tter understand it. But
Browning's work was not limited to any particular or temporary phase of
human nature. He set himself to represent, as far as he could, all types
of human nature; and, more audacious still, types taken from many
diverse ages, nations and climates. He told us of times and folk as far
apart as Caliban and Cleon, as Karshish and Waring, as Balaustion and
Fifine, as St. John and Bishop Blougram. The range and the contrasts of
his subjects are equally great. And he did this work with a searching
analysis, a humorous keenness, a joyous boldness, and an opulent
imagination at once penetrative and passionate. When, then, we realise
this as we realise it now, we are the more astonished that appreciation
of him lingered so long. Why did it not come at first, and why did it
come in the end?

The first answer to that question is a general one. During the years
between 1860 and 1890, and especially during the latter half of these
years, science and criticism were predominant. Their determination to
penetrate to the roots of things made a change in the general direction
of thought and feeling on the main subjects of life. Analysis became
dearer to men than synthesis, reasoning than imagination. Doubtful
questions were submitted to intellectual decision alone. The
Understanding, to its great surprise, was employed on the investigation
of the emotions, and even the artists were drawn in this direction.
They, too, began to dissect the human heart. Poets and writers of
fiction, students of human nature, were keenly interested, not so much
in our thoughts and feelings as in exposing how and why we thought or
felt in this or that fashion. In such analysis they seemed to touch the
primal sources of life. They desired to dig about the tree of humanity
and to describe all the windings of its roots and fibres--not much
caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to
describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy
fruit. And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of
motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer
to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. They became,
on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. The close marriage
between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of
genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the
artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. Some of t