enriched with song, a time when we have all grown epicures in our taste for exquisite verse, too much has been said about Browning's want of form. It would be an absurdity to call a man a poet who had no sense of poetic form, who could not sing. Browning was a poet but not always a singer; song was not to him the inevitable language, the supreme instinct. When he strains his metre by attempting to pack more meaning into a line than it will bear with grace, when he juggles with farfetched and hideous rhymes, he really ceases to be a poet and puts his laurels in jeopardy. But oftener his form, more espe cially his blank verse form, is justified by the fact that he is essentially a dramatic poet; his verse must fit the character and the mood in which he speaks. The Elizabethans, who were no fumblers in the matter of metre, had their reasons for choosing a form for dramatic verse which should be not severe, but loose and flexible-a form which might alternately approach the classical iambus, a lyric measure and plain prose, yet remain more forcible than prose by the retention of a certain beat. It resembles not a mask and cothurn, but a fine and flowing garment, following the movements of the actor's limbs. Great is the liberty of English unrhymed verse, and nobly it has been used; it has given us the most various treasures, from the ordered magnificence of Paradise Lost to the lyric cry of Romeo at Juliet's grave. Browning has often misused his liberty, but by no means so often as his hasty critics suppose. Try to think of Caliban on Setebos, and even Dominus Hyacinthus in prose, and you see at once by the loss involved that they are really poems; that is, that the verse form, and their own special form, is an essential part of their excellence. His unrhymed verse is seldom or never rich and stately, it is sometimes harsh and huddled; but it is constantly vigorous and appropriate; it can flow with a clear idyllic grace, as in Cleon and Andrea del Sarto, or spring up in simple lyric beauty, as in One Word more and the dedication to The Ring and the Book. He had that great gift of singing straight from the heart which some great poets have lacked. Such songs have always an incommunicable charm, a piercing sweetness of their own. A strong emotion, whether personal or dramatic, has a magical effect in smoothing what is rugged and clearing what is turbid in Browning's style.

For the rest, he wrote Pippa passes, the gallant marching Cavalier Songs, the galloping ballad of How we brought the Good News, the serene harmonies of Love among the Ruins. These, and many other outbursts of beautiful song, make it doubly ridiculous to speak of him as a poet who could not sing. Yet it is true that he frequently sacrificed sound to sense. This the plain person thinks right, but the poet knows or should know it to be wrong. And it did not even save him from obscurity. Such are his deficiencies-the more noticeable because the whole tendency of the century has been and is toward the perfecting of lyric and narrative forms of verse. In dramatic poetry this age of poets has been strangely poor. Let Shelley's lurid drama of The Cenci be set aside in the high place that it deserves: after that the first seventy years of this century produced nothing of importance as dramatic poetry except Browning's work. For what makes work dramatic? Not special fitness for the stage, but the author's impersonality and power of characterisation; the clash of human passions and interests on each other, the event, or even the accident, that as in a lightning-flash reveals the dim hearts of men. In his dramatic power Browning stands alone among the poets of the nineteenth century.

In another aspect he stands alone. While they have remained curiously untouched by the most important literary movement of the last fifty years, he has been in it, and even, for a time, in advance of it. In his measure as a poet he is a realist. His aim, like that of contemporary writers of prose fiction, is to see and represent human life and character as it is. The history of literature during the entire century has been a history of revolts. Daumier represents the eloquent M. Prudhomme telling his son, with a noble sweep of the arm, how on the place where they now stand once stood a tyrannous barrier, but he, M. Prudhomme, and his friends right bravely knocked it down. 'Yes, dear papa,' returns the child, looking a few yards ahead, and then I see you built it up again a little further on.' The barrier of the conventional has been constantly moved on, here quickly, there slowly; but in English poetry, since the great move that separated the eighteenth from the nineteenth century, it has been stationary. Browning climbed over it. He climbed over

other barriers too, which have since been moved on. He was not afraid of passion when mild sentiment was the literary thing. Some one when he died made a sonnet commemorating him as the Poet of Love. For a moment it seemed strange that the philosopher, the psychologist, the man, the ruggedness of whose genius had challenged so much criticism, should be lamented as the Poet of Love. Yet such he emphatically was. He was so not only because he had that power of singing straight from the heart to which I have before referred, but because he was fearlessly truthful in his presentation of human nature, and also because he was drawn by his dramatic bent to the strong situations which cannot be evolved out of mild sentiments. In the fearlessness as well as the subtlety of his psychology, he is from the first with Balzac rather than with his contemporaries in England, where the barriers were many and moved reluctantly. The play of light and shadow in the world, of good and evil in complex characters, has an endless attraction for him. The clear sweet song of his Pippa runs sparkling through dark scenes of crime and treachery; Chiappino is at the height of heroism when the Nuncio comes to him, and like a wise, benevolent kind of devil, shows him the stupidity of heroism and all that sort of thing, and how much better he can serve the world by serving his own interests first. Twice, in Paracelsus and in The Return of the Druses, he has taken impostors for his heroes, and shown them to have been so largely because they were men of finer mould than the most honest of their dupes. From first to last he feels a passionate interest in the story of a soul.' Now the simple soul, like the knifegrinder, has got no story. The simple heart, however, may have story enough, and it is the Pippa of all his work. It is, above all, truth of which he is in search, whether he paints the sixteenth-century Bishop ordering his tomb, or the nineteenthcentury Bishop chatting over his wine. His aim is to keep poetry in touch not merely with the life of the imagination, but with life in general. It is of course where it touches this modern life of ours that the real poetic crux occurs. There will always be the stuff of poetry in the world, so long as there are hearts and souls in it, and so long as the earth moves on through starry space, clothed in her beautiful vesture of air.

But either the surface of our life has really grown prosaic, or we think it has, which comes to the same thing. It requires tact as well as boldness and power to harmonise it with the imaginative atmosphere that we expect in poetry. Browning sometimes failed in tact; at other times, as in Waring and the brief poem called Confessions, his touch was sure. But this realism of his, at its best as well as its worst, inevitably repelled readers who were only just beginning to relish realism in prose. Besides, he had a language of his own, with a strange new flavour about it, which made him seem much more obscure than he really was. So here a little ahead of his contemporaries and there a great way, most of Robert Browning's road was something solitary. The pleasanter for him when one fine day he found a troop of followers marching behind him; young folk, full of sympathy and enthusiasm.

He had other things in common with them, besides realistic and psychological tendencies. His poems from Sordello onwards bear witness to his love and knowledge of Italian Art. This he had gained for himself as he travelled through Italy, looking round him with a painter's eye. But Ruskin taught a younger generation to share it with him. Then, though from first to last a sturdy lover of England, he was something of a cosmopolitan in his sympathies; and cosmopolitanism is strongly characteristic of the literature of to-day, and even mildly characteristic of the literary man. It used not to be

So.

The novelists of Browning's date can never quite repress their chuckles at the idea of any one being ridiculous enough to be born a Frenchman or a German. The other poets travelled and even made their homes in Italy, but they were interested only in its scenery and romance. Browning not only travelled much, but formed intimate friendships outside his own country, and when he and his wife lived in Florence it was not as strangers and sojourners. Their poems reflect their sympathy with the national life about them. For this freedom from provincialism, as well as for some other kindred qualities, he doubtless owed much thanks to his education, which was remarkable for its appropriateness to his genius. He was not machine made.

In yet another and a more important characteristic he was in

harmony with the most modern developments. His dramatic bent was unseasonable in the middle years of this century. English literature had turned its back on the theatre, in spite of Macreadys and Kembles. Not only so, but its tendencies were non-dramatic. Scenes may of course be found in the works of the great novelists of the period which stand in contradiction to this. But all the same the tendency was towards a gentle development of plot and character, an absence of central situations, of crucial moments in the affairs and minds of men; that is, towards the non-dramatic. Browning instinctively turned towards the stage. He did not succeed there, yet one cannot but think that had circumstances encouraged the clever young man to go on writing stage-plays, he would eventually have learned the business. There is nothing to regret in the fact that he did not. His genius found for itself the most full and fitting expression. Through the plays, the Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, it swept on to that Dramatic Epic of The Ring and the Book, which perhaps most perfectly embodied it. The plan of The Ring and the Book grew so naturally out of the documents on which it was founded and his own habitual manner of writing, that probably he himself was hardly conscious of its originality, of its excellence as a device for breaking the monotony of a long poem. The brilliant Introduction tells the facts of the story with a lucidity to which he did not always attain. By thus on the threshold revealing his whole plot, he at once asserts and vindicates his old belief in the interest of the story of souls; for no one would wish it otherwise. Then at the touch of the magician's wand arise out of their dust the hearts that beat hard,' the brains that ticked two centuries since.' All Rome is there, Arezzo too, yet the plan of the poem permits the principal figures to stand out clear against that crowded background. They re-act dramatically upon each other, yet they are more complete than they could be in a play, where much must be left to conjecture. Long as it is, it is seldom long-winded. When it is, the remedy is plainly in the reader's own hands; another virtue of the plan. General practice has long suppressed Doctor Bottinius, and many persons think they can do without Tertium Quid; but this is not universal. At any rate it is possible without these to realize the