beauty is independent of time, particular forms of doubt and belief are not. Men may agree to use the same phrases, but there can be no effectual agreement to mean the same thing by them. Such special causes of temporary popularity will tend not to remembrance but to oblivion in ages to come. It is a great thing to have expressed best of all the thought and feeling of one century; but it is not so great as to have expressed the thoughts of all centuries. When the time is gone the interest passes away. There remains, however, to be set against this the pure and exquisite beauty of much of Tennyson's work, the melody of his verse, the perennial charm of the literary associations which he, better than any contemporary, knew how to impart to his poetry. There remains also the mass of thought which is not of one age but of all. By virtue of these Tennyson's memory is safe. CHAPTER V BROWNING BROWNING'S poems vary in quality at least as widely as Tennyson's; and there are differences in tone between the works of one period as a whole and those of another. But there is no such revolution as that which is implied in the development of the dramatic element in Tennyson. On the contrary, the principle upon which Browning's work is based remains singularly uniform from beginning to end: he never swerved from the conviction that his genius was fundamentally dramatic. He contrasts with Tennyson also in his remarkable independence. Only a few great poets owe so much to their predecessors as Tennyson, while hardly any are so entirely self-sustained as Browning. Tennyson is full of echoes from the classics; but though Browning knew all the Greek and Latin poets, there are few lines or phrases in his works which can be traced back to them. Browning could when he pleased interweave among his lines literary reminiscences drawn from his vast reading. But his method of conception was essentially his own, and his work did not readily amalgamate with the work of others. The echoes of Shelley in his early poetry seem not quite in keeping with the context. He felt the incongruity, and early learnt to rely upon himself alone. Even his marriage with a poetess had little influence upon Browning's work. Though there is a change after 1846, the greater part of it seems to be due not to her but to himself: it was something which would have come whether he had married or not. The scanty success achieved after many efforts made his abandonment of the drama almost inevitable. No doubt the long residence in Italy was a result of the marriage, and no doubt it strengthened the Italian influence. But this was no new thing: Browning had visited Italy before, and had already felt the charm of the Italian Renascence. Further, although he knew and loved Italian literature, his own work remains Teutonic in spirit. Perhaps no English poet ever knew any foreign country as well as Browning knew Italy; certainly none has ever dedicated more of his best work to a land which was not his own. Pippa Passes, Luria, A Soul's Tragedy, Andrea del Sarto, Fra Lippo Lippi, The Bishop at St Praxed's, with many more of the shorter poems, and the great Ring and the Book itself, are all Italian in subject-matter; they show an infinity of knowledge; and yet not one of them could for a moment be conceived to be the work of an Italian. Tennyson's knowledge of the country, the people and the literature was far narrower, but there is a great deal more of the spirit of Italian poetry embodied in his verse. Byron is far less alien. The Elizabethan dramatists seem more in harmony with Venice or Verona than Browning ever is. If Keats was born a Greek, Browning was born a Goth-the author of The City of Dreadful Night has said so in other words. His case proves how much spiritual affinity has to do with literary resemblances, and how dangerous is the argument that such resemblances indicate direct influence. Anyone familiar with German philosophy as well as with Browning would be tempted to argue that the latter had been powerfully swayed by the philosophers, and that some of his most characteristic and most frequently reiterated ideas were borrowed from them. And yet the poet was emphatic in his assurance that he knew neither the German philosophers nor their reflection in Coleridge1." Why, then, is it that there is in his poetry far more of the spirit of that Germany in which he never lived, and whose language and literature he knew very imperfectly, than there is of Italy, though he knew it thoroughly and lived in it for many of the best years of his life? No answer can be given more definite than that, some1 Mrs Sutherland Orr's Life of Browning, 108. 66 how, the poet was born a Goth. But stress must not be laid on blood; for English, Scotch, German and Creole meet in Robert Browning; and some believe that there was a Jewish element as well. The Brownings settled in Italy, partly for the sake of Mrs Browning's health, and partly because the unhappy relations between her and her father, on account of his violent and unreasonable opposition to the marriage, made it desirable that father and daughter should live far apart. Their home, till Mrs Browning's death, was at Florence, whence Browning sent his two next works, Christmas Eve and Easter Day (1850) and Men and Women (1855). The former of these poems is the only work of Browning's in which we may with probability trace the influence of Mrs Browning; and even in this instance the influence is conjectural. The manner is Browning's, and the subject is one which would naturally attract him. It may, therefore, be no more than a coincidence that the poet's first publication after his marriage is that in which he most explicitly deals with questions of religion, or rather of theology, for he is religious throughout. But whatever may be the secret of its genesis, Christmas Eve and Easter Day is a poem of peculiar interest as that in which the poet's own views are most clearly revealed; for in spite of the dramatic principle we may safely ascribe to himself a large part of its substance. It is further interesting because of a connexion, unusually close for Browning, with contemporary thought. In this respect Browning is unlike all his chief contemporaries. Tennyson, Arnold, Clough, Rossetti and Dobell, all betray themselves not only as poets of the nineteenth century, but of a particular decade or, at widest, a particular quarter of it. The themes which caught their imagination would not have caught it a little earlier or a little later, or else they would have been treated differently. But Browning did not much love to work on topics connected with his own generation. To him, time was a matter almost of indifference; for the human soul, in which his interest was centred, has remained much the same since the days of Adam. If he had a preference, it was for the Italian Renascence rather than for any other age or country. Nevertheless, he kept his eyes open to what was taking place around him. Sludge the Medium shows that he was awake to the rise of spiritualism; perhaps because Mrs Browning would not allow him to sleep. He was also interested, in a scornful way, in the ecclesiastical ferment caused by Newman. He was familiar with all the "thrilling views of the surplice question," and he was temptuously amused by the clerical figure with the chains of Peter round his waist, and his back "brave with the needlework of noodledom." So too he noted the effect of Essays and Reviews and of Colenso's work as well as the negative criticism of the German school; while he showed no more inclination to accept this without reserve than to give over his intellect into the keeping of the Catholic party. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that Browning should have chosen in Christmas Eve to make his comments upon the two extreme forms of faith which divide his countrymen, and upon the form of scepticism which was threatening both. As the representatives of faith he chooses, on the one hand, ultra-Protestantism, "the dissidence of dissent," and, on the other, Roman Catholicism. In both he finds much to question and to reject, but in both he finds present the " one thing needful," love. This is where churches and chapels have the decisive advantage over the German professor's lecture-room. The last speaks only to the intellect, they address the heart; and Browning is always disposed to give the heart a higher place than the head. Stupid as is the doctrine of the Nonconformist preacher, and gross as is the yoke of Rome, either is preferable to the negations of the German professor. The two former may "poison the air for healthy breathing," "But the Critic leaves no air to poison; It will be observed that, proceeding from a different starting-point, Paracelsus reaches a similar conclusion. The difference between the two poems is that the earlier is fundamentally philosophical, |