the reason, as he wrote a few
years later, it solved "all problems in the earth and out of it." To
that solution Shelley seemed to Browning to be on the way, and his
incomplete grasp of it appealed to him more powerfully than did the
elaborate dogmatisms professedly based upon it. Shelley had mistaken
"Churchdom" for Christianity; but he was on the way, Browning was
convinced, to become a Christian himself. "I shall say what I
think,--had Shelley lived he would have finally ranged himself with the
Christians."

This emphatic declaration is of great importance for Browning's
intellectual history. He may have overlooked the immense barriers which
must have always divided Shelley from the Christian world of his time;
he may have overlooked also that the Christian thought of our time has
in some important points "ranged itself with" Shelley; so that the
Christianity which he might finally have adopted would have been
sufficiently unlike that which he assailed. But it is clear that for
Browning himself the essence of Christianity lay at this time in
something not very remote from what he revered as the essence of
Shelleyism--a corollary, as it were, ultimately implicit in his thought.

It was thus a deeper poetical rather than a religious or doctrinal
interest which drew Browning in these Italian years, again and again to
seek his revealing experiences of souls amid the eddies and convulsions,
the exultations and the agonies, brought into the world by the amazing
"revelation of God in Christ." It is true that we nowhere approach this
focus of interest, that we have no glimpse, through Browning's art, how
that "revelation" shaped itself in the first disciples, far less of
Christ himself. But that was at no time Browning's way of bringing to
expression what he deeply cared for. He would not trumpet forth truth in
his own person, or blazon it through the lips of the highest recognised
authority; he let it struggle up through the baffling density, or
glimmer through the conflicting persuasions of alien minds, and break
out in cries of angry wonder or involuntary recognition. And nowhere is
this method carried further than in the Christian poems of the Italian
time. The supreme musicians and painters he avoids, but Fra Lippo Lippi
and Master Hugues belong at least to the crafts whose secrets they
expound; while the Christian idea is set in a borrowed light caught from
the souls of men outside the Christian world--an Arab physici