try to show that it gives pleasure, or refinement, or moral culture.  There is no doubt that great poetry has all these uses, but the reader can enjoy them only on condition of forgetting them; for they are effects that follow the sense of its beauty.  Art, morality, religion, is each supreme in its own sphere; the beautiful is not more beautiful because it is also moral, nor is a painting great because its subject is religious.  It is true that their spheres overlap, and art is never at its best except when it is a beautiful representation of the good; nevertheless the points of view of the artist and of the ethical teacher are quite different, and consequently also the elements within which they work and the truth they reveal.

In attempting, therefore, to discover Robert Browning’s philosophy of life, I do not pretend that my treatment of him is adequate.  Browning is, first of all, a poet; it is only as a poet that he can be finally judged; and the greatness of a poet is to be measured by the extent to which his writings are a revelation of what is beautiful.

I undertake a different and a humbler task, conscious of its limitations, and aware that I can hardly avoid doing some violence to the artist.  What I shall seek in the poet’s writings is not beauty, but truth; and although truth is beautiful, and beauty is truth, still the poetic and philosophic interpretation of life are not to be confused.  Philosophy must separate the matter from the form.  Its synthesis comes through analysis, and analysis is destructive of beauty, as it is of all life.  Art, therefore, resists the violence of the critical methods of philosophy, and the feud between them, of which Plato speaks, will last through all time.  The beauty of form and the music of speech which criticism destroys, and to which philosophy is, at the best, indifferent, are essential to poetry.  When we leave them out of account we miss the ultimate secret of poetry, for they cling to the meaning and penetrate it with their charm.  Thought and its expression are inseparable in poetry, as they never are in philosophy; hence, in the former, the loss of the expression is the loss of truth.  The pure idea that dwells in a poem is suffused in the poetic utterance, as sunshine breaks into beauty in the mist, as life beats and blushes in the flesh, or as an impassioned thought breathes in a thinker’s face.

But, although art and philosophy are supreme, each in its own realm, and neither can be subordinated to the uses of the other, they may help each other.  They are independent, but not rival powers of the world of mind.  Not only is the interchange of truth possible between them; but each may show and give to the other all its treasures, and be none the poorer itself.  “It is in works of art that some nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions and ideas of their hearts.”  Job and Isaiah, AEschylus and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Goethe, were first of all poets.  Mankind is indebted to them