s new definition I think Browning
will ultimately be judged. As the sculptor in "Pippa Passes" was the
predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself appears as
the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in
degree, not in kind. But I do not for a moment believe that his
greatness is in his status as a thinker: even less, that the poet and
the thinker are indissociable. Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed
this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism: "Venir nous dire que tout
poete de talent est, par essence, un grand _penseur_, et que tout vrai
_penseur_ est necessairement artiste et poete, c'est une pretention
insoutenable et que dement a chaque instant la realite."

When Browning's enormous influence upon the spiritual and mental life of
our day--an influence ever shaping itself to wise and beautiful
issues--shall have lost much of its immediate import, there will still
surely be discerned in his work a formative energy whose resultant is
pure poetic gain. It is as the poet he will live: not merely as the
"novel thinker in verse." Logically, his attitude as 'thinker' is
unimpressive. It is the attitude, as I think some one has pointed out,
of acquiescence with codified morality. In one of his _Causeries_, the
keen French critic quoted above has a remark upon the great Bossuet,
which may with singular aptness be repeated of Browning:--"His is the
Hebrew genius extended, fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the
acquisitions of the understanding, but retaining some degree of
sovereign interdiction, and closing its vast horizon precisely where its
light ceases." Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the
future except from the basis of assured continuity of individual
existence. He is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he
cannot even credit the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of
eternity in another world is at least in part due to his despair at not
being eternal in this. He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous
detect the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible
assurance. Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations
of his which are so characteristic and so acute, "that which is called
'mathematical certainty' is the cane of a blind man without a dog, or
equilibrium in darkness." Browning would sometimes have us accept the
evidence of his 'cane' as all-sufficient. He does not entrench himself
am