Browning’s conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went to visit an elephant.  One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree.  In the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear.  This, as I have said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning.  But he differs from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there all the time.  The blind men formed mistaken theories because an elephant is a thing with a very curious shape.  And Browning firmly believed that the Universe was a thing with a very curious shape indeed.  No blind poet could even imagine an elephant without experience, and no man, however great and wise, could dream of God and not die.  But there is a vital distinction between the mystical view of Browning, that the blind men are misled because there is so much for them to learn, and the purely impressionist and agnostic view of the modern poet, that the blind men were misled because there was nothing for them to learn.  To the impressionist artist of our time we are not blind men groping after an elephant and naming it a tree or a serpent.  We are maniacs, isolated in separate cells, and dreaming of trees and serpents without reason and without result.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROWNING

The great fault of most of the appreciation of Browning lies in the fact that it conceives the moral and artistic value of his work to lie in what is called “the message of Browning,” or “the teaching of Browning,” or, in other words, in the mere opinions of Browning.  Now Browning had opinions, just as he had a dress-suit or a vote for Parliament.  He did not hesitate to express these opinions any more than he would have hesitated to fire off a gun, or open an umbrella, if he had possessed those articles, and realised their value.  For example, he had, as his students and eulogists have constantly stated, certain definite opinions about the spiritual function of love, or the intellectual basis of Christianity.  Those opinions were very striking and very solid, as everything was which came out of Browning’s mind.  His two great theories of the universe may be expressed in two comparatively parallel phrases.  The first was what may be called the hope which lies in the imperfection of man.  The characteristic poem of “Old Pictures in Florence” expresses very quaintly and beautifully the idea that some hope may always be based on deficiency itself; in other