All artists, who have any experience of the arts, will agree so far, that a poet is bound to be conventional with regard to matters of art.  Unfortunately, however, they are the very people who cannot, as a general rule, see that a poet is also bound to be conventional in matters of conduct.  It is only the smaller poet who sees the poetry of revolt, of isolation, of disagreement; the larger poet sees the poetry of those great agreements which constitute the romantic achievement of civilisation.  Just as an agreement between the dramatist and the audience is necessary to every play; just as an agreement between the painter and the spectators is necessary to every picture, so an agreement is necessary to produce the worship of any of the great figures of morality—­the hero, the saint, the average man, the gentleman.  Browning had, it must thoroughly be realised, a real pleasure in these great agreements, these great conventions.  He delighted, with a true poetic delight, in being conventional.  Being by birth an Englishman, he took pleasure in being an Englishman; being by rank a member of the middle class, he took a pride in its ancient scruples and its everlasting boundaries.  He was everything that he was with a definite and conscious pleasure—­a man, a Liberal, an Englishman, an author, a gentleman, a lover, a married man.

This must always be remembered as a general characteristic of Browning, this ardent and headlong conventionality.  He exhibited it pre-eminently in the affair of his elopement and marriage, during and after the escape of himself and his wife to Italy.  He seems to have forgotten everything, except the splendid worry of being married.  He showed a thoroughly healthy consciousness that he was taking up a responsibility which had its practical side.  He came finally and entirely out of his dreams.  Since he had himself enough money to live on, he had never thought of himself as doing anything but writing poetry; poetry indeed was probably simmering and bubbling in his head day and night.  But when the problem of the elopement arose he threw himself with an energy, of which it is pleasant to read, into every kind of scheme for solidifying his position.  He wrote to Monckton Milnes, and would appear to have badgered him with applications for a post in the British Museum.  “I will work like a horse,” he said, with that boyish note, which, whenever in his unconsciousness he strikes it, is more poetical than all his poems.  All his language in this matter is emphatic; he would be “glad and proud,” he says, “to have any minor post” his friend could obtain for him.  He offered to read for the Bar, and probably began doing so.  But all this vigorous and very creditable materialism was ruthlessly extinguished by Elizabeth Barrett.  She declined altogether even to entertain the idea of her husband devoting himself to anything else at the expense of poetry.  Probably she was right and Browning wrong, but it was an error which every man would desire to have made.