the test of a terrible sincerity.  The practical value of poetry is that it is realistic upon a point upon which nothing else can be realistic, the point of the actual desires of man.  Ethics is the science of actions, but poetry is the science of motives.  Some actions are ugly, and therefore some parts of ethics are ugly.  But all motives are beautiful, or present themselves for the moment as beautiful, and therefore all poetry is beautiful.  If poetry deals with the basest matter, with the shedding of blood for gold, it ought to suggest the gold as well as the blood.  Only poetry can realise motives, because motives are all pictures of happiness.  And the supreme and most practical value of poetry is this, that in poetry, as in music, a note is struck which expresses beyond the power of rational statement a condition of mind, and all actions arise from a condition of mind.  Prose can only use a large and clumsy notation; it can only say that a man is miserable, or that a man is happy; it is forced to ignore that there are a million diverse kinds of misery and a million diverse kinds of happiness.  Poetry alone, with the first throb of its metre, can tell us whether the depression is the kind of depression that drives a man to suicide, or the kind of depression that drives him to the Tivoli.  Poetry can tell us whether the happiness is the happiness that sends a man to a restaurant, or the much richer and fuller happiness that sends him to church.

Now the supreme value of Browning as an optimist lies in this that we have been examining, that beyond all his conclusions, and deeper than all his arguments, he was passionately interested in and in love with existence.  If the heavens had fallen, and all the waters of the earth run with blood, he would still have been interested in existence, if possible a little more so.  He is a great poet of human joy for precisely the reason of which Mr. Santayana complains:  that his happiness is primal, and beyond the reach of philosophy.  He is something far more convincing, far more comforting, far more religiously significant than an optimist:  he is a happy man.

This happiness he finds, as every man must find happiness, in his own way.  He does not find the great part of his joy in those matters in which most poets find felicity.  He finds much of it in those matters in which most poets find ugliness and vulgarity.  He is to a considerable extent the poet of towns.  “Do you care for nature much?” a friend of his asked him.  “Yes, a great deal,” he said, “but for human beings a great deal more.”  Nature, with its splendid and soothing sanity, has the power of convincing most poets of the essential worthiness of things.  There are few poets who, if they escaped from the rowdiest waggonette of trippers, could not be quieted again and exalted by dropping into a small wayside field.  The speciality of Browning is rather that he would have been quieted and exalted by the waggonette.