ABSTRACT
Mr. Browning has always had a predilection for the type of characters which the moralist finds it convenient to class as hypocrites. An artist who begins to analyse character quite disinterestedly is met very soon by the difficulty which character he is to analyse, the character which the man indulges or the character which he assumes; nor is it allowable to cut the knot and say that a man is what he allows himself to be, and is not what he assumes himself to be. The assumption seriously influences his conduct, and it is quite as essential to his comfort that the assumption should impose upon himself as that it should impose upon others; if it come to the point, he would even prefer to allow himself in less rather than give up the assumption altogether. In fact, the study of human character, in general, might almost be resolved into an attempt to ascertain the true relations between what we claim to be and what we tend to be; and this problem is obviously best approached in the individuals in whom the contrast assumes the most piquant form. In the same way the ethical distinction between honest men and rogues is replaced by the aesthetical distinction between those who recognise and accept and those who rebel against the inevitable contrast between the ideal and the natural self. On the one side we have Mr. Sludge and Bishop Blougram, and the bishop who orders his tomb in St. Praxede, and the other bishops who display their successful or unsuccessful diplomacy in the Return of the Druses and The Soul’s Tragedy; on the other side, there is the noble Djebal, one of the loftiest of all tragic characters, and the pitiful Chiappino and poor Mr. Gigadibs. It is worth noticing that Djebal comes nearest to the common conception of a common imposter, just because his enthusiasm is too deep not to be practical, too sustained not to become unscrupulous, while the worthless Gigadibs is too shallow to be unsincere. Of course the Saviour of Society belongs to the more intelligent if not to the more estimable class. The machinery of the poem is intricate, and it is difficult to believe that the whole of it was written upon a single plan. For 142 pages out of 148 the Saviour of Society, in exile, is explaining his career to a young lady;
the last half-page we learn that he has not yet begun his second exile, has no young lady to talk to; but the whole reverie has arisen out of the possible consequences of an ultimatum, which he has still to decide upon sending. On the other hand, he says early in the poem:
I could then, last July, bid courier take Message for me, post-haste, a thousand miles.
