may be a bore.  Then comes “The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” from which the most ingenious “Browning student” cannot extract anything except that people sometimes hate each other in Spain; and then “The Laboratory,” from which he could extract nothing except that people sometimes hate each other in France.  This is a perfectly honest record of the poems as they stand.  And the first eleven poems read straight off are remarkable for these two obvious characteristics—­first, that they contain not even a suggestion of anything that could be called philosophy; and second, that they contain a considerable proportion of the best and most typical poems that Browning ever wrote.  It may be repeated that either he wrote these lyrics because he had an artistic sense, or it is impossible to hazard even the wildest guess as to why he wrote them.

It is permissible to say that the Dramatic Lyrics represent the arrival of the real Browning of literary history.  It is true that he had written already many admirable poems of a far more ambitious plan—­Paracelsus with its splendid version of the faults of the intellectual, Pippa Passes with its beautiful deification of unconscious influence.  But youth is always ambitious and universal; mature work exhibits more of individuality, more of the special type and colour of work which a man is destined to do.  Youth is universal, but not individual.  The genius who begins life with a very genuine and sincere doubt whether he is meant to be an exquisite and idolised violinist, or the most powerful and eloquent Prime Minister of modern times, does at last end by making the discovery that there is, after all, one thing, possibly a certain style of illustrating Nursery Rhymes, which he can really do better than any one else.  This was what happened to Browning; like every one else, he had to discover first the universe, and then humanity, and at last himself.  With him, as with all others, the great paradox and the great definition of life was this, that the ambition narrows as the mind expands.  In Dramatic Lyrics he discovered the one thing that he could really do better than any one else—­the dramatic lyric.  The form is absolutely original:  he had discovered a new field of poetry, and in the centre of that field he had found himself.

The actual quality, the actual originality of the form is a little difficult to describe.  But its general characteristic is the fearless and most dexterous use of grotesque things in order to express sublime emotions.  The best and most characteristic of the poems are love-poems; they express almost to perfection the real wonderland of youth, but they do not express it by the ideal imagery of most poets of love.  The imagery of these poems consists, if we may take a rapid survey of Browning’s love poetry, of suburban streets, straws, garden-rakes, medicine bottles, pianos, window-blinds, burnt cork, fashionable fur coats.  But in this new method he thoroughly expressed