every associated idea was so quick and subtile, his elliptical style is so supercilious of the reader's needs, that often to understand him is like following a long mathematical demonstration in which many of the intermediate equations are omitted. And then his very trick of approaching the emotions indirectly, his suspended psychology as I have called it, requires a peculiar flexibility of the reader's mind. But in a way these roughnesses of the shell possess an attraction for the educated public which has been sated with what lies too accessibly on the surface. They hold out the flattering promise of an initiation into mysteries not open to all the world. Our wits have become pretty well sharpened by the complexities of modern life, and we are ready enough to prove our analytical powers on any riddle of poetry or economics. And once we have penetrated to the heart of these enigmas we are quite at our ease. His emotional content is of a sort that requires no further adjustment; it demands none of that poetical displacement of the person which is so uncomfortable to the keen but prosaic intelligence.

And here that tenth Muse, who has been added to the Pantheon for the guidance of the critical writer, trembles and starts back. She beholds to the right and the left a quaking bog of abstractions and metaphysical definitions, whereon if a critic so much as set his foot he is sucked down into the bottomless mire. She plucks me by the ear and bids me keep to the strait and beaten path, whispering the self-admonition of one who was the darling of her sisters:

Indeed, the question that arises is no less than the ultimate distinction between poetry and prose, and "ultimates" may well have an ugly sound to one who is content if he can comprehend what is concrete and very near at hand. And, as for that, those who would care to hear the matter debated in terms of Idee and Begriff, ObjektivitÄt and SubjektivitÄt, must already be familiar with those extraordinary chapters in Schopenhauer wherein philosophy and literature are married as they have seldom been elsewhere since the days of Plato. And yet without any such formidable apparatus as that, it is not difficult to see that the peculiar procedure of Browning's mind offers to the reader a pleasure different more in kind than in degree from what is commonly associated with the word poetry. His very manner of approaching the passions obliquely, his habit of holding his portrayal of character in suspense between direct exposition and dramatic reaction, tends to keep the attention riveted on the individual speaker or problem, and prevents that escape into the larger and more general vision which marks just the transition from prose to poetry.

It is not always so. Into that cry "O lyric Love" there breaks the note which from the beginning has made lovers forget themselves in their song—the note that passes so easily from the lips of Persian Omar to the mouth of British FitzGerald:

Is it not clear how, in these direct and lyrical expressions, the passion of the individual is carried up into some region where it is blended with currents of emotion broader than any one man's loss or gain? and how, reading these words, we, too, feel that sudden enlargement of the heart which it is the special office of the poet to bestow? But it is equally true that Browning's treatment of love, as in James Lee's Wife and In a Balcony, to name the poems nearest at hand, is for the most part so involved in his peculiar psychological method that we cannot for a moment forget ourselves in this freer emotion.

And in his attitude towards nature it is the same thing. I have not read Schopenhauer for many years, but I remember as if it were yesterday my sensation of joy as in the course of his argument I came upon these two lines quoted from Horace:

How perfectly simple the words, and yet it was as if the splendour of the heavens had broken upon me—rather, in some strange way, within me. And that, I suppose, is the real function of descriptive poetry—not to present a detailed scene to the eye, but in its mysterious manner to sink our sense of individual life in this larger sympathy with the world. Now and then, no doubt, Browning, too, strikes this universal note, as, for instance, in those lines from Paracelsus already quoted. But for the most part, his description, like his lyrical passion, is adapted with remarkable skill towards individualising still further the problem or character that he is analysing. Take that famous passage in Easter-Day:

We are far enough from the "Nox erat" of Horace or even the "trunks that glare like grates of hell"; we are seeing the world with the eye of a man whose mind is perplexed and whose imagination is narrowed down by terror to a single question: "How hard it is to be A Christian!"

And nothing, perhaps, confirms this impression of a body of writing which is neither quite prose nor quite poetry more than the rhythm of Browning's verse. Lady Burne-Jones in the Memorials of her husband tells of meeting the poet at Denmark Hill, when some talk went on about the rate at which the pulse of different people beat. Browning suddenly leaned toward her, saying, "Do me the honour to feel my pulse"—but to her surprise there was none to feel. His pulse was, in fact, never perceptible to touch. The notion may seem fantastic, but, in view of certain recent investigations of psychology into the relation between our pulse and our sense of rhythm, I have wondered whether the lack of any regular systole and diastole in Browning's verse may not rest on a physical basis. There is undoubtedly a kind of proper motion in his language, but it is neither the regular rise and fall of verse nor the more loosely balanced cadences of prose; or, rather, it vacillates from one movement to the other, in a way which keeps the rhythmically trained ear in a state of acute tension. But it has at least the interest of corresponding curiously to the writer's trick of steering between the elevation of poetry and the analysis of prose. It rounds out completely our impression of watching the most expert funambulist in English letters. Nor is there anything strange in this intimate relation between the content of his writing and the mechanism of his metre. "The purpose of rhythm," says Mr. Yeats in a striking passage of one of his essays, "it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation, by hushing us with an alluring monotony, while it holds us waking by variety." That is the neo-Celt's mystical way of putting a truth that all have felt—the fact that the regular sing-song of verse exerts a species of enchantment on the senses, lulling to sleep the individual within us and translating our thoughts and emotions into something significant of the larger experience of mankind.

But I would not leave this aspect of Browning's work without making a reservation which may seem to some (though wrongly, I think) to invalidate all that has been said. For it does happen now and again that he somehow produces the unmistakable exaltation of poetry through the very exaggeration of his unpoetical method. Nothing could be more indirect, more oblique, than his way of approaching the climax in Cleon. The ancient Greek poet, writing "from the sprinkled isles, Lily on lily, that o'erlace the sea," answers certain queries of Protus the Tyrant. He contrasts the insufficiency of the artistic life with that of his master, and laments bitterly the vanity of pursuing ideal beauty when the goal at the end is only death:

The poem, one begins to suspect, is a specimen of Browning's peculiar manner of indirection; in reality, through this monologue, suspended delicately between self-examination and dramatic confession, he is focussing in one individual heart the doom of the great civilisation that is passing away and the splendid triumph of the new. And then follows the climax, as it were an accidental afterthought:

It is not revoking what has been said to admit that the superb audacity of the indirection in these underscored lines touches on the sublime; the individual is involuntarily rapt into communion with the great currents that sweep through human affairs, and the interest of psychology is lost in the elevation of poetry. At the same time it ought to be added that this effect would scarcely have been possible were not the rhythm and the mechanism of the verse unusually free of Browning's prosaic mannerism.

It might seem that enough had been said to explain why Browning is popular. The attitude of the ordinary intelligent reader toward him is, I presume, easily stated. A good many of Browning's mystifications, Sordello, for one, he simply refuses to bother himself with. Le jeu, he says candidly, ne vaut pas les chandelles. Other works he goes through with some impatience, but with an amount of exhilarating surprise sufficient to compensate for the annoyances. If he is trained in literary distinctions, he will be likely to lay down the book with the exclamation: C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la poÉsie! And probably such a distinction will not lessen his admiration; for it cannot be asserted too often that the reading public to-day is ready to accede to any legitimate demand on its analytical understanding, but that it responds sluggishly, or only spasmodically, to that readjustment of the emotions necessary for the sustained enjoyment of such a poem as Paradise Lost. But I suspect that we have not yet touched the real heart of the problem. All this does not explain that other phase of Browning's popularity, which depends upon anything but the common sense of the average reader; and, least of all, does it account for the library of books, of which Professor Herford's is the latest example. There is another public which craves a different food from the mere display of human nature; it is recruited largely by the women's clubs and by men who are unwilling or afraid to hold their minds in a state of self-centred expectancy toward the meaning of a civilisation shot through by threads of many ages and confused colours; it is kept in a state of excitation by critics who write lengthily and systematically of "joy in soul." Now there is a certain philosophy which is in a particular way adapted to such readers and writers. Its beginnings, no doubt, are rooted in the naturalism of Rousseau and the eighteenth century, but the flower of it belongs wholly to our own age. It is the philosophy whose purest essence may be found distilled in Browning's magical alembic, and a single drop of it will affect the brain of some people with a strange giddiness.

And here again I am tempted to abscond behind those blessed words Platonische Ideen and Begriffe, universalia ante rem and universalia post rem, which offer so convenient an escape from the difficulty of meaning what one says. It would be so easy with those counters of German metaphysicians and the schoolmen to explain how it is that Browning has a philosophy of generalised notions, and yet so often misses the form of generalisation special to the poet. The fact is his philosophy is not so much inherent in his writing as imposed on it from the outside. His theory of love does not expand like Dante's into a great vision of life wherein symbol and reality are fused together, but is added as a commentary on the action or situation. And on the other hand he does not accept the simple and pathetic incompleteness of life as a humbler poet might, but must try with his reason to reconcile it with an ideal system:

Yet "ideal" and "reconcilement" are scarcely the words; for Browning's philosophy, when detached, as it may be, from its context, teaches just the acceptance of life in itself as needing no conversion into something beyond its own impulsive desires:

Passion to Shakespeare was the source of tragedy; there is no tragedy, properly speaking, in Browning, for the reason that passion is to him essentially good. By sheer bravado of human emotion we justify our existence, nay—

His notion of "moral strength," as Professor Santayana so forcibly says, "is a blind and miscellaneous vehemence."

But if all the passions have their own validity, one of them in particular is the power that moves through all and renders them all good:

It is the power that reaches up from earth to heaven, and the divine nature is no more than a higher, more vehement manifestation of its energy:

And in the closing vision of Saul this thought of the identity of man's love and God's love is uttered by David in a kind of delirious ecstasy:

But there is no need to multiply quotations. The point is that in all Browning's rhapsody there is nowhere a hint of any break between the lower and the higher nature of man, or between the human and the celestial character. Not that his philosophy is pantheistic, for it is Hebraic in its vivid sense of God's distinct personality; but that man's love is itself divine, only lesser in degree. There is nothing that corresponds to the tremendous words of Beatrice to Dante when he meets her face to face in the Terrestrial Paradise:

nothing that corresponds to the "scot of penitence," the tears, and the plunge into the river of Lethe before the new, transcendent love begins. Indeed, the point of the matter is not that Browning magnifies human love in its own sphere of beauty, but that he speaks of it with the voice of a prophet of spiritual things and proclaims it as a complete doctrine of salvation. Often, as I read the books on Browning's gospel of human passion, my mind recurs to that scene in the Gospel of St. John, wherein it is told how a certain Nicodemus of the Pharisees came to Jesus by night and was puzzled by the hard saying: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." There is no lack of confessions from that day to this of men to whom it has seemed that they were born again, and always, I believe, the new birth, like the birth of the body, was consummated with wailing and anguish, and afterwards the great peace. This is a mystery into which it is no business of mine to enter, but with the singularly uniform record of these confessions in my memory, I cannot but wonder at the light message of the new prophet: "If you desire faith—then you've faith enough," and "For God is glorified in man." I am even sceptical enough to believe that the vaunted conclusion of Fifine at the Fair, "I end with—Love is all and Death is naught," sounds like the wisdom of a schoolgirl. There is an element in Browning's popularity which springs from those readers who are content to look upon the world as it is; they feel the power of his lyric song when at rare intervals it flows in pure and untroubled grace, and they enjoy the intellectual legerdemain of his suspended psychology. But there is another element in that popularity (and this, unhappily, is the inspiration of the clubs and of the formulating critics) which is concerned too much with this flattering substitute for spirituality. Undoubtedly, a good deal of restiveness exists under what is called the materialism of modern life, and many are looking in this way and that for an escape into the purer joy which they hear has passed from the world. It used to be believed that Calderon was a bearer of the message, Calderon who expressed the doctrine of the saints and the poets:

(since the greatest transgression of man is to have been born). It was believed that the spiritual life was bought with a price, and that the desires of this world must first suffer permutation into something not themselves. I am not holding a brief for that austere doctrine; I am not even sure that I quite understand it, although it is written at large in many books. But I do know that those who think they have found its equivalent in the poetry of Browning are misled by wandering and futile lights. The secret of his more esoteric fame is just this, that he dresses a worldly and easy philosophy in the forms of spiritual faith and so deceives the troubled seekers after the higher life.

It is not pleasant to be convicted of throwing stones at the prophets, as I shall appear to many to have done. My only consolation is that, if the prophet is a true teacher, these stones of the casual passer-by merely raise a more conspicuous monument to his honour; but if he turns out in the end to be a false prophet (as I believe Browning to have been)—why, then, let his disciples look to it.