is that nothing can be more powerfully efficacious from the moral point of view than the exercise of an exalted creative art, stirring within the intelligence of the spectator active thought and curiosity about many types of character and many changeful issues of conduct and fortune, at once enlarging and elevating the range of his reflections on mankind, ever kindling his sympathies into the warm and continuous glow which purifies and strengthens nature, and fills men with that love of humanity which is the best inspirer of virtue.  Is not this why music, too, is to be counted supreme among moral agents, soothing disorderly passion by diving down into the hidden deeps of character where there is no disorder, and touching the diviner mind?  Given a certain rectitude as well as vigour of intelligence, then whatever stimulates the fancy, expands the imagination, enlivens meditation upon the great human drama, is essentially moral.  Shakespeare does all this, as if sent Iris-like from the immortal gods, and The Ring and the Book has a measure of the same incomparable quality.

A profound and moving irony subsists in the very structure of the poem.  Any other human transaction that ever was, tragic or comic or plain prosaic, may be looked at in a like spirit, As the world’s talk bubbled around the dumb anguish of Pompilia, or the cruelty and hate of Guido, so it does around the hourly tragedies of all times and places.

“The instinctive theorizing whence a fact
Looks to the eye as the eye likes the look.”—­
“Vibrations in the general mind
At depth of deed already out of reach.”—­
“Live fact deadened down,
Talked over, bruited abroad, whispered away:”—­

if we reflect that these are the conditions which have marked the formation of all the judgments that we hold by, and which are vivid in operation and effect at this hour, the deep irony and the impressive meaning of the poem are both obvious:—­

               “So learn one lesson hence

Of many which whatever lives should teach,
This lesson that our human speech is naught,
Our human testimony false, our fame
And human estimation words and wind” (iv. 234).

It is characteristic of Mr. Browning that he thus casts the moral of his piece in an essentially intellectual rather than an emotional form, appealing to hard judgment rather than to imaginative sensibility.  Another living poet of original genius, of whom we have much right to complain that he gives us so little, ends a poem in two or three lines which are worth quoting here for the illustration they afford of what has just been said about Mr. Browning:—­

  “Ah, what dusty answer gets the soul,
  When hot for certainties in this our life!—­
  In tragic hints here see what evermore
  Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean’s force,
  Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
  To throw that faint thin line upon the shore?"[1]