ferent to
the truth of beauty. Or shall we say that his vision of beauty became
enlarged, so that in laying bare by dissection the anatomy of any poor
corpse, he found an artistic joy in studying the enlacements of veins
and nerves? To say this is perhaps to cheat oneself with words. His own
defence would, doubtless, have been a development of two lines which
occur near the close of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_:

Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace
Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself.

And he would have pleaded that art, which he styles

The love of loving, rage
Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things
For truth's sake, whole and sole,

may "crush itself" for sake of the truth which is its end and aim. But
the greatest masters have not sought for beauty merely or mainly in the
dissection of ugliness, nor did they find their rejoicing in artistic
suicide for the sake of psychological discovery. To Browning such a
repulsive story as that of _Red Cotton Night-Cap Country_ served now as
well as one which in earlier days would have attracted him by its
grandeur or its grace. Here was a fine morbid growth, an exemplary moral
wen, the enormous product of two kinds of corruption--sensuality and
superstition, and what could be a more fortunate field for exploration
with aid of the scalpel? The incidents of the poem were historical and
were recent. Antoine Mellerio, the sometime jeweller of Paris, had flung
himself from his belvedere in 1870; the suit, which raised the question
of his sanity at the date when his will had been signed, was closed in
1872; the scene of his death was close to Browning's place of summer
sojourn, Saint-Aubin. The subject lay close to Browning's hand. It was
an excellent subject for a short story of the kind that gets the name of
realistic. It was an unfortunate subject for a long poem. But the
botanist who desires to study vegetable physiology does not require a
lily or a rose. Browning who viewed things from the ethical as well as
the psychological standpoint was attracted to the story partly because
it was, he thought, a story with a moral. He did not merely wish to
examine as a spiritual chemist the action of Castilian blood upon a
French brain, to watch and make a report upon the behaviour of inherited
faith when brought into contact with acquired scepticism--the scepticism
induced by the sensual temperament of the boulevards; he