Then began the chief part of that celebrated correspondence which has within comparatively recent years been placed before the world.  It is a correspondence which has very peculiar qualities and raises many profound questions.

It is impossible to deal at any length with the picture given in these remarkable letters of the gradual progress and amalgamation of two spirits of great natural potency and independence, without saying at least a word about the moral question raised by their publication and the many expressions of disapproval which it entails.  To the mind of the present writer the whole of such a question should be tested by one perfectly clear intellectual distinction and comparison.  I am not prepared to admit that there is or can be, properly speaking, in the world anything that is too sacred to be known.  That spiritual beauty and spiritual truth are in their nature communicable, and that they should be communicated, is a principle which lies at the root of every conceivable religion.  Christ was crucified upon a hill, and not in a cavern, and the word Gospel itself involves the same idea as the ordinary name of a daily paper.  Whenever, therefore, a poet or any similar type of man can, or conceives that he can, make all men partakers in some splendid secret of his own heart, I can imagine nothing saner and nothing manlier than his course in doing so.  Thus it was that Dante made a new heaven and a new hell out of a girl’s nod in the streets of Florence.  Thus it was that Paul founded a civilisation by keeping an ethical diary.  But the one essential which exists in all such cases as these is that the man in question believes that he can make the story as stately to the whole world as it is to him, and he chooses his words to that end.  Yet when a work contains expressions which have one value and significance when read by the people to whom they were addressed, and an entirely different value and significance when read by any one else, then the element of the violation of sanctity does arise.  It is not because there is anything in this world too sacred to tell.  It is rather because there are a great many things in this world too sacred to parody.  If Browning could really convey to the world the inmost core of his affection for his wife, I see no reason why he should not.  But the objection to letters which begin “My dear Ba,” is that they do not convey anything of the sort.  As far as any third person is concerned, Browning might as well have been expressing the most noble and universal sentiment in the dialect of the Cherokees.  Objection to the publication of such passages as that, in short, is not the fact that they tell us about the love of the Brownings, but that they do not tell us about it.