There is poetry and beauty, no doubt, in the common lives about us, if we look at them with imaginative and sympathetic eye, and we owe much to the art that reveals to us the tragedy of the parlour and the frockcoat, and analyses the bitterness and sorrow and high passion that may underlie a life of outer smoothness and decorum.  Still, criticism cannot accept this as the final and exclusive limitation of imaginative work.  Art is nothing if not catholic and many-sided, and it is certainly not exhausted by mere domestic possibilities.  Goethe’s fine and luminous feeling for practical life, which has given such depth of richness and wisdom to his best prose writing, fills us with a delightful sense of satisfaction and adequateness; and yet why should it not leave us with a mind eagerly open for the larger and more inventive romance, in which nature is clothed with some of that awe and might and silent contemplation of the puny destinies of man, that used to surround the conception of the supernatural?  Victor Hugo seeks strong and extraordinary effects; he is a master of terrible image, profound emotion, audacious fancy; but then these are as real, as natural, as true to fact, as the fairest reproduction of the moral poverties and meannesses of the world.  And let it be added that while he is without a rival in the dark mysterious heights of imaginative effect, he is equally a master in strokes of tenderness and the most delicate human sympathy.  His last book seems to contain pieces that surpass every other book of Hugo’s in the latter range of qualities, and not to fall at all short in the former.  And so, in the words of the man of genius who last wrote on Victor Hugo in these pages,[1] “As we pity ourselves for the loss of poems and pictures which have perished, and left of Sappho but a fragment and of Zeuxis but a name, so are we inclined to pity the dead who died too soon to enjoy the great works we have enjoyed.  At each new glory that ’swims into our ken,’ we surely feel that it is something to have lived to see that too rise.”

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Swinburne.]

ON “THE RING AND THE BOOK.”

When the first volume of Mr. Browning’s new poem came before the critical tribunals, public and private, recognised or irresponsible, there was much lamentation even in quarters where a manlier humour might have been expected, over the poet’s choice of a subject.  With facile largeness of censure, it was pronounced a murky subject, sordid, unlovely, morally sterile, an ugly leaf out of some ancient Italian Newgate Calendar.  One hinted in vain that wisdom is justified of her children, that the poet must be trusted to judge of the capacity of his own theme, and that it is his conception and treatment of it that ultimately justify or discredit his choice.  Now that the entire work is before the world, this is plain, and it is admitted.  When the second volume, containing Giuseppe Caponsacchi, appeared,