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 did not merely wish to exhibit the difficulties and dangers of a life divided against itself.  His purpose was also to rebuke that romantic sentimentalism which would preserve the picturesque lumber of ruined faiths and discredited opinions, that have done their work, and remain only as sources of danger to persons who are weak of brain and dim of sight.  Granted the conditions, it was, Browning maintains, an act of entire sanity on the part of his sorry hero, Monsieur Leonce Miranda, to fling himself into mid air, to put his faith to the final test, and trust to our Blessed Lady, the bespangled and bejewelled Ravissante, to bear him in safety through the air.  But the conditions were deplorable; and those who declined to assist in carting away the rubbish of medievalism are responsible for Leonce Miranda’s bloody night-cap.

The moral is just, and the story bears it well.  Yet Browning’s own conviction that man’s highest and clearest faith is no more than a shadow of the unattainable truth may for a moment give us pause.  An iconoclast, even such an iconoclast as Voltaire, is ordinarily a man of unqualified faith in the conclusions of the intellect.  If our best conceptions of things divine be but a kind of parable,