This is a perfect realisation of that eerie sentiment which comes upon us, not so often among mountains and water-falls, as it does on some half-starved common at twilight, or in walking down some grey mean street.  It is the song of the beauty of refuse; and Browning was the first to sing it.  Oddly enough it has been one of the poems about which most of those pedantic and trivial questions have been asked, which are asked invariably by those who treat Browning as a science instead of a poet, “What does the poem of ‘Childe Roland’ mean?” The only genuine answer to this is, “What does anything mean?” Does the earth mean nothing?  Do grey skies and wastes covered with thistles mean nothing?  Does an old horse turned out to graze mean nothing?  If it does, there is but one further truth to be added—­that everything means nothing.

CHAPTER VII

THE RING AND THE BOOK

When we have once realised the great conception of the plan of The Ring and the Book, the studying of a single matter from nine different stand-points, it becomes exceedingly interesting to notice what these stand-points are; what figures Browning has selected as voicing the essential and distinct versions of the case.  One of the ablest and most sympathetic of all the critics of Browning, Mr. Augustine Birrell, has said in one place that the speeches of the two advocates in The Ring and the Book will scarcely be very interesting to the ordinary reader.  However that may be, there can be little doubt that a great number of the readers of Browning think them beside the mark and adventitious.  But it is exceedingly dangerous to say that anything in Browning is irrelevant or unnecessary.  We are apt to go on thinking so until some mere trifle puts the matter in a new light, and the detail that seemed meaningless springs up as almost the central pillar of the structure.  In the successive monologues of his poem, Browning is endeavouring to depict the various strange ways in which a fact gets itself presented to the world.  In every question there are partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the right side; there are also partisans who bring cogent and convincing arguments for the wrong side.  But over and above these, there does exist in every great controversy a class of more or less official partisans who are continually engaged in defending each cause by entirely inappropriate arguments.  They do not know the real good that can be said for the good cause, nor the real good that can be said for the bad one.  They are represented by the animated, learned, eloquent, ingenious, and entirely futile and impertinent arguments of Juris Doctor Bottinius and Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis.  These two men brilliantly misrepresent, not merely each other’s cause, but their own cause.  The introduction of them is one of the finest and most artistic strokes in The Ring and the Book.