glows in Browning's thought of love. In "Youth and Art," in "Colombe's Birthday," in "The Inn Album," in "The Ring and the Book," in those noble self-confessions "One Word More," and "By the Fireside," in a hundred other forms, it is made clear that life touches its zenith only as it surrenders itself to a passion whose spiritual fervor burns away all selfishness and makes it one with whatever is eternal and divine. He who fails to make the last venture, to hazard all for the possible possession of heaven, may gain everything else, but has miserably and finally failed. He has missed the one supreme hour when life would have been revealed to him. So profoundly is the poet possessed by the necessity of surrendering one's self to the highest impulses that occasionally, as in "The Statue and the Bust," this thought dominates and excludes all other considerations, and stamps the ungirt loin and the unlit lamp as the supreme and irrevocable sin against life.

In Browning's conception of the place of personality it was foreordained that his genius should be dramatic; should deal with situations and characters and rarely with abstractions. Thought, in his view, has not come to complete consciousness until it has borne the fruit of action. From "Pauline" to the epilogue in " Parleyings" it is always a person who speaks, and rarely the poet; the latter keeps himself out of sight by the instinct which is a part of his gift. The subtle genius of a poet whose mastery of psychology is universally recognized has marvelous power of penetrating the secret of natures widely dissimilar, and of experiences which have little in common save that they are a part of life. No poet has ever surpassed Browning in this spiritual clairvoyance or mind-reading, which has made it possible for him to give us the very spirit of the Greek decadence in "Cleon;" the subtle, confused, but marvelously interesting spirit of the Renaissance in "The Bishop Orders his Tomb; " the soul of debased Mediævalism in "The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister;" the first dim perception of religious ideas in a possible primitive man in "Caliban upon Setebos." All Browning's poems are dramatic, and all his dramas are dramas of the soul. In "Paracelsus," in “Luria,” in “Sordello," in "The Ring and the Book," action is used, not for dramatic effect, but to reveal the soul. And only those who have carefully studied these works know what astonishing power is embodied in them, what marvelous subtlety of analysis, what masterly grouping and interplay of motives, what overflowing and apparently inexhaustible force and vitality of mind.

In one of his luminous generalizations Goethe says that thought expands but weakens, while action intensifies but narrows. The singular combination of great intellectual range with passionate intensity of utterance which characterizes Browning is explained by the indissoluble union in which he holds thought and action. The dramatic monologue, which belongs to him as truly as the terza rima to Dante, or the nine-line stanza to Spenser, has this great advantage over other forms of expression, that it gives us with the truth the character which that truth has formed; instead of an abstraction we have a piece of reality.

In his essay on Shelley, Browning makes a distinction between the two great classes of poets, the seers and the makers. It is conceded on all sides that he himself is a seer; is he also a maker? The question involves a good deal more than the possession of the skill of the craftsman who employs approved methods and makes his work conform to the best accepted standards. Art is as inexhaustible as nature, and those who know most thoroughly the history of the development of literature will be slowest to condemn a form of expression which does not at a glance reveal all its content of beauty and strength to them. A thinker of Browning's depth and subtlety will never attract those to whom literature is a recreation simply; a decorative art which aims to beguile the senses by purely sensuous melody, and to substitute for the hardship of thinking a pleasantly superficial comment on or embellishment of life. Great art will never be easy of comprehension to any save those who have been trained to the point of understanding what it signifies, and whose imaginations are sympathetically awakened and dilated by it. The fact that a writer is difficult, that his meaning does not play like a sunbeam on the surface of his expression, but must be sought in the very structure of his work, does not disprove his possession of the highest artistic power. Sophocles is still the supreme artist among all those who have impressed their genius upon language; but Sophocles never condescends to make himself agreeable to our easy, careless moods; he demands our best hours and severest thought. Dante stands by the suffrages of all civilized peoples among the three or four foremost poets of the world, but the "Divine Comedy" was never yet mastered by the wayfaring man. The fact that Browning is often difficult is evidently not conclusive evidence of his failure as an artist. The great body of his work is perfectly comprehensible when one approaches it from the poet's own point of view. It is then seen to be, for the most part, marvelously adapted to the

utterance of his thought, the masterful expression of his purpose. The dramatic monologue is not easy reading at first, but when one has become familiar with it, does any form of art seem so alive with the potency of passion, so compact and yet so flexible and expressive? Does not "My Last Duchess" tell the whole story, reveal the whole interior tragedy, in a few swift words, not one of which misses the exact emphasis, the essential and inevitable weight? It lies within the power of no secondary artist to match his thought with an expression that is instantly and forever a part of that thought; not its form only, but its soul irradiating and fashioning the whole by its own impulsion.

In literature, as in the plastic arts, there is not only great variety of type but there is always the possibility of the new type. The genius of each age creates its own expression by the same unconscious but irresistible development which gives its insight new direction or its constructive tendency a new impulse. It is never a question of conformity to accredited standards; it is always a question of adequate and inevitable expression. The form which comes inevitably with a new thought of nature or life is invariably recognized in the end as instinct with the art spirit. The style of "Sartor Resartus" is fatal to every imitator, but to convey the set of impressions, to place one at the point of view, which are the essential things in the book, it is thoroughly artistic. The man who wrote "Sartor Resartus" and "The Diamond Necklace was a literary artist of a very high rank, although he possessed nothing in common with the Benvenuto Cellini school of literary craftsmanship.

The distinctive quality of an artist is that which leads him to use the one form of expression which gives his thought the most virile and capacious utterance; which not only conveys to another its definite outlines, but those undisclosed relations which unite it to the totality of his thinking. Now, at his best, this is precisely what Browning does; he puts us in complete possession of his conception. He gives us not only the fruit of a great passion in some clear, decisive action; he indicates every stage of the obscure processes which lay behind it. The soil out of which it drew its sustenance, the sky that bent over it, the winds that touched it gently or harshly, shadow of cloud and flash of sun upon it, the atmosphere that enveloped it, the movement of human life about it, -all these things become clear to us as we read such a story as the crime of Guido in "The Ring and the Book," become part of the intricate play, become part also of our imagination, until at last

the marvelous drama is complete in a sense in which few works of art are ever complete. Browning's view of life and art and nature is not that of the scientific observer or of the philosopher; it is the artist's view. And those who come into sympathy with it are persuaded that it is a view which enlarges and enriches art on every side, and that the man who has attained it is not only an artist, but an artist in the truest and deepest sense of a great but ill-used word. Browning not only sees life as a whole and sees it in its large relations; he sees it always through the imagination. The bare, unrelated fact touches and inspires him; he feels the warm life in it; he understands it because there is something in himself which answers to it; it begins to glow in his thought; other facts gather about it. It may be a fragment when it leaves the poet's hands, but it will suggest the whole; fragment or complete and elaborately worked out conception, the truth that lies at its heart somehow penetrates us, rouses our imagination, possesses us then and finally not only as true, but as beautiful in some new and deep way. "Rabbi Ben Ezra " will hardly attract those who are content with the sweet and obvious commonplaces of the "Psalm of Life; " but to some at least it will remain one of the incomparable works which slowly distil their meaning to deepening thought and widening experience. Is there not in the sense of incompleteness which many of Browning's works convey a hint of that larger art of the future whose depth of beauty shall lie, not in faultless outline, but in inexhaustible suggestiveness; not in the perfection of form which captures us at a glance and then slowly releases us as its charm becomes familiar, but in that amplitude of idea and of aspiration which slowly wins us to itself by a power which penetrates and dilates our imagination more and more? Life is incomplete; a titanesque fragment as Browning sees it; shall not art also share that incompleteness which runs like a shining line of prophecy across all the works of our hands? "On earth the broken arcs; in the heaven a perfect round."

In what has been said the endeavor has been to lay bare Browning's characteristic quality as a thinker and as an artist, to make clear his distinctive and peculiar message and work. A poet of such vigor, of such intense vitality, will disclose grave faults. It is the work of intelligent criticism, while it takes account of these things, to make it clear that incompleteness is a necessary part of life. The Angelos and Dantes are always somewhat careless of detail; the Cellinis alone are faultless. Browning sometimes sees life on its spontaneous side so clearly that he fails to

attach due weight to conventions and institutions; he has more than once wasted his force on unimportant themes; and he is sometimes needlessly and exasperatingly obscure. "Sordello," for instance, is distinctly defective as a work of art, because the conception was evidently not mastered at the start, and the undeniable confusion and obscurity of the poem are due largely to this offense against the primary law of art. The lover of Browning will not shrink from the application of a rigid selective principle to a body of verse which he is persuaded will remain, after all reductions are made, one of the most powerful, varied, and nobly executed contributions to contemporary poetry; the splendid utterance of a great soul who has searched knowledge, nature, art, and life, and with the awful vision clear before him still sings with Pippa:

"God's in his heaven,
All's right with the world."

GREENWICH, CONN.

Hamilton Wright Mabie.

CONDITIONS OF LABOR IN ENGLAND.

PERHAPS the most noteworthy conclusion in the stranger's estimate of the English people is that he finds a nation which has taken its second wind. A boy starts off in a race with wind intact and with muscles firm: soon he tires, and tugs on, if he does not stop, by sheer force of nerval momentum. But if he keeps on long enough the equilibrium of muscle and lung and nerve is established, and he has his second wind. From that time on he can run till the last ohm of vitality is exhausted, without distress. Now the English people appear to one to have gotten the second wind. They have accepted the limitations against which newer nations rebel; they have accepted gradations of position and of immediate reward as a condition of existence; in a word, they have accepted themselves. They have learned to plod, and to plod effectively. They all plod: the member of the House of Commons in his speeches, the coal drayman with his basket and his broom, the leader-writers in the daily journals, the fish-boy with his board on his head, the vicar in his Sunday sermon, the dancing-man at the ball, the talker at the dinner,— they all plod, to the infinite weariness of the man accustomed to our less complex civilization. But they plod effectively, and they give the impression that they can plod on forever.