n his _Essays and Thoughts_, well remarks
that man's passion shows, in Browning's work, "a greater width of view
and intellectual power" than woman's does; that in the feminine
utterances "little beyond the actual love of this life is
imagined";[277:1] and that in such utterances "we notice . . . an
absolute want of originality and of power to look at the passion of love
in an abstract sense outside the woman herself and her lover."

I too have, by implication, found this fault with Browning; but Mr.
Nettleship differs from me in that he apparently delights to dwell on
the idea of woman's accepted inferiority--her "tender, unaspiring
love . . . type of that perfection which looks to one superior." It will
be seen from this how little he is involved by feminism. That woman
should be the glad inferior quarrels not at all with his vision of
things as they should be. Man, indeed, he grants, "must firmly establish
his purity and constancy before he dares to assert supremacy over
Nature": woman, we may suppose, being--as if she were not quite
certainly _a person_--included in Nature. That a devotee of Browning
should retain this attitude may well surprise us, since nothing in his
"teaching" is clearer than that woman is the great inspiring influence
for man. But the curious fact which has struck both Mr. Nettleship and
myself--that, in Browning's work, woman does so frequently, _when
expressing herself_, fail in breadth and imagination--may very well
account for the obsolete gesture in this interpreter. . . . Can it be,
then, that Browning was (as has frequently been said of him) very much
less dramatic a writer than he wished to believe himself? Or, more aptly
for our purpose to frame the question, was he dramatic only for men? Did
he merely guess at, and not grasp, the deepest emotions and thoughts of
women? This, if it be affirmed, will rob him of some glory--yet I think
that affirmed it must be. It leaves him all nobility of mind and heart
with regard to us; the glory of which he is robbed is after all but that
of thaumaturgic power--it is but to say that he could not turn himself
into a woman!

+ + + + +

In what ways does Browning show us as the makers of "love's trouble" for
man? First, of course, as loved and unwon. But though this be the most
obvious of the ways, not obvious is Browning's treatment of it. To love
"in vain" is a phrase contemned of him. No love is in vain. Grief,
angu