he
parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products,
freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or
vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel
exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was
glorified. They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were
nothing better than disagreeable Science. But this was an extreme
deviation of the tendency. The main line it took was not so detestable.
It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a
part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. The outward forms of
things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.
The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life,
before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and
easier, than any description of their final result in act. This was
borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a
comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry it did not last so
long. Morris carried us out of it. But long before it began, long before
its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius
delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and
from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it
became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual
analysis of human nature. When he began it, no one cared for it; and
_Paracelsus, Sordello_ and the soul-dissecting poems in _Bells and
Pomegranates_ fell on an unheeding world. But Browning did not heed the
unheeding of the world. He had the courage of his aims in art, and while
he frequently shaped in his verse the vigorous movement of life, even to
its moments of fierce activity, he went on quietly, amid the silence of
the world, to paint also the slowly interwoven and complex pattern of
the inner life of men. And then, when the tendency of which I speak had
collared the interest of society, society, with great and ludicrous
amazement, found him out. "Here is a man," it said, "who has been doing
in poetry for the last thirty years the very thing of which we are so
fond, and who is doing it with delightful and varied subtlety. We will
read him now." So Browning, anticipating by thirty years the drift of
the world, was not read at first; but, afterwards, the world having
reached him, he became a favoured poet.

However, fond as he was of metaphysi