Chapter 20 - Page 2

characteristics of Mr. Browning's nature: his optimism, and his belief
in direct Providence; and these again represented a condition of
mind which was in certain respects a quality, but must in others be
recognized as a defect. It disposed him too much to make a virtue of
happiness. It tended also to the ignoring or denying of many incidental
possibilities, and many standing problems of human suffering. The first
part of this assertion is illustrated by 'The Two Poets of Croisic',
in which Mr. Browning declares that, other conditions being equal,
the greater poet will have been he who led the happier life, who most
completely--and we must take this in the human as well as religious
sense--triumphed over suffering. The second has its proof in the
contempt for poetic melancholy which flashes from the supposed utterance
of Shakespeare in 'At the Mermaid'; its negative justification in the
whole range of his work.

Such facts may be hard to reconcile with others already known of Mr.
Browning's nature, or already stated concerning it; but it is in the
depths of that nature that the solution of this, as of more than one
other anomaly, must be sought. It is true that remembered pain dwelt
longer with him than remembered pleasure. It is true that the last great
sorrow of his life was long felt and cherished by him as a religion, and
that it entered as such into the courage with which he first confronted
it. It is no less true that he directly and increasingly cultivated
happiness; and that because of certain sufferings which had been
connected with them, he would often have refused to live his happiest
days again.

It seems still harder to associate defective human sympathy with his
kind heart and large dramatic imagination, though that very imagination
was an important factor in the case. It forbade the collective and
mathematical estimate of human suffering, which is so much in favour
with modern philanthropy, and so untrue a measure for the individual
life; and he indirectly condemns it in 'Ferishtah's Fancies' in the
parable of 'Bean Stripes'. But his dominant individuality also barred
the recognition of any judgment or impression, any thought or feeling,
which did not justify itself from his own point of view. The barrier
would melt under the influence of a sympathetic mood, as it would
stiffen in the atmosphere of disagreement. It would yield, as did in his
case so many other things, to continued indirect pressure, whether from
his love of justice, the strength of his attachments, or his power
of imaginative absorption. But he was bound by the conditions of an
essentially creative nature. The subjectiveness, if I may for once use
that hackneyed word, had passed out of his work only to root itself more
strongly