ABSTRACT
The vignette to the Symposium is the key-note of Mr. Browning’s poem, and he has in his own manner worked it into a fugue, as puzzling, as full of subtleties and ironies, as capricious, and as iridescent as his Sordello. The world has had warnings of late that critics must never be personal. And yet it is-we venture to think-impossible to understand or even to dimly sympathize with The Last Adventure of Balaustion without knowing a few simple facts-facts that are matter of notoriety-about its author. Mr. Jowett is Master of Baliol, Mr. Browning is the one Honorary Fellow whom Baliol has elected, and the two are friends. Mr. Jowett, no old Oxford man need be reminded, is especially fond of the Symposium, for its own sake as a work of art, and still more for the sake of the subtle problem which its last few sentences throw down, and to which we know but one solution-that the dialogue itself is the answer. This being so, it is to be hoped we in no way exceed our province in suggesting that the Master of Baliol and its Honorary Fellow must have talked over the conclusion of the Symposium more than once, and possibly even until cock-crow, and that in some way the poem has grown out of the discussion.
