rse, soon to be
quoted, does not seem to me what Mr. Chesterton calls it--"delightful."
Nothing, plainly, did bring these two together; she may have looked
jealously at his models, and he at her piano-tuner (though even this, so
far as "he" is concerned, I question), but they remained uninterested in
one another--and why should they not? When at the end she cries--

"This could but have happened once,
And we missed it, lost it for ever"--

one's impulse surely is (mine is) to ask with some vexation what "this"
was?

"Each life's unfulfilled, you see;
It hangs still, patchy and scrappy;
We have not sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired--been happy."

Away from its irritating context, that stanza _is_ delightful; with the
context it is to me wholly meaningless. The boy and girl had not fallen
in love--there is no more to say; and I heartily wish that Browning had
not tried to say it. The whole lyric is based on nothingness, or else on
a self-consciousness peculiarly unappealing. Kate Brown was evidently
quite "safe in her corset-lacing" before she put up a blind. I fear that
this confession of my dislike for _Youth and Art_ is a betrayal of
lacking humour; I can but face it out, and say that unhumorous is
precisely what, despite its levity of manner, rhythm, and rhyme, _Youth
and Art_ seems to my sense. . . . I rejoice that we need not reckon this
Kate among Browning's girls; she is introduced to us as married to her
rich old lord, and queen of _bals-pares_. Thus we may console ourselves
with the hope that life has vulgarised her, and that as a girl she was
far less objectionable than she now represents herself to have been. We
have only to imagine Evelyn Hope putting up a superfluous blind that she
might be safe in her corset-lacing, to sweep the gamut of Kate Brown's
commonness. . . . Let us remove her from a list which now offers us a
figure more definitely and dramatically posed than any of those whom we
have yet considered.

FOOTNOTES:

[12:1] Mr. Chesterton and Mrs. Orr both speak of Kate Brown as having
succeeded in her art. I cannot find any words in the poem which justify
this view. She is "queen at _bals-pares_," and she has married "a rich
old lord," but nothing in either condition predicates the successful
cantatrice.

I

THE GIRL IN "COUNT GISMOND"

It is like a fairy tale, for there are three beautiful princesses, and
the youngest is