e Ring and the Book_, represents the
attempt to discover, not the truth in the sense that Goldsmith states
it, but the larger truth which is made up of all the emotional
experiences, such as that rendered by Burns. Browning, like Goldsmith,
seeks ultimately to be just and impartial, but he does it by
endeavouring to feel acutely every kind of partiality. Goldsmith
stands apart from all the passions of the case, and Browning includes
them all. If Browning were endeavouring to do strict justice in a case
like that of the deserted lady by the banks of Doon, he would not
touch or modify in the smallest particular the song as Burns sang it,
but he would write other songs, perhaps equally pathetic. A lyric or a
soliloquy would convince us suddenly by the mere pulse of its
language, that there was some pathos in the other actors in the drama;
some pathos, for example, in a weak man, conscious that in a
passionate ignorance of life he had thrown away his power of love,
lacking the moral courage to throw his prospects after it. We should
be reminded again that there was some pathos in the position, let us
say, of the seducer's mother, who had built all her hopes upon
developments which a mesalliance would overthrow, or in the position
of some rival lover, stricken to the ground with the tragedy in which
he had not even the miserable comfort of a _locus standi_. All these
characters in the story, Browning would realise from their own
emotional point of view before he gave judgment. The poet in his
ancient office held a kind of terrestrial day of judgment, and gave
men halters and haloes; Browning gives men neither halter nor halo, he
gives them voices. This is indeed the most bountiful of all the
functions of the poet, that he gives men words, for which men from the
beginning of the world have starved more than for bread.

Here then we have the second great respect in which _The Ring and the
Book_ is the great epic of the age. It is the great epic of the age,
because it is the expression of the belief, it might almost be said,
of the discovery, that no man ever lived upon this earth without
possessing a point of view. No one ever lived who had not a little
more to say for himself than any formal system of justice was likely
to say for him. It is scarcely necessary to point out how entirely the
application of this principle would revolutionise the old heroic
epic, in which the poet decided absolutely the moral relations and
moral