61.]

III.

And yet realism as commonly understood is a misleading term for
Browning's art. If his keen objective senses penned his imagination,
save for a few daring escapades, within the limits of a somewhat normal
actuality, it exercised, within those limits, a superb individuality of
choice. The acute observer was doubled with a poet whose vehement and
fiery energy and intense self-consciousness influenced what he observed,
and yet far more what he imagined and what he expressed. It is possible
to distinguish four main lines along which this determining bias told.
He gloried in the strong sensory-stimulus of glowing colour, of dazzling
light; in the more complex _motory_-stimulus of intricate, abrupt, and
plastic form,--feasts for the agile eye; in all the signs of power,
exciting a kindred joy by sympathy; and in all the signs of conscious
life or "soul," exciting a joy which only reaches its height when it is
enforced by those more elemental and primitive springs of joy, when he
is engaged with souls that glow like a flower or a gem, with souls
picturesquely complex and diversified, or vehement, aspiring, heroic. In
each of those four domains, light and colour, form, power, soul,
Browning had a profound, and in the fullest sense creative, joy, which
in endless varieties and combinations dominated his imagination,
controlled and pointed its flight, and determined the contents, the
manner, and the atmosphere of his poetic work. To trace these operations
in detail will be the occupation of the five following sections.

IV.

1. JOY IN LIGHT AND COLOUR.

Browning's repute as a thinker and "teacher" long overshadowed his glory
as a singer, and it still to some extent impedes the recognition of his
bold and splendid colouring. It is true that he is never a colourist
pure and simple; his joy in light and colour is never merely epicurean.
Poets so great as Keats often seem to sit as luxurious guests at their
own feasts of sense; Browning has rather the air of a magnificent
dispenser, who "provides and not partakes." His colouring is not subtle;
it recalls neither the aethereal opal of Shelley nor the dewy flushing
glow and "verdurous glooms" of Keats, nor the choice and cultured
splendour of Tennyson; it is bold, simple, and intense. He neglects the
indecisive and subdued tones; the mingled hues chiefly found in Nature,
or the tender "silvery-grey" of Andrea's placid perfection. He dazzles
us with scarlet and