He had the one great requirement of a poet—­he was not difficult to please.  The life of society was superficial, but it is only very superficial people who object to the superficial.  To the man who sees the marvellousness of all things, the surface of life is fully as strange and magical as its interior; clearness and plainness of life is fully as mysterious as its mysteries.  The young man in evening dress, pulling on his gloves, is quite as elemental a figure as any anchorite, quite as incomprehensible, and indeed quite as alarming.

A great many literary persons have expressed astonishment at, or even disapproval of, this social frivolity of Browning’s.  Not one of these literary people would have been shocked if Browning’s interest in humanity had led him into a gambling hell in the Wild West or a low tavern in Paris; but it seems to be tacitly assumed that fashionable people are not human at all.  Humanitarians of a material and dogmatic type, the philanthropists and the professional reformers go to look for humanity in remote places and in huge statistics.  Humanitarians of a more vivid type, the Bohemian artists, go to look for humanity in thieves’ kitchens and the studios of the Quartier Latin.  But humanitarians of the highest type, the great poets and philosophers, do not go to look for humanity at all.  For them alone among all men the nearest drawing-room is full of humanity, and even their own families are human.  Shakespeare ended his life by buying a house in his own native town and talking to the townsmen.  Browning was invited to a great many conversaziones and private views, and did not pretend that they bored him.  In a letter belonging to this period of his life he describes his first dinner at one of the Oxford colleges with an unaffected delight and vanity, which reminds the reader of nothing so much as the pride of the boy-captain of a public school if he were invited to a similar function and received a few compliments.  It may be indeed that Browning had a kind of second youth in this long-delayed social recognition, but at least he enjoyed his second youth nearly as much as his first, and it is not every one who can do that.

Of Browning’s actual personality and presence in this later middle age of his, memories are still sufficiently clear.  He was a middle-sized, well set up, erect man, with somewhat emphatic gestures, and, as almost all testimonies mention, a curiously strident voice.  The beard, the removal of which his wife had resented with so quaint an indignation, had grown again, but grown quite white, which, as she said when it occurred, was a signal mark of the justice of the gods.  His hair was still fairly dark, and his whole appearance at this time must have been very well represented by Mr. G.F.  Watts’s fine portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.  The portrait bears one of the many testimonies which exist to Mr. Watts’s grasp of the essential of character, for it is the only one of the portraits of Browning in which we get primarily the air of virility, even of animal virility, tempered but not disguised, with a certain touch of the pallor of the brain-worker.  He looks here what he was—­a very healthy man, too scholarly to live a completely healthy life.