that the critic does not know what The Ring and the Book means.  We feel about it as we should feel about a man who said that the plot of Tristram Shandy was not well constructed, or that the women in Rossetti’s pictures did not look useful and industrious.  A man who has missed the fact that Tristram Shandy is a game of digressions, that the whole book is a kind of practical joke to cheat the reader out of a story, simply has not read Tristram Shandy at all.  The man who objects to the Rossetti pictures because they depict a sad and sensuous day-dream, objects to their existing at all.  And any one who objects to Browning writing his huge epic round a trumpery and sordid police-case has in reality missed the whole length and breadth of the poet’s meaning.  The essence of The Ring and the Book is that it is the great epic of the nineteenth century, because it is the great epic of the enormous importance of small things.  The supreme difference that divides The Ring and the Book from all the great poems of similar length and largeness of design is precisely the fact that all these are about affairs commonly called important, and The Ring and the Book is about an affair commonly called contemptible.  Homer says, “I will show you the relations between man and heaven as exhibited in a great legend of love and war, which shall contain the mightiest of all mortal warriors, and the most beautiful of all mortal women.”  The author of the Book of Job says, “I will show you the relations between man and heaven by a tale of primeval sorrows and the voice of God out of a whirlwind.”  Virgil says, “I will show you the relations of man to heaven by the tale of the origin of the greatest people and the founding of the most wonderful city in the world.”  Dante says, “I will show you the relations of man to heaven by uncovering the very machinery of the spiritual universe, and letting you hear, as I have heard, the roaring of the mills of God.”  Milton says, “I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you of the very beginning of all things, and the first shaping of the thing that is evil in the first twilight of time.”  Browning says, “I will show you the relations of man to heaven by telling you a story out of a dirty Italian book of criminal trials from which I select one of the meanest and most completely forgotten.”  Until we have realised this fundamental idea in The Ring and the Book all criticism is misleading.

In this Browning is, of course, the supreme embodiment of his time.  The characteristic of the modern movements par excellence is the apotheosis of the insignificant.  Whether it be the school of poetry which sees more in one cowslip or clover-top than in forests and waterfalls, or the school of fiction which finds something indescribably significant in the pattern of a hearth-rug, or the tint of a man’s tweed coat, the tendency is the same.  Maeterlinck stricken still and wondering by a deal door half open,