nd, brought to much the same point
by different paths, seek for a poetry which is international rather than
national, and which recognises no special country as its own, they do
not find it in Tennyson, but they do find Browning writing, and quite
naturally, as if he belonged to other peoples as much as to his own,
even more than to his own. And they also find that he had been doing
this for many years before their own international interests had been
awakened. That, then, differentiates him completely from Tennyson, and
is another reason why he was not read in the past but is read in the
present.

9. Again, with regard to politics and social questions, Tennyson made us
know what his general politics were, and he has always pleased or
displeased men by his political position. The British Constitution
appears throughout his work seated like Zeus on Olympus, with all the
world awaiting its nod. Then, also, social problems raise their
storm-awakening heads in his poetry: the Woman's Question; War;
Competition; the State of the Poor; Education; a State without Religion;
the Marriage Question; where Freedom lies; and others. These are brought
by Tennyson, though tentatively, into the palace of poetry and given
rooms in it.

At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson. He was not the
politician, not the sociologist, only the poet. No trace of the British
Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it
that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years in close
contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!

He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he
is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. We know what they
thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know
what Browning thought. The art-representation, the _Vorstellung_ of the
thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the same
in social matters. What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which
should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our
fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but
Browning is not on that plane. There are no poems directly applied to
them. This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and
social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out
of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. With
steady purpose he re