When we have grasped this point about “Sludge the Medium,” we have grasped the key to the whole series of Browning’s casuistical monologues—­Bishop Blaugram’s Apology, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Fra Lippo Lippi, Fifine at the Fair, Aristophanes’ Apology, and several of the monologues in The Ring and the Book.  They are all, without exception, dominated by this one conception of a certain reality tangled almost inextricably with unrealities in a man’s mind, and the peculiar fascination which resides in the thought that the greatest lies about a man, and the greatest truths about him, may be found side by side in the same eloquent and sustained utterance.

    “For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.”

Or, to put the matter in another way, the general idea of these poems is, that a man cannot help telling some truth even when he sets out to tell lies.  If a man comes to tell us that he has discovered perpetual motion, or been swallowed by the sea-serpent, there will yet be some point in the story where he will tell us about himself almost all that we require to know.

If any one wishes to test the truth, or to see the best examples of this general idea in Browning’s monologues, he may be recommended to notice one peculiarity of these poems which is rather striking.  As a whole, these apologies are written in a particularly burly and even brutal English.  Browning’s love of what is called the ugly is nowhere else so fully and extravagantly indulged.  This, like a great many other things for which Browning as an artist is blamed, is perfectly appropriate to the theme.  A vain, ill-mannered, and untrustworthy egotist, defending his own sordid doings with his own cheap and weather-beaten philosophy, is very likely to express himself best in a language flexible and pungent, but indelicate and without dignity.  But the peculiarity of these loose and almost slangy soliloquies is that every now and then in them there occur bursts of pure poetry which are like a burst of birds singing.  Browning does not hesitate to put some of the most perfect lines that he or anyone else have ever written in the English language into the mouths of such slaves as Sludge and Guido Franceschini.  Take, for the sake of example, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology.”  The poem is one of the most grotesque in the poet’s works.  It is intentionally redolent of the solemn materialism and patrician grossness of a grand dinner-party a deux.  It has many touches of an almost wild bathos, such as the young man who bears the impossible name of Gigadibs.  The Bishop, in pursuing his worldly argument for conformity, points out with truth that a condition of doubt is a condition that cuts both ways, and that if we cannot be sure of the religious theory of life, neither can we be sure of the material theory of life, and that in turn is capable of becoming an uncertainty continually shaken by a tormenting suggestion.  We cannot establish ourselves on rationalism, and make it bear fruit to us.  Faith itself is capable of becoming the darkest and most revolutionary of doubts.  Then comes the passage:—­