ge in which he lived. Above all others, the
Elizabethan era was rich in romantic adventure, of the mind as well as
of the body, and above all others, save that of the Renaissance in
Italy, animated by a passionate curiosity. So, too, supremely, the
Victorian era has been prolific of novel and vast Titanic struggles of
the human spirit to reach those Gates of Truth whose lowest steps are
the scarce discernible stars and furthest suns we scan, by piling Ossas
of searching speculation upon Pelions of hardly-won positive knowledge.
The highest exemplar of the former is Shakspere, Browning the
profoundest interpreter of the latter. To achieve supremacy the one had
to create a throbbing actuality, a world of keenest living, of acts and
intervolved situations and episodes: the other to fashion a mentality so
passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality
of concrete individualities. The one reveals individual life to us by
the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative
eduction of personal characteristics: the other by his apprehension of
that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is
transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light. The elder poet
reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision: the
younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction,
compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity,
as by the spectrum analysis. The one, again, fulfils his aim by a broad
synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection of vital
details: the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis. In a
word, Shakspere works as with the clay of human action: Browning as with
the clay of human thought.

As for the difference in value of the two methods it is useless to
dogmatise. The psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable only
so far as it is convincingly true.

The profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities
of depth. The physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety,
barely ever even its profile. The utmost we can expect to reproduce,
perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment, is a
partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette. As no human being
has ever seen his or her own soul, in all its rounded completeness of
good and evil, of strength and weakness, of what is temporal and
perishable and what is germinal and essential, how can we expe