Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1903-06-06 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

NORTHERN WEEKLY GAZETTE.  about the Provencal Troubadours, knowledge about the Jewish Rabbis of the Middle Ages." But he was ignorant of the fact that such knowledge was exceptional. "His father was a student of mediteval times, he had himself imbibed that learning in the same casual manner in which a boy learns to walk or to play cricket. Consequently, in a literary sense he rushed up to the first person he met, and began talking about Ecolo and Taurello Solinguerra with about as much literary egotism as an English baby shows when it talks 14Inglisla to an Italian organ grinder." Thus, Mr Chesterton at once explains the obscurity of Sordello, and dismisses the general accusation against Browning of intellectual pride. He was not unintelligible because his thoughts were vague, but because to him they were obv'ous, and he thought the postman and tailor were poets like himself.  It is not true either, the critio adds, that Browning's intellectual complexity increased with his later poems. But we have to credit him w:th having invented what seemed so difficult to believe passible—new, artistic, and novel forms of poetry. "Among all his two hundred to three hundred poems, it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that there are half as many different metres as there are different poems." It cannot be surprising, therefore, that Browning is "caviare to the general." We have to know something more of the man, to educate our tastes to this new standard; and it is the highest praise one mm bestow to say that Mr Chesterton has cleared the air of much misconception concerning Browning-'s poetry, and redeemed him from tbe false position in which he has been placed by his friends. The most striking element in Browning's constitution was his optimism. His worshippers are inclined to make most of his philosophy, many claiming him as philosopher more than poet. But as Mr Chesterton aptly remarks, his doctrines "were the symptoms of his optimism, they were not the origin." His critic might have found a good illustration of this characteristic in the closing stanza of "Apparent Failure" —a poem in which Browning speculates on the reasons for committing suicide as he looks upon three bodies dragged from the Seine. His deductions are:—  "It's wiser being good than bad: It's safer being meek than fierce; It's fitter being sane than mad. My own hope is, a sun will pieroe The thiekest oloud earth ever stretched: That, after Last, returns the First,  Thong,' h a wide oOmpaes-iound be fctolbed; That what began best, oan't end worst, Nor what God blessed one, prove  accurst."  Here Browning reaches the same conclusion as Tennyson when he hopes "that somehow good will be the final goal of ill." If his philwophy could be reduced to form it would be to express the deep faith, founded upon his own experience, where the joyfulness of life is made to stand out. so prominently, that "man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection," and that life, therefore, implies immortality. The mysticism of Browning, however, is less marked than his habit of seizing upon the strange elements of "a strange world," upon the grotesque, and, in a sense, upon the obscure rather than upon the most conspicuous aspects of life, to extract therefrom their message. We have had poets who have taken us to the beautiful in *nature. Browning himself makes Brother Lippo say- We're made ao that we love First when we see thorn painted, things we have plumed Perhaps a hundeed times nor oared to see.  . . I Azi Wee given for lima,  S •  JUNE 6, lima  Poetry and painting, in other words have made us see "the beauty and the' wonder and .the power, the shape of things, their colour, lights, and shades," which was before us every day but unobserved. But Browning has gone a step further, and shown us "the beauty of refuse, the poetry of moan landscapes, and grey streets, and some half-starved common at twilight; the poetry of the shabby and hungry aspects of the earth itself." This is altogether different from the modern realism that insists upon painting things in all their sordidness, merely because they exist, and must, therefore, be known. Browning seemed to believe in making everyone speak from his own point of view—the rogue, the impostor, or the traitor, explaining his own position and accounting for his deeds—which again is not the same thing as picturing crime and offering excuses for the criminal. One has to judge of the method by the effect, and it speaks much for Browning's art that when he has made each character tell his own story before the fmal judgment is given, each has supplied an adequate reason for his own condemnation or justification. Browning's aim seems throughout to have been to give men vcioes, not to praise or blame them, and certainly not to excuse or palliate their deeds, not even to employ them for satires or attacks upon certain opinions. We are asked to believe that Browning felt each man had a right to speak for himself, and we must hear all we can or we shall not get at the real truth. Browning was thus a Liberal in a. sense which is not so often understood to-day. "His mind was possessed, perhaps even to excess, by a belief in growth and energy. The world was going right, he felt. He had found truth in so many strange forms," and he would not stifle the eccentricities of others. He would have each to speak, for he thought that this particular freedom of speech would the sooner expose and destroy error than would the suppression of that freedom. He was a rberal of the kind that Mr Chesterton defines approximately "as a man who, if he could by waving his haad in a dark room, stop the mouths of all deceivers of mankind for ever, would not wave his hand." Browning believed in a certain destiny of the human spirit beyond our sincerest convictions, and, perhaps, in spite of them, so that Mr Chesterton claims him as pre-eminently modern, and the "Ring and the Book" as the great epic of free speech. He had his weaknesses and his prejudices, and his critic's summing up seems to be that Browning was "simply a great demagogue with an impediment in his speech."