psychical mysteries than if they were the hocus-pocus of a charlatan.  He knew his wife better than posterity can be expected to do; but even posterity can see that she was the type of woman so much adapted to the purposes of men like Home as to exhibit almost invariably either a great craving for such experiences or a great terror of them.  Like many geniuses, but not all, she lived naturally upon something like a borderland; and it is impossible to say that if Browning had not interposed when she was becoming hysterical she might not have ended in an asylum.

The whole of this incident is very characteristic of Browning; but the real characteristic note in it has, as above suggested, been to some extent missed.  When some seven years afterwards he produced “Mr. Sludge the Medium,” every one supposed that it was an attack upon spiritualism and the possibility of its phenomena.  As we shall see when we come to that poem, this is a wholly mistaken interpretation of it.  But what is really curious is that most people have assumed that a dislike of Home’s investigations implies a theoretic disbelief in spiritualism.  It might, of course, imply a very firm and serious belief in it.  As a matter of fact it did not imply this in Browning, but it may perfectly well have implied an agnosticism which admitted the reasonableness of such things.  Home was infinitely less dangerous as a dexterous swindler than he was as a bad or foolish man in possession of unknown or ill-comprehended powers.  It is surely curious to think that a man must object to exposing his wife to a few conjuring tricks, but could not be afraid of exposing her to the loose and nameless energies of the universe.

Browning’s theoretic attitude in the matter was, therefore, in all probability quite open and unbiassed.  His was a peculiarly hospitable intellect.  If any one had told him of the spiritualist theory, or theories a hundred times more insane, as things held by some sect of Gnostics in Alexandria, or of heretical Talmudists at Antwerp, he would have delighted in those theories, and would very likely have adopted them.  But Greek Gnostics and Antwerp Jews do not dance round a man’s wife and wave their hands in her face and send her into swoons and trances about which nobody knows anything rational or scientific.  It was simply the stirring in Browning of certain primal masculine feelings far beyond the reach of argument—­things that lie so deep that if they are hurt, though there may be no blame and no anger, there is always pain.  Browning did not like spiritualism to be mentioned for many years.