or the light shining out of a window at night; Zola filling note-books with the medical significance of the twitching of a man’s toes, or the loss of his appetite; Whitman counting the grass and the heart-shaped leaves of the lilac; Mr. George Gissing lingering fondly over the third-class ticket and the dilapidated umbrella; George Meredith seeing a soul’s tragedy in a phrase at the dinner-table; Mr. Bernard Shaw filling three pages with stage directions to describe a parlour; all these men, different in every other particular, are alike in this, that they have ceased to believe certain things to be important and the rest to be unimportant.  Significance is to them a wild thing that may leap upon them from any hiding-place.  They have all become terribly impressed with and a little bit alarmed at the mysterious powers of small things.  Their difference from the old epic poets is the whole difference between an age that fought with dragons and an age that fights with microbes.

This tide of the importance of small things is flowing so steadily around us upon every side to-day, that we do not sufficiently realise that if there was one man in English literary history who might with justice be called its fountain and origin, that man was Robert Browning.  When Browning arose, literature was entirely in the hands of the Tennysonian poet.  The Tennysonian poet does indeed mention trivialities, but he mentions them when he wishes to speak trivially; Browning mentions trivialities when he wishes to speak sensationally.  Now this sense of the terrible importance of detail was a sense which may be said to have possessed Browning in the emphatic manner of a demoniac possession.  Sane as he was, this one feeling might have driven him to a condition not far from madness.  Any room that he was sitting in glared at him with innumerable eyes and mouths gaping with a story.  There was sometimes no background and no middle distance in his mind.  A human face and the pattern on the wall behind it came forward with equally aggressive clearness.  It may be repeated, that if ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would have been through this turbulent democracy of things.  If he looked at a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of philosophers:  the vase, like the jar in the Arabian Nights, to send up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a conjuror’s hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a scamper along the road to the end of the world.  Any one who has read Browning’s longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude which could not have been