 I do not think anyone could find any fault with the way in which Mr. Collingwood has discharged his task, except, of course, Mr. Ruskin himself, who would certainly have scored through all the eulogies and passionate red ink, and declared that his dear friend had selected for admiration the very parts of his work which were vile, brainless, and revolting. That however was merely Ruskin's humor, and one of the deepest disappointments with Mr. Collingwood is that he, like everyone else, fails to appreciate Ruskin as a humorist. Yet he was a great humorist. Half the explosions which are solemnly scolded as one-sided were simply meant to be one-sided. They were mere laughing experiments in language. Like a woman he saw the humor of his own prejudices, did not sophisticate them by logic but deliberately exaggerated them by rhetoric. One-tenth of his paradoxes would have made the fortune of a modern young man with gloves of an art yellow. He was as fond of nonsense as Mr. Max Beerbaum. Only he was fond of other things too. He did not ask humanity to dine on his pickles. But while his kaleidoscope of fancy and depogram gives him some kinship with the present day, he was essentially of an earlier type. He was the last of the prophets. With him vanishes the secret of that early Victorian simplicity which gave a man the courage to mount a pulpit above the head of his fellows. Many elements, good and bad, have destroyed it. Humility as well as fear, camaraderie as well as skepticism, have bred in us a desire to give our advice lightly and persuasively, to mask our morality, to whisper a word and glide away. The contrast was, in some degree, typified in the House of Commons under the last leadership of Mr. Gladstone, the old order with its fist on the box and the new order with its feet on the table. Doubtless the whine of that prophecy was too strong even for the strong heads that carried it. It made Ruskin capricious and despotic. Tennyson lonely and whimsical, Carlisle harsh to the point of hatred and Kingsley often rabid on the ruin of logic and charity. One alone of that race of giants the greatest and most neglected was sober after the cup. No mission, no frustration could touch with hysteria the humanity of Robert Browning. Though Ruskin seems to close the role of the militant prophets, we feel how needful are such figures when we consider with what pathetic eagerness men pay prophetic honors even to those who disclaim the prophetic character. Ibsen declares that he only depicts life, that as far as he is concerned there is nothing to be done, and still armies of Ibsenites rally to the flag and enthusiastically do nothing. I have found traces of a school which avowedly follows Mr. Henry James, an idea full of humor. I like to think of a crowd with pikes and torches shouting passages from the awkward age. It is right and proper for a multitude to declare its readiness to follow a prophet to the end of the world. But if he himself explains, with pathetic gesticulations, that he is only going for a walk in the park, there is not much for the multitude to do. But the disciple of Ruskin had plenty to do. He made roads. In his spare moments he studied the whole of geology and botany. He lifted up paving stones and got down into early Florentine cellars where, by hanging upside down, he could catch a glimpse of a Simibu unprasable but by divine silence. He rushed from one end of a city to the other, comparing ceilings. His limbs were weary, his clothes were torn, and in his eyes was that unfathomable joy of life which man will never know again until once more he takes himself seriously. Mr. Collingwood's excellent chapters on the art criticism of Ruskin would be better, in my opinion, if they showed more consequences of the after-revolutions that have reversed, at least in detail, much of Ruskin's teaching. We no longer think that art became valueless when it was first corrupted with anatomical accuracy. But if we return to that Revialism to which he was so unjust, let us not fall into the old era of unintelligent reactionaries, that of ignoring our own debt to revolutions. Ruskin could not destroy the market of Revialism, but he could and did destroy its monopoly. We may go back to the Renaissance, but let us remember that we go back free. We can picnic now in the ruins of our dungeon and deride our deliverer. But neither in Mr. Collingwood's book nor in Ruskin's own delightful Prey Terita shall we ever get to the heart of the matter. The work of Ruskin and his peers remains incomprehensible by the very completeness of their victory. Fallen Forever is that vast brick temple of utilitarianism, of which we may find the fragments, but which never renew the spell. Liberal Unionists howl in its highest places, and in its ruins Mr. Lecky builds his nest. His records read with something of the mysterious arrogance of Chinese. Hardly a generation away from us we read of a race who believed in the present with the same sort of servile optimism with which the Oriental believes in the past. It may be that banging his head against the roof for twenty years did not improve the temper of the Prophet, but he made what he praised in the old Italian pictures, an opening into eternity. 2 The Life of John Ruskin by W. G. Collingwood, London, and of Chapter 16. This is the LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. 17 Queen Victoria Anyone who possesses spiritual or political courage has made up his mind to a prospect of immutable mutability. But even in a transformation there is something catastrophic in the removal of the back scene. It is a truism, to say of the wise and noble lady who has gone from us, that we shall always remember her. But there is a subtler and higher compliment, still, in confessing that we often forgot her. We forgot her as we forgot the sunshine, as we forget the postulates of an argument, as we commonly forget our own existence. Mr. Gladstone is the only figure whose laws prepared us for such earthquakes altering the landscape. But Mr. Gladstone seemed a fixed and stationary object in our age, for the same reason that one railway train looked stationary from another, because he and the age of progress were both traveling at the same impetuous rate of speed. In the end, indeed, it was probably the age that dropped behind. For a symbol of the Queen's position we must rather recur to the image of a stretch of scenery in which she was, as a mountain so huge and familiar, that its disappearance would make the landscape round our own door seem like a land of strangers. She had an inspired genius for the familiarizing virtues. Her sympathy and sanity made us feel at home, even in an age of revolutions, that indestructible sense of security which for good and evil is so typical of our nation that almost scornful optimism, which in the matter of ourselves, cannot take peril or even decadence seriously, reached by far its highest and healthiest form in the sense that we were watched over by one so thoroughly English, in her silence and self-control, in her shrewd trustfulness and her brilliant inaction. Over and above those sublime laws of labor and pity by which she ordered her life, there are a very large number of minor intellectual matters in which we might learn a lesson from the Queen. There is one especially which is increasingly needed in an age when moral claims become complicated and hysterical. The Queen Victoria was a model of political unselfishness as well known. It is less often remark that few modern people have an unselfishness so completely free from morbidity so fully capable of deciding a moral question without exaggerating its importance. No imminent person of our time has been so utterly devoid of that disease of self-assurance, which is often rampant among the unselfish. She had one most rare and valuable faculty. The faculty of letting things pass, acts of parliament and other things. Her predecessors, whether honest men or naves, were attacked every now and then with a nightmare of despotic responsibility. They suddenly conceived that it rested with them to save the world and the Protestant Constitution. Queen Victoria had far too much faith in the world to try to save it. She knew that acts of parliament, even bad acts of parliament, do not destroy nations. She knew that ignorance, ill temper, tyranny and officiousness do destroy nations, and not upon any provocation which she set an example in these things. We fancy that this sense of proportion, this largeness and coolness of intellectual magnanimity is the one of the thousand virtues of Queen Victoria which the near future will stand most in need. We are gaining many new mental powers and with them new mental responsibilities, in psychology and sociology, above all in education. We are learning to do great many clever things. Unless we are much mistaken, the next great task will be to learn not to do them. If that time comes, assuredly, we cannot do better than turn once more to the memory of the great Queen who for seventy years followed through every possible tangle and distraction the very thread of common sense. We are suffering just now from an outbreak of the imagination which exhibits itself in politics and the most unlikely places. The German emperor, for example, is neither a tyrant nor a lunatic, as used to be absurdly represented. He is simply a minor poet, and he feels just as any minor poet would feel if he found himself on the throne of Barbarossa. The revival of militarism and ecclesiasticism is an invasion of politics by the artistic sense. It is heraldry rather than chivalry that is lust that after. Amid all this waving of wands and flaunting of uniforms, all this hedonistic desire to make the most of everything, there is something altogether quiet and splendid about the sober disdain with which this simple and courteous lady in a black dress left idle beside her the scepter of a hundred tyrants. The heart of the whole nation warmed as it had never warmed for centuries at the thought of having in their midst a woman who cared nothing for her rights and nothing for those fantastic duties which are more egotistical than rights themselves. The work of the queen for progressive politics has surely been greatly underrated. She invented democratic monarchy as much as James Watt invented the steam engine. William IV, from whom we think of her as inheriting her constitutional position, held in fact a position entirely different to that which she now hands on to Edward VII. William IV was a limited monarch, that is to say he had a definite open and admitted power in politics, but it was a very limited power. Queen Victoria was not a limited monarch, in the only way in which she cared to be a monarch at all. She was as unlimited as Haroun al-Rashid. She had unlimited willing obedience and unlimited social supremacy. To her belongs the credit of inventing a new kind of monarchy, in which the crown, by relinquishing the whole of that political and legal department of life which is concerned with coercion, regimentation and punishment, was unable to rise above it and become the symbol of the sweeter and purer relations of humanity, the social intercourse which leads and does not drive. Too much cannot be said for the wise audacity and confident completeness with which the Queen cut away all those cords of political supremacy to which her predecessors had clung madly as the only stays of the monarchy. She had her reward. For while William IV's supremacy may be called a survival, it is not too much to say that the Queen's supremacy might be called a prophecy. By lifting a figure purely human over the heads of judges and warriors, we uttered in some symbolic fashion the abiding, if unreasoning hope which dwells in all human hearts, that some day we may find a simpler solution of the woes of nations than the summons and the treadmill, that we may find in some such influence as the social influence of a woman, what was called in the noble old language of medieval monarchy a fountain of mercy and a fountain of honor. When the universal reverence paid to the Queen, there was hardly anywhere a touch of snobbishness. Snobbishness insofar as it went towards former sovereigns went out to them as aristocrats rather than as kings as heads of that higher order of men who were almost angels or demons in their admitted superiority to common lines of conduct. This kind of reverence was always a curse. Nothing can be conceived as worse for the masses of the people than that they should think the morality for which they have to struggle an inferior morality, a thing unfitted for a haughtier class. But of this patrician element there was hardly a trace in the dignity of the Queen. Indeed the degree to which the middle and lower classes took her troubles and problems to their hearts was almost grotesque in its familiarity. No one thought of the Queen as an aristocrat like the Duke of Devonshire or even as a member of the governing classes like Mr. Chamberlain. Men thought of her as something nearer to them even in being further off, as one who was a good Queen and who would have been had her fate demanded with equal cheerfulness a good washerwoman. Herein lay her an example triumph. The greatest and perhaps the last triumph of monarchy. Monarchy in its healthiest days had the same basis as democracy. The belief in human nature went entrusted with power. A King was only the first citizen who received the franchise. Both royalty and religion have been accused of despising humanity, and in practice it has been too often true. After all both the conception of the Prophet and that of the King were formed by paying humanity the supreme compliment of selecting from it almost at random. This daring idea that a healthy human being went thrilled by all the trumpets of a great trust would rise to the situation, as often been tested, but never with such complete success as in the case of our dead Queen. Even her was piled the crushing load of a vast and mystical tradition, and she stood up straight under it. Haralds proclaimed her as the anointed of God, and it did not seem presumptuous. Brave men died in thousands, shouting her name, and it did not seem unnatural. No mere intellect, no mere worldly success could, in this age of bold inquiry, have sustained that tremendous claim. Long ago we should have stricken Caesar and dethrone Napoleon, but these glories and these sacrifices did not seem too much to celebrate a hardworking human nature. They were possible, because at the heart of our empire was nothing but a defiant humility. If the Queen had stood for any novel or fantastic imperial claims, the whole would have seemed a nightmare. The whole was successful, because she stood, and no one could deny that she stood for the humblest, the shortest, and the most indestructible of human gospels. That when all troubles and trouble-mongers have had their say, our work can be done till sunset, our life can be lived till death. CHAPTER 18 THE GERMAN EMPEROR The list of the really serious, the really convinced, the really important and comprehensible people now alive includes, as most Englishmen would now be prepared to admit, the German Emperor. He is a practical man and a poet. I do not know whether there are still people in existence who think there is some kind of faint antithesis between these two characters, but I inclined to think there must be. Because of the surprise which the career of the German Emperor has generally evoked. When he came to the throne, it became at once apparent that he was poetical. People assumed in consequence that he was unpractical, that he would plunge Europe into war, that he would try to ennex France, that he would say that he was the Emperor of Russia, that he would stand on his head in the Reichstag, and he would become a pirate on the Spanish Main. Years upon years of past he has gone on making speeches. He has gone on talking about God and his sword. He has poured out an ever-increased rhetoric and aestheticism. And yet, all the time, people have slowly and surely realized that he knows what he is about, that he is one of the best friends of peace, that his influence on Europe is not only successful, but in many ways good, that he knows what world he is living in better than a score of materialists. The explanation never comes to them. He is a poet, therefore a practical man. The affinity of the two words, merely as words, is much nearer than many people suppose for the matter of that. There is one Greek word for I do, from which we get the word practical, and another Greek word for I do, from which we get the word poet. I was doubtless once informed of a profound difference between the two, but I have forgotten it. The two words, practical and poetical, may mean two subtly different things, in that old and subtle language, but they mean the same in English, and the same in the long run. It is ridiculous to suppose that the man who can understand the inmost intricacies of the human being, who has never existed at all, cannot make a guess at the conduct of a man who lives next door. It is idle to say that a man who has himself felt the mad longing under the mad moon for a vagabond life, cannot know why his son runs away to sea. It is idle to say that a man who has himself felt a hunger for any kind of exhilaration from angel or devil, cannot know why his butler takes to drink. It is idle to say that a man who has been fascinated with the wild fastidiousness of destiny does not know why stockbrokers gamble. To say that a man who has been knocked into the middle of eternal life by a face in the crowd does not know why the poor marry young. That a man who found his path to all things kindly and pleasant, blackened and barred suddenly by the body of a man, does not know what it is to desire murder. It is idle, in short, for a man who has created men to say that he does not understand them. A man who is a poet may, of course, easily make mistakes in these personal and practical relations. Such mistakes and similar ones have been made by poets. Such mistakes and greater ones have been made by soldiers and statesmen and men of business. But insofar as a poet is in these things less of a practical man, he is also less of a poet. If Shakespeare really married a bad wife when he had conceived the character of Beatrice, he ought to have been ashamed of himself. He had failed not only in his life, he had failed in his art. If Balzac got into rouse with his publisher, he ought to be rebuked and not commiserated, having evolved so many consistent businessmen from his own inside. The German emperor is a poet, and therefore he succeeds because poetry is so much nearer to reality than all the other human occupations. He is a poet and succeeds because the majority of men are poets. It is true, if that manner is at all important, that the German emperor is not a good poet. The majority of men are poets, only they happen to be bad poets. The German emperor fails ridiculously, if that is all that is in question, in almost every one of the artistic occupations to which he addresses himself. He is neither a first-rate critic nor a first-rate musician nor a first-rate painter nor a first-rate poet. He is a twelfth-rate poet, but because he is a poet at all, he knocks to pieces all the first-rate politicians in the war of politics. Having made clear my position so far, I discover, with a certain amount of interest, that I have not yet got to the subject of these remarks. The German emperor is a poet, and although, as far as I know, every line he ever wrote may be nonsense, he is a poet in this real sense that he has realized the meaning of every function he has performed. Why should we jeer at him? Because he has a great many uniforms, for instance. The very essence of the really imaginative man is that he realizes the various types or capacities in which he can appear. Every one of us, or almost every one of us, does, in reality fulfill almost as many offices as Puba. Almost every one of us is a rate-payer, an immortal soul, an Englishman, a baptized person, a mammal, a minor poet, a gerryman, a married man, a bicyclist, a Christian, a purchaser of newspapers, and a critic of Mr. Alfred Austin. We ought to have uniforms for all these things. How beautiful it would be if we appeared tomorrow in the uniform of a rate-payer in brown and green, with buttons made in the shape of coins and a blue income tax paper tastefully arranged as a favor. Or again if we appeared dressed as immortal souls in a blue uniform with stars. It would be very exciting to dress up as an Englishman, or to go to a fancy dress-ball as Christians. Some of the costumes I have suggested might appear a little more difficult to carry out. The dress of a person who purchased newspapers, though it mostly consists of colored evening editions arranged in a stiff skirt, like that of a sultrice round the waist of the wear, has many mysterious points. The attire of a person prepared to criticize the poet laureate is something so awful and striking that I dare not even to describe it. The one fact which I am willing to reveal, and to state seriously and responsibly, is that it buttons up behind. But most assuredly we ought not to abuse the Kaiser because he is fond of putting on all his uniforms. He does so because he has a large number of established and involuntary incarnations. He tries to do his duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call him. And it so happens that he has been called, as many different estates, as there are regiments in the German army. He is a huntsman, and proud of being a huntsman. An engineer, and proud of being an engineer. An infantry soldier, and proud of being so. A light horseman, and proud of being so. There is nothing wrong in all of this. The only wrong thing is that it should be confined to merely destructive arts of war. The sight of the German Kaiser in the most magnificent of the uniforms, in which he had led armies to victory, is not in itself so splendid or delightful, as that of many other sites which might come before us without a whisper of the alarms of war. It is not so splendid or delightful as the sight of an ordinary householder showing himself in that magnificent uniform of purple and silver which should signalize the father of three children. It is not so splendid or delightful as the appearance of a young clerk in an insurance office, decorated with those three long crimson plumes which are the well-known insignia of a gentleman who is just engaged to be married. Nor can it compare with the look of a man wearing the magnificent green and silver armor by which we know one who has induced an acquaintance to give up getting drunk, or the blue and gold which is only accorded to persons who have prevented fights in the streets. We belong to quite as many regiments as the German Kaiser. Our regiments are regiments that are embattled everywhere. They fight an unending fight against all that is hopeless and rapacious and of evil report. The only difference is that we have the regiments, but not the uniforms. Only one obvious point occurs to me to add. If the Kaiser has more than any other man, the sense of the poetry of the ancient things, the sword, the crown, the ship, the nation, he has the sense of the poetry of modern things also. He has one sense, and it is even a joke against him. He feels the poetry of one thing that is more poetic than sword or crown or ship or nation, the poetry of the telegram. No one ever sent a telegram who did not feel like a god. He is a god, for he is a minor poet, a minor poet, but a poet still. CHAPTER XIX TENNESEN Mr. Morton Luce has written a short study of Tennyson, which has considerable cultivation and suggestedness, which will be sufficient to serve as a notebook for Tennyson's admirers, but scarcely sufficient, perhaps, to serve as a pamphlet against his opponents. Infracritic has, as he ought to have, any of the functions anciently attributed to the prophet. It ought not to be difficult for him to prophesy that Tennyson will pass through a period of fissile condemnation and neglect before we arrive at the true appreciation of his work. The same thing has happened to the most vigorous of Essayus, Macaulay, and the most vigorous of Romancers, Dickens, because we live in a time when mere vigour is considered a vulgar thing. The same idle and frigid reaction will almost certainly discredit the statelyness and care of Tennyson as it has discredited the recklessness and inventiveness of Dickens. It is only necessary to remember that no action can be discredited by a reaction. The attempts which have been made to discredit the poetical position of Tennyson are, in the main, dictated by an entire misunderstanding of the nature of poetry. When critics like Matthew Arnold, for example, suggest that his poetry is deficient in elaborate thought, they only prove, as Matthew Arnold approved, that they themselves could never be great poets. It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace. It is vulgar in the noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiment that is made by a popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature. Unless he is, to some extent, a demagogue, he cannot be a poet. A man who expresses in poetry new and strange and undiscovered emotions is not a poet. He is a brain specialist. Tennyson can never be discredited before any serious tribunal of criticism because the sentiments and thoughts to which he dedicates himself are those sentiments and thoughts which occur to anyone. These are the peculiar province of poetry. Poetry, like religion, is always a democratic thing, even if it pretends the contrary. The faults of Tennyson so far as they existed were not have so much in the common character of his sentiments as in the arrogant perfection of his workmanship. He was not by any means so wrong in his faults as he was in his perfections. Men are very much too ready to speak of men's work being ordinary when we consider that, properly considered, every man is extraordinary. The average man is a tribal fable like the man-wolf or the wise man of the Stoics. In every man's heart there is a revolution. How much more in every poet's? The supreme business of criticism is to discover that part of a man's work which is his and to ignore that part which belongs to others. Why should any critic of poetry spend time and attention on that part of a man's work which is unpolitical? Why should any man be interested in aspects which are uninteresting? The business of a critic is to discover the importance of men and not their crimes. It is true that the Greek word critic carries with it the meaning of a judge, and up to this point of history judges have had to do with the valuation of men's sins and not with the valuation of their virtues. Tennyson's work, disencumbered of all that uninteresting accretion which he had inherited or copied, resolves itself like that of any other man of genius into those things which he really inaugurated. Underneath all his exterior of polished and polite rectitude there was in him a genuine fire of novelty, only that, like all the able men of his period, he disguised revolution under the name of evolution. He is only a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of the conservative. Tennyson had certain absolutely personal ideas, as much his own as the ideas of Browning or Meredith, though they were fewer in number. One of these, for example, was the fact that he was the first of all poets, and perhaps the last, to attempt to treat poetically that vast and monstrous vision of fact which science had recently revealed to mankind. Scientific discoveries seem commonly fables as fantastic in the ears of poets as poems in the ears of men of science. The poet is always a tomeist. For him the sun still rises and the earth stands still. Tennyson really worked the essence of modern science into his poetical constitution so that its appalling birds and frightful flowers were really part of his literary imagery. To him blind and brutal monsters, the products of the wild babyhood of the universe were as the daisies and the nightingales were to Keats. He absolutely realized the great literary paradox mentioned in the Book of Job. He saw a behemoth and he played with him as with the bird. Instances of this would not be difficult to find, but the tests of poetry are those instances in which this outrageous scientific phraseology becomes natural and unconscious. Tennyson wrote one of his own exquisite lyrics describing the exaltation of a lover on the evening before his bridal day. This would be an occasion, if ever there was one, for falling back on those ancient and assured falsehoods of the domed heaven and the flat earth in which generations of poets have made us feel at home. We can imagine the poet in such a lyric saluting the setting sun and prophesying the sun's resurrection. There is something extraordinarily typical of Tennyson's scientific faith in the fact that this, one of the most sentimental and elemental of his poems, opens with the two lines. Move eastward happy earth and leave, yawn orange sunset waning slow. Rivers had often been commanded to flow by poets and flowers to blossom in their season, and both were doubtless grateful for the permission. But the terrestrial globe of science has only twice so far as we know been encouraged in poetry to continue its course. One instance being that of this poem and the other the incomparable address to the terrestrial globe in the bab ballads. There was again another poetic element entirely peculiar to Tennyson, which his critics have in many cases ridiculously confused with the vault. This was the fact that Tennyson stood alone, among modern poets, in the attempt to give a poetic character to the conception of liberal conservatism, of splendid compromise. The carping critics who have abused Tennyson for this do not see that it was far more daring and original for a poet to defend a conventionality than to defend the cartload of revolutions. His really sound and essential conception of liberty, turning to scorn with lips divine the falsehood of extremes, is as good a definition of liberalism as has been uttered in poetry in the liberal century. Moderation is not a compromise. Moderation is a passion, the passion of great judges. That Tennyson felt that lyrical enthusiasm could be devoted to established customs, to indefensible and ineradical national constitutions, to the dignity of time and the empire of unutterable common sense. All this did not make him a tamer poet, but an infinitely more original one. Any po-taster can describe a thunderstorm. It requires a poet to describe the ancient and quiet sky. I cannot, indeed, fall in with Mr. Morton Luce in his somewhat frigid and patrician theory of poetry. Dialect, he says, mostly falls below the dignity of art. I cannot feel myself that art has any dignity higher than the indwelling and divine dignity of human nature. Great poets like Burns were far more undignified when they clothed their thoughts in what Mr. Morton Luce calls the seemingly raiment of cultured speech, than when they clothed them in the headlong and flexible petoi in which they thought and prayed and quarreled and made love. If Tennyson failed, which I do not admit, in such poems as The Northern Farmer, it was not because he used too much of the spirit of the dialect, but because he used too little. Tennyson belonged undoubtedly to a period from which we are divided, the period in which men had queer ideas of the antagonism of science and religion, the period in which the missing link was really missing. But his hold upon the old realities of existence never wavered. He was the apostle of the sanctity of laws, of the sanctity of customs. Above all, like every poet, he was the apostle of the sanctity of words. CHAPTER 20 Elizabeth Barrett Browning The delightful new edition of Mrs. Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, which Mr. John Lane has just issued, ought certainly to serve as an opportunity for the serious criticism and inevitable admiration to which a great poet is entitled. For Mrs. Browning was a great poet, and not, as is idly and vulgarly supposed, only a great poetess. The word poetess is bad English, and it conveys a particularly bad compliment. Browning is more remarkable about Mrs. Browning's work than the absence of that trite and namby-pamby elegance which the last two centuries demanded from Lady Writers. Wherever her verse is bad, it is bad from some extravagance of imagery, some violence of comparison, some kind of debauch of cleverness. Her nonsense never arises from weakness, but from a confusion of powers. As the phrase explains itself, she is far more a great poet than she is a good one. Mrs. Browning often appears more luscious and sentimental than many other literary women, but this was because she was stronger. It requires a certain amount of internal force to break down. A complete self-humiliation requires enormous strength. More strength than most of us possess. When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment, she really abandoned herself with the valor and decision of an anchor-right abandoning the world. Such a couplet as, Are Euripides the human with his dropping of warm tears, gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous sensation. Nothing can be well-conceived more ridiculous than Euripides going about dropping tears with a loud splash. And Mrs. Browning, coming after him with a thermometer. But the one emphatic point about this idiotic couplet is that Mrs. Hermans would never have written it. She would have written something perfectly dignified, perfectly harmless, perfectly inconsiderable. Mrs. Browning was in a great and serious difficulty. She really meant something. She aimed at a vivid and curious image, and she missed it. She had that catastrophic and public failure, which is as much as a medal or a testimonial, the badge of the brave. In spite of the tiresome half-truths that art is un-moral, the arts require a certain considerable number of moral qualities. And more especially, all the arts require courage. The art of drawing, for example, requires even a kind of physical courage. Even one who has tried to draw a straight line and failed knows that he fails chiefly in nerve, as he might fail to jump off a cliff. And similarly all great literary art involves the element of risk. And the greatest literary artists have commonly been those who have run the greatest risks of talking nonsense. Almost all great poets rant from Shakespeare downwards. Mrs. Browning was Elizabethian in her luxuriance and her audacity, and the gigantic scale of her wit. We often feel with her, as we feel with Shakespeare, that she would have done better with half as much talent. The great curse of the Elizabethians is upon her, that she cannot leave anything alone. She cannot write a single line without a conceit. In the eyes of the Peacock fans winked at the alien glory. She said of the papal fans in the presence of the Italian tricolor. And a royal blood sends glances up her princely eye to trouble, and the shadow of a monarch's crown is softened in her hair, as her description of a beautiful and aristocratic lady. The notion of Peacock feathers winking like so many London merchants is perhaps one of her rather aggressive and outrageous figures of speech. The image of a woman's hair as the softened shadow of a crown is singularly vivid and perfect one, but both have the same quality of intellectual fancy and intellectual concentration. They are both instances of a sort of ethereal epigram. This is the great and dominant characteristic of Mrs. Browning, that she was significant alike in failure and success. Just as every marriage in the world, good or bad, is a marriage, dramatic, irrevocable, and big with coming events. So every one of her wild weddings between alien ideas is an accomplished fact which produces a certain effect on the imagination, which has, for good or evil, become part and partial of our mental vision for ever. She gives the reader the impression that she never declined a fancy, just as some gentleman of the eighteenth century never declined a duel. When she fell, it was always because she missed the foothold, never because she funked the leap. Casa Guidi Windows is, in one aspect, a poem very typical of its author. Mrs. Browning may fairly be called the peculiar poet of liberalism, that great movement of the first half of the nineteenth century towards the emancipation of men from ancient institutions which had gradually changed their nature, from the houses of refuge which had turned into dungeons, and the mystic jewels which remained only as fetters. It was not what we ordinarily understand by revolt. It had no hatred in its heart for ancient and essentially human institutions. It had that deeply conservative belief in the most ancient of institutions, the average man, which goes by the name of democracy. It had none of the spirit of modern imperialism which is kicking a man because he is down, but on the other hand it had none of the spirit of modern anarchism and skepticism which is kicking a man merely because he is up. It was based fundamentally on a belief in the destiny of humanity, whether that belief took an irreligious form, as in Swinburne, or a religious form, as in Mrs. Browning. It had that rooted and natural conviction that the millennium was coming to-morrow, which has been the conviction in all iconic classes and reformers, and for which some rationalists have been absurd enough to blame the early Christians. But they had none of that disposition to pin their whole faith to some black and white scientific system which afterwards became the curse of philosophical radicalism. They were not like the sociologists who lay down a final rectification of things, amounting to nothing except an end of the world. A great deal more depressing than would be the case if it were knocked to pieces by a comet. Their ideal, like the ideal of all sensible people, was a chaotic and confused notion of goodness made up of English primroses and Greek statues, birds singing in April and regiments being cut to pieces for a flag. They were neither radicals nor socialists, but liberals, and a liberal is a noble and indispensable lunatic who tries to make a cosmos of his own head. Mrs. Browning and her husband were more liberal than most liberals. Theirs was the hospitality of the intellect and the hospitality of the heart, which is the best definition of the term. They never fell into the habit of the idle revolutionists, of supposing that the past was bad because the future was good, which amounted to asserting that because humanity had never made anything but mistakes it was now quite certain to be right. Browning possessed in a greater degree than any other man the power of realizing that all conventions were only victorious revolutions. She could follow the medieval logicians in all their sowing of the wind and reaping of the whirlwind, with all that generous ardor which is due to abstract ideas. He could study the ancients with the young eyes of the Renaissance and read a Greek grammar like a book of love lyrics. This immense and almost confounding liberalism of Browning doubtless had some effect upon his wife. In her vision of New Italy she went back to the image of ancient Italy like an honest and true revolutionist, for does not the very word revolution mean a rolling backward. All true revolutions are reversions to the natural and the normal. A revolutionist who breaks with the past is a notion fit for an idiot, for how could a man even wish for something which he had never heard of? Mrs. Browning's inexhaustible sympathy with all the ancient and essential passions of humanity was nowhere more in evidence than in her conception of patriotism. For some dark reason which it is difficult indeed to fathom, belief in patriotism in our day is held to mean principally a belief in every other nation abandoning its patriotic feelings. In the case of no other passion does this weird contradiction exist. Women whose lives are mainly based upon friendship and sympathize with the friendship of others. The interest of engaged couples in each other is a proverb and like many other proverbs, sometimes a nuisance. In patriotism alone it is considered correct, just now, to assume that the sentiment does not exist in other people. It was not so with the great liberals of Mrs. Browning's time. The Browning's had, so to speak, a disembodied talent for patriotism. They loved England, and they loved Italy, yet they were the very reverse of cosmopolitan's. They loved the two countries as countries, not as arbitrary divisions of the globe. They had hold of the root and essence of patriotism. They knew how certain flowers and birds and rivers pass into the mills of the brain and come out as wars and discoveries, and how some triumphant adventure or some staggering crime wrought in a remote continent may bear about it the color of an Italian city or the soul of a silent village of Suri. End of Chapter 20 End of Varied Types by G.K. Chesterton