first of these is Browning's most energetic assertion that the poet is no philosopher concerned with ideas rather than with things-with abstractions rather than with actions. His disciples have written a great many books that seem to reduce him from a poet to a philosopher, and one cannot protest too vehemently against this dulling of an imagination richer than a child's in adventures and in the passion for the detailed and the concrete. In Transcendentalism he bids a younger poet answer whether there is more help to be got from Jacob Boehme with his subtle meanings :

Or some stout Mage like him of Halberstadt,

John, who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about.

With how magnificent an image he then justifies the poet of" things" as compared with the philosopher of "thoughts" :

"

He with a "look you! vents a brace of rhymes,

And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,

Over us, under, round us every side,

Nay, in and out the tables and the chairs

And musty volumes, Boehme's book and all—
Buries us with a glory, young once more,
Pouring heaven into this poor house of life.

One of the things one constantly marvels at as one reads Browning is the splendid æstheticism with which he lights up prosaic words and pedestrian details with beauty.

The truth is, if we do not realize that he is a great singer and a great painter as well as a great humorist and realist, we shall have read him in vain. No doubt his phrases are often as grotesque as jagged teeth, as when the mourners are made to say in A Grammarian's Funeral:

Look out if yonder be not day again,
Rimming the rock-row !

Reading the second of these lines one feels as if one of the mourners had stubbed his foot against a

sharp stone on the mountain-path. And yet, if Browning invented a harsh speech of his own for common use, he uttered it in all the varied rhythms of genius and passion. There may often be no music in the individual words, but there is always in the poems as a whole a deep undercurrent of music as from some hidden river. His poems have the movement of living things. They are lacking only in smooth and static loveliness. They are full of the hoof-beats of Pegasus.

We find in his poems, indeed, no fastidious escape from life, but an exalted acceptance of it. Browning is one of the very few poets who, echoing the Creator, have declared that the world is good. His sense of the goodness of it even in foulness and in failure is written over half of his poems. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is a fable of life triumphant in a world tombstoned with every abominable and hostile thing-a world, too, in which the hero is doomed to perish at devilish hands. Whenever one finds oneself doubting the immensity of Browning's genius, one has only to read Childe Roland again to restore one's faith. There never was a landscape so alive with horror as that amid which the knight travelled in quest of the Dark Tower. As detail is added to detail, it becomes horrible as suicide, a shrieking progress of all the torments, till one is wrought up into a very nightmare of apprehension and the Tower itself appears :

The round squat tower, blind as the fool's heart.

Was there ever such a pause and gathering of courage as in the verses that follow in which the last of the knights takes his resolve?:

Not see? because of night perhaps?-why, day
Came back again for that! before it left,

The dying sunset kindled through a cleft :

The hills, like giants at a hunting, lay
Chin upon hand, to see the game at bay-

"Now stab and end the creature-to the heft!"

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears,
Of all the lost adventurers my peers-

How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

There they stood, ranged along the hillside, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture in a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all. And yet
Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,

And blew. Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came."

There, if anywhere in literature, is the summit of tragic and triumphant music. There, it seems to me, is as profound and imaginative expression of the heroic spirit as is to be found in the English language.

To belittle Browning as an artist after such a poem is to blaspheme against art. To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words. Browning was an optimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils. He was not defiant in a fine attitude like Byron. His defiance was rather a form of magnanimity. He is said, on Robert Buchanan's authority, to have thundered No," when in his later years he was asked if he were a Christian. But his defiance was the defiance of a Christian, the dauntlessness of a knight of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps it is that he was more Christian than the Christians. Like the Pope in The Ring and the Book, he loathed the association of Christianity with respectability. Some readers are bewildered by his respectability in trivial things, such as dress, into failing to see his hatred of respectability when accepted as a standard in spiritual things. He is more sympathetic towards the disreputable suicides in Apparent Failure than towards the vacillating and respectable lovers in

The Statue and the Bust. There was at least a hint of heroism in the last madness of the doomed men. Browning again and again protests, as Blake had done earlier, against the mean moral values of his age. Energy to him as to Blake meant endless delight, and especially those two great energies of the spirit-love and heroism. For, though his work is not a philosophic expression of moral ideas, it is an imaginative expression of moral ideas, as a result of which he is, above all, the poet of lovers and heroes. Imagination is a caged bird in these days; with Browning it was a soaring eagle. In some ways Mr. Conrad's is the most heroic imagination in contemporary literature. But he does not take this round globe of light and darkness into his purview as Browning did. The whole earth is to him shadowed with futility. Browning was too lyrical to resign himself to the shadows. He saw the earth through the eyes of a lover till the end. He saw death itself as no more than an interlude of pain, darkness, and cold before a lovers' meeting. It may be that it is all a rapturous illusion, and that, after we have laid him aside and slept a night's broken sleep, we sink back again naturally into the little careful hopes and infidelities of everyday. But it seems to me that here is a whole heroic literature to which the world will always do well to turn in days of inexorable pain and horror such as those through which it has but recently passed.

VIII

THE FAME OF J. M. SYNGE

THE most masterly piece of literary advertising in modern times was surely Mr. Yeats's enforcement of Synge upon the coteries or the choruses-as a writer in the great tradition of Homer and Shakespeare. So successful has Mr. Yeats been, indeed, in the exaltation of his friend, that people are in danger of forgetting that it is Mr. Yeats himself, and not Synge, who is the ruling figure in modern Irish literature. One does not criticize Mr. Yeats for this. During the Synge controversy he was a man raising his voice in the heat of battle-a man, too, praising a generous comrade who was but lately dead. The critics outside Ireland, however, have had none of these causes of passion to prevent them from seeing Synge justly. They simply bowed down before the idol that Mr. Yeats had set up before them, and danced themselves into ecstasies round the image of the golden playboy.

Mr. Howe, who wrote a sincere and able book on Synge, may be taken as a representative apostle of the Synge cult. He sets before us a god, not a man-a creator of absolute beauty-and he asks us to accept the common view that The Playboy of the Western World is his masterpiece. There can never be any true criticism of Synge till we have got rid of all these obsessions and idolatries. Synge was an extraordinary man of genius, but he was not an extraordinarily great man of genius. He is not the peer of Shakespeare : he is not the peer of Shelley he is the peer, say, of Stevenson. His was a byway, not a high-road, of