ABSTRACT
The one quality of Mr. Browning’s intellectual nature which is at present most universally recognized is its casuistry-his disposition to allow an excessive weight to the incidental conditions of human action, and consequently to employ sliding scales in the measurement of it. The most remarkable evidence of this quality, supplied by his later works, is to be found in Prince HohenstielSchwangau. It is displayed with more audacity in Fifine at the Fair, with larger and more sustained effect in The Ring and the Book. But Fifine at the Fair, though very subjective in treatment, verges too much on the grotesque to be accepted as a genuine reflection of the author’s mind; and The Ring and the Book represents him as a pleader, but at the same time as a judge. It describes the case under discussion from every possible point of view, but does not describe it as subject to any possible moral doubt. Prince HohenstielSchwangau is a deliberate attempt on the author’s part to defend a cause which he knows to be weak, and as such is a typical specimen, as it is also a favourable one, of his genius for special pleading. It places in full relief the love of opposition which impels him to defend the weaker side, and the love of fairness which always makes him subsume in the defence every argument that may be justly advanced against it; and it also exhibits that double-refracting quality of his mind which can convert a final concession to the one side into an irresistible last word in favour of the other.…
more emotional character, and so various is his mode of self-manifestation that the evidence contained in his collective works of his belief in the necessary relativity of judgment is not a whit stronger than their indirect advocacy of courage, devotion, singleness of heart-in short, of all the virtues which are born of conviction. His imagination is keenly alive to every condition of love; but its deepest and most passionate response is always yielded to that form of tenderness which by its disinterested nature most approaches to the received ideal of the Divine. This feeling attains its highest expression in ‘Saul,’ where the anthropomorphism so often apparent in the author’s conception of God is justified by historic truth and ennobled by a sustained intensity of lyric emotion which has been rarely equalled and probably never surpassed. It is the outpouring of a passionate human friendship gradually raised by its own strength to the presentiment of a divine love manifest in the flesh, and to which in its final ecstasy the very life of nature becomes the throbbing of a mysterious and expectant joy. The love of love is the prevailing inspiration of all such of Mr. Browning’s poems as even trench on religious subjects, and it often resolves itself into so earnest a plea for the divine nature and atoning mission of Christ, that we can scarcely retain the conviction that it is his heart, and not his mind, which accepts it.
