Philosophy, Love, Poetry, Politics, Painting (the nude, with a discourse concerning evolution), Painting again (the modern versus the mythological in art), Music, and, if we add the epilogue, the Invention of Printing—­these are the successive themes of Browning’s Parleyings, and they are important and interesting themes.  Unfortunately the method of discussion is neither sufficiently abstract for the lucid exposition of ideas, nor sufficiently concrete for the pure communication of poetic pleasure.  Abstract and concrete meet and take hands or jostle, too much as skeleton and lady might in a danse Macabre.  The spirit of acquiescence—­strenuous not indolent acquiescence—­with our intellectual limitations is constantly present.  Does man groan because he cannot comprehend the mind outside himself which manifests itself in the sun?  Well, did not Prometheus draw the celestial rays into the pin-point of a flame which man can order, and which does him service?  Is the fire a little thing beside the immensity in the heavens above us?

    Little?  In little, light, warmth, life are blessed—­
    Which, in the large, who sees to bless?

Or again—­it is Christopher Smart, who triumphs for once so magnificently in his “Song to David,” and fails, with all his contemporaries, in the poetry of ambitious instruction.  And why?  Because for once he was content with the first step that poetry should take—­to confer enjoyment, leaving instruction—­the fruit of enjoyment—­to come later.  True learning teaches through love and delight, not through pretentious didactics,—­a truth forgotten by the whole tribe of eighteenth century versifiers.  And once more—­does Francis Furini paint the naked body in all its beauty?  Right! let him study precisely this divine thing the body, before he looks upward; let him retire from the infinite into his proper circumscription: 

    Only by looking low, ere looking high,
    Comes penetration of the mystery.

So also with our view of the mingled good and evil in the world; perhaps to some transcendent vision evil may wholly disappear; perhaps we shall ourselves make this discovery as we look back upon the life on earth.  Meanwhile it is as men that we must see things, and even if evil be an illusion (as Browning trusts), it is a needful illusion in our educational process, since through evil we become aware of good.  Thus at every point Browning accepts here, as in Ferishtah’s Fancies, a limited provisional knowledge as sufficient for our present needs, with a sustaining hope which extends into the future.  On the other hand, if your affair is not the sincerity of thought and feeling, but a design to rule the mass of men for your own advantage, you must act in a different spirit.  Do not, in the manner of Bubb Doddington, attempt to impose upon your fellows with the obvious and worn-out pretence that all you do has been undertaken on their behalf and in their interests.  There is a newer