Browning’s tragedies are tragedies without villains.  The world is here the villain, which has baits and bribes and snares wherewith to entangle its victims, to lure down their mounting aspirations, to dull their vision for the things far-off and faint; perhaps also to make them prosperous and portly gentlemen, easy-going, and amiably cynical, tolerant of evil, and prudently distrustful of good.  Yet truth is truth, and fact is fact; worldly wisdom is genuine wisdom after its kind; we shall be the better instructed if we listen to its sage experience, if we listen, understand, and in all justice, censure.  Ogniben can blandly and skilfully conduct a Chiappino to his valley of humiliation—­“let him that standeth take heed lest he fall.”  But what would the wisdom of Ogniben be worth in its pronouncements on a Luria or a Colombe?  Perhaps even in such a case not wholly valueless.  The self-pleased, keen-sighted Legate might after all have applauded a moral heroism or a high-hearted gallantry which would ill accord with his own ingenious and versatile spirit.  Bishop Blougram—­sleek, ecclesiastical opportunist—­was not insensible to the superior merits of “rough, grand, old Martin Luther.”

In Browning’s nature a singularly keen, exploring intelligence was united with a rare moral and spiritual ardour, a passion for high ideals.  In creating his chief dramatis persona he distributes among them what he found within himself, and they fall into two principal groups—­characters in which the predominating power is intellect, and characters in which the mastery lies with some lofty emotion.  The intellect dealing with things that are real and positive, those persons in whom intelligence is supreme may too easily become the children of this world; in their own sphere they are wiser than the children of light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them.  The passionate natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired moment—­the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and space?  Prophet and casuist—­Browning is both; and to each he will endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this cannot be in favour of the casuist.  Every self-transcending passion has in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the salvation of a soul.  It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb voluptuousness, who cries—­“Not me—­to him, O God, be merciful.”