nearly the whole of Browning's poetry there is no touch that is either hysterical or sentimental; and we may measure, if we can, the difference in the colour of life which is induced by such freedom. If, in a few wellknown pieces, sentiment may seem to be played with a little insincerely, if, in a few others, the exuberance is lacking in simplicity, these are momentary interruptions in the steady comprehension with which the working of passion in human life is faced. Sentimentality never fronts the real issue at all; hysteria clouds it. Browning's grave and searching realism evades no difficulties here, and never condescends to the idea that beauty is exquisite or pleasure rare if either is thought of as separable from the sum of life.

Thus it is, then, that he is able to linger among the emotional refinements and ingenuities which he so loves to explore, without forfeiting in their minuteness the ardour and glow of passionate beauty. His passion is living and enduring because it has understood that nothing can endure-however brilliant its moment of climax-which is discontinuous with all else. There are features in his work, obvious enough, which have suggested to some an affinity between his treatment of these themes and that which is to be seen in the lyrical poems of Donne ; and indeed, if we must have an antitype in literature to Browning's lyric, it is there if anywhere that we shall find it. But Donne, precisely, bringing the same fire to the same intricacies of experience, shows only too often how easily the simplicity of true passion may be damaged in the quest for an ever closer notation of the labyrinth. His overcharged brain drives him into an extravagance of discrimination before he has reached the inner lucidity which alone ensures proportion. Browning, with a brain far inferior, indeed, for keenness and force, could yet indulge to all lengths its subtlety of perception, without losing his relation to reality, because he had once for all achieved simplicity first. And if it was this that gave him his control over complexity, it is to this, and to nothing less, that is due the entirely unique savour of his style. Browning's handling of words, in the best of his lyric poetry, becomes more and more of a wonder, the deeper they fix themselves in the mind; and we end-where we do

not perhaps begin-by discovering, under their appearance of informality, how instantly sensitive they prove themselves to his touch. Their response is so quick that the movement by which they slip into their places escapes us; they do not make the gesture, of one sort or another, that in other writers enables us to watch the process of expression. It is an artless judgment which concludes that with Browning there was no process, that language was an obstacle to his bursting thought, which he broke down unscrupulously, careless so long as his thought got through. Language, rather, obeyed the candour of his passion, and answered by yielding him effects of beauty which, when we look at the extreme simplicity of the means, it seems impossible to analyse.

To every lover of these poems a different instance will at once present itself. They hang in the memory irresistibly and (as it may often appear) unaccountably. They persist when a hundred things, of which we more clearly understand the beauty, droop and lose their charm. There are stanzas of 'By the Fireside,' of 'James Lee's Wife,' of 'Mesmerism,' of 'Love among the Ruins,' of a score more, which seem to have caught us by accident, for nothing that they say or any way in which they say it; it happened so. They have music without any recognised harmonies; loftiness without any heightened expression; pathos without pathetic device; passion without a passionate word. Where we can definitely point to the means, as we can, for example, in 'The Last Ride Together,'' Evelyn Hope,' May and Death,' and a few others, we probably feel in the end that the ring of the poem is not entirely true. The poems that last, the poems that we never exhaust, seem mysteriously to have caught a note of style for which no precept can be laid down, but which can be described by saying that it possesses the fringe of values, the associated harmonics, of the spoken word. Between writing and speaking (by which, it should possibly be noted, I do not at all mean oratory or recitation) there lies a chasm which tempts an effort to sound and measure it. Mere differences between the formal and the informal, the plain and the coloured, are negligible when it comes to the discrimination between the moral and emotional values of a word picked up from a written page, and those which it bears

when a voice utters it as the immediate symbol proposed by the brain. These values Browning incessantly captures for the written word; if a quotation is desired it might be any of a hundred, and may be this:

'But he looked upon the city, every side,

Far and wide,

All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,

All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts and then,

All the men!'

'All the men!' It is not a line in a written poem; it is a remark, suddenly dropped to us by an urgent and present imagination, to which the listener reacts as instinctively as to an unexpected voice. And here is another, sharper and finer in its subdued sadness:

'Was it something said,

Something done,

Vexed him? was it touch of hand,

Turn of head?

Strange! that very way

Love begun :

I as little understand

Love's decay.'

A direct association, not a transmitted portrayal of passion and beauty-this is what we seem to find; and it holds us till we may likely be surprised to see how acute a divergence of mind and temperament has been altogether forgotten. Browning, in many articles of his creed, and not those which he would have felt to be least important, is very remote from us now. Yet of the poetry of the nineteenth century there is none which has had more continuous power over new generations, and certainly none which appeals to nearly so great a diversity of spirit. Lovers of Browning are of no definite sort or complexion, and they do not, perhaps, always love each other. But they have all discovered, and they perpetually renew the discovery, that the mind can pour itself into the endless variety of these poems, sure of finding support and comprehension and fulfilment.

PERCY LUBBOCK.

Art. 8. TWO

ACTION.

SEVENTEENTH - CENTURY MEN OF

1. The Life of James, First Duke of Ormonde (1610-1688). By Lady Burghclere. Two vols. London: Murray,

1912.

2. The Life of Edward Mountagu, First Earl of Sandwich (1625-1672). By F. R. Harris. Two vols. London: Murray, 1912.

THE discovery of proper subjects for historical biography, like the discovery of new material for the biographies themselves, has become, in this crowded age of competition, no inconsiderable achievement. Obscure persons are celebrated in despite of their obscurity, vicious persons on account of their vices; a career suitable for treatment in an essay is accorded a full-bottomed life; a life is magnified into a discursive and unmethodical description of a period; and the praises of a really eminent man are sung in so many tongues and with such singular variations that it is impossible for the ordinary reader to know easily where to direct his attention or what opinion to receive when he has done so. Lady Burghclere and Mr Harris have neither removed landmarks nor darkened counsel. Ormonde and Sandwich are both distinguished and honourable men; and while the former suffers from a biography of too great dimensions, the latter has never secured any adequate biography at all. The work, now that it has been taken in hand, has been executed with all the accuracy, diligence, impartiality and understanding of which the very names of the sponsors-Mr H. W. C. Davis in the one case, Prof. Firth and Mr Herbert Fisher in the other-are in themselves a guarantee.

No one could read through a chapter of Mr Harris's book without becoming sensible of the competence of the treatment. The style is firm, terse and lucid; the facts are marshalled with admirable discrimination; nothing superfluous intrudes, nothing essential is forgotten. The Hinchingbrooke Manuscripts-or rather those of them which relate to the first Lord Sandwich, for there is a promise of good things yet to come-have met with a worthy student; and the result has been the production of a life which reads like a first-class state-paper. But

this, which is its strength, is also its weakness. The artist, appointed to the task and painting to order, has given indeed all he had to give, but has not been able to give that which he had not the subtle indefinable affection which comes to a man with the choice of his own subject. Hence the biography is lacking in psychological interest. The most obvious evidence of this is the author's omission to discuss Sandwich's religious opinions in the course of the concluding sketch of his character. Mr Harris, indeed, is too careful a worker not just to have mentioned Sandwich's creed on an earlier page of his book; but he is content to leave it at that. Yet, of all the curiosities about a man, the curiosity about his beliefs, or, if we like it-for it comes to the same thing-about his criticism of life, is the most profound. To be content to pass it by as a thing indifferent is to leave the riddle of the microcosm not only unsolved but unexamined. Doubtless Sandwich was every way a man of great reserves; doubtless in the life of a man of action we must look rather for peril and adventure and the keen clash of arms than for subtle developments of thought and character. But in the patron of Pepys and the friend of Evelyn, in this 'true nobleman,' as the latter calls him, this ornament to the Court and Prince,'' one of the best accomplished persons, not only of this nation but of any other,' in this man 'learned in sea affairs, in politics, in mathematics and in music,' who was of so 'sweet and obliging a temper, sober, chaste, very ingenious,' there must have been some deep chord of feeling which Mr Harris has never caught and the absence of which makes his portrait, for all its excellence of technique, a trifle lifeless.

Lady Burghclere has the quality which Mr Harris lacks. It would be a mean soul indeed which was insensible to the charm of Ormonde's personality; but his new biographer gathers all the rosebuds with a woman's tenderness and care. The influences that played upon his character in old age as well as in youth, that warmed and strengthened it and pressed it on towards its high emprise, are not neglected. Hers is more really what all biography ought to be, a tale that is told. But in other respects she is hardly Mr Harris's equal. Her style is not so crisp; she uses a broader canvas; and her execution sometimes Vol. 217.-No. 433.

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