found in any more usual example.  Thus, for instance, Prince Hohenstiel—­Schwangau explains the psychological meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to connect two separate blots that were already there.  This queer example is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of man.  I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the spiritual sea.

It is therefore the very essence of Browning’s genius, and the very essence of The Ring and the Book, that it should be the enormous multiplication of a small theme.  It is the extreme of idle criticism to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good and evil a current and sordid story may contain.  When once this is realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the work.  It explains, for example, Browning’s detailed and picturesque account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and ends for sale, out of which he picked the printed record of the trial, and his insistence on its cheapness, its dustiness, its yellow leaves, and its crabbed Latin.  The more soiled and dark and insignificant he can make the text appear, the better for his ample and gigantic sermon.  It explains again the strictness with which Browning adhered to the facts of the forgotten intrigue.  He was playing the game of seeing how much was really involved in one paltry fragment of fact.  To have introduced large quantities of fiction would not have been sportsmanlike. The Ring and the Book therefore, to re-capitulate the view arrived at so far, is the typical epic of our age, because it expresses the richness of life by taking as a text a poor story.  It pays to existence the highest of all possible compliments—­the great compliment which monarchy paid to mankind—­the compliment of selecting from it almost at random.

But this is only the first half of the claim of The Ring and the Book to be the typical epic of modern times.  The second half of that claim, the second respect in which the work is representative of all modern development, requires somewhat more careful statement. The Ring and the Book is of course, essentially speaking, a detective story.  Its difference from the ordinary detective story is that it seeks to establish, not the centre of criminal guilt, but the centre of spiritual guilt.  But it has exactly the same kind of exciting quality that a detective story has, and a very excellent quality it is.  But the element which is important, and which now requires pointing out, is the method by which that centre of spiritual guilt and the corresponding centre of spiritual rectitude is discovered.  In order to make clear the peculiar character of this method, it is necessary to begin rather nearer the beginning, and to go back some little way in literary history.