darkness in which the soul goes drifting it knows not whither! Then the pole-star in heaven is obscured, and the compass on earth is deflected. That, Browning thinks, is one of the most fatal conditions ;-worse than any sin of sense and passion is the self-delusion which blurs the moral distinctions, drugs the conscience, and seems to make remorse and repentance impossible to the man who has yielded himself up to believe a lie ! He sometimes seems fascinated by the horrible and grotesque, thinking, with Goethe, that Nature reveals her secrets in monsters. These terrae incognitae, these obscure territories in the realm of character he has explored with unrelenting severity; and many a time must the discovery of secret sin have roused his readers to cast out the evil thing that was unconsciously working a moral catastrophe.

In all this, we notice how Browning makes everything subservient to the individual man. Personality with its abysmal deeps,-that, he holds, is the supreme fact, the surpassing miracle, the one infinite element in a finite world of space and time. And, in the present day, when men are trying to manufacture millenniums apart from a change in the personal being, the teaching of Browning as to the final test of personal integrity of soul is what the world needs most of all to ponder and lay to heart. A thousand times better to endure the sufferings of the world for centuries to come, than attempt to abolish them by the creation of a mechanical system, which would have the effect of making the living soul a mere working factor in a huge machine ccnstructed to grind out a utilitarian happiness. Man can do without happiness, but he cannot do without

moral freedom, spiritual greatness, and personal responsibility. Before any questions as to a man's happiness and misery, success and failure,-before even any question as to whether his actions conform to any external ethical code, there is the prior question: how much is there of him? has he any soul? is there in him any positive force and effective will-power? Ay! and our poet hints that, even before the question of immortality, he is tempted to ask: is there anything behind the shows of time that can claim an eternal destiny? In A Toccata of Galuppi's he says:

The soul doubtless is immortal-where a soul can be discerned.

To use the splendid irony of St. Paul, Browning has no patience with the man who thinks himself to be something, when he is NOTHING. All outward words and deeds are interesting, only when they express a valid personality. A man should not only be good, he should be good for something. He thinks there is more hope of a strong sinner than of a flabby saint; you can make nothing of flabbiness, any more than you can build a house of sand or grow a forest from the chaff which the wind driveth away. The force of character which makes a great sinner may fashion a great saint. The passionate sin of a strenuous soul may be the wrongly directed energy that can yet be gathered up for some higher purpose. The very aberrations caused by the presence of a deflecting object are abundant testimony that the needle is so polarised as to be able to turn to the North. It is Saul the zealous persecutor, sweeping through the land in a whirlwind of eager wrath, who becomes Paul the Apostle of mankind. It is this that so

greatly puzzles some people when they read these poems. Before Browning asks whether a man is ethically good or bad, he wants to know whether he is anything. He cannot endure lethargy and indifference and torpid conventionalism. You might take as the text of some of his poems, those words of divine severity: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot.. I would that thou wert cold or hot. So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.”* The chivalry of God does not consist of those who have kept their garments unspotted by cowardly avoidance of the battle and lazy renunciation of the world; it is formed of

The soldier-saints, who, row on row,

Burn upward to his point of bliss.

And the one sin that seems most effectually to frustrate the end of life

Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.†

A man must be of a positive quality before anything can be made of him. Our poet is of the same mind as Dante in his verdict of those neutrals, who, in the battle on the plains of heaven, would join neither with God. nor Satan, but stood aloof, waiting to see which side won,-ready to shout their paean with the victorious army. But when the battle was over, they were turned out of heaven as traitors, and hell would not receive such worthless sneaks; and so they had to remain in a limbo of their own, the off-scouring of the universe, enduring alike the contempt of angels and devils.‡ Inferno, Canto III.

* Revelation iii. 15. + The Statue and the Bust.

Neutrals those are the only beings for whom Browning feels unutterable contempt.

"Good is understood," says Maurice, "not only as the opposite of evil, but also as the deliverance from it." And our poet thinks that virtue must be of a positive quality, it must possess a conquering energy, fashioning the being after the power of an endless life. The negative and passive goodness which Browning condemns is vividly expressed in those words of Milton, descriptive of a passing mood in Satan :

That space the Evil One abstracted stood
From his own evil, and for the time remained
Stupidly good.*

5. THE LAW OF LIFE.

With this emphasis on a strenuous personality, his great rule of conduct is: "follow your highest impulse;" whether your stake in the game be a wooden button or a gold coin, it matters not; let us see how earnestly you will play your part; whatever purpose you follow, when once you have chosen it, put all your reserved strength into its achievement; risk everything to accomplish your purpose; never mind whether you succeed or fail, the very effort that never slacks its courage is success; you have proved your soul, you have tested your strength, and that is enough. many, that sounds like dangerous advice; instead of exaltation of impulse, they would rather approve the severe morality of Wordsworth's Ode to Duty as the

* Paradise Lost, IX. 463.

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"stern Daughter of the Voice of God." But I think it might be shown that there is not so much a difference of doctrine between these two great poets as a difference of point of view. From one point of view duty does seem a higher word than impulse; but, on many occasions Browning thinks that what goes by the name of duty is merely a social conventionality with no divine authority to control the living energies of a man's inner life. The inanities of custom are often mistaken for the sacraments of duty. The mighty reserves of a divine soul may be wasted on the shallow levels of a monotonous conformity; while faithful tenacity to the soul's own highest impulse gives a binding strength to the character and a stately beauty to the manhood. There must often be "a noble antinomianism," as a strong nature breaks through the obstructions of artificial rules to realise an absolute loyalty to a supreme ideal.* The rejection of current codes must never, indeed, be prompted by frivolity or license; the traditional precept must only be denied under the diviner stress of pure aspiration and holy passsion; "the only right of rebellion is the right to seek a higher law." This is excellently illustrated in the apocryphal story which tells us that Christ once saw a man working on the Sabbath, and said: "If thou understandest what thou art doing, blessed art thou; but if thou understandest it not thou art accursed." These words have been thus paraphrased :-"If thou hast so large an idea of a man's life as to look on the Sabbath-day as his servant, and not his master, and thou

*The Flight of the Duchess may be studied as illustrating these remarks.