Of no English poet, except Shakespeare, can we say with approximate truth that he is the poet of all times.  The subjective breath of their own epoch dims the mirror which they hold up to nature.  Missing by their limitation the highest universality, they can only be understood in their setting.  It adds but little to our knowledge of Shakespeare’s work to regard him as the great Elizabethan; there is nothing temporary in his dramas, except petty incidents and external trappings—­so truly did he dwell amidst the elements constituting man in every age and clime.  But this cannot be said of any other poet, not even of Chaucer or Spenser, far less of Milton, or Pope or Wordsworth.  In their case, the artistic form and the material, the idea and its expression, the beauty and the truth, are to some extent separable.  We can distinguish in Milton between the Puritanic theology which is perishable, and the art whose beauty can never pass away.  The former fixes his kinship with his own age, gives him a definite place in the evolution of English life; the latter is independent of time, a thing which has supreme worth in itself.

Nor can it be doubted that the same holds good of Browning.  He also is ruled by the ideas of his own age.  It may not be altogether possible for us, “who are partners of his motion and mixed up with his career,” to allow for the influence of these ideas, and to distinguish between that which is evanescent and that which is permanent in his work; still I must try to do so; for it is the condition of comprehending him, and of appropriating the truth and beauty he came to reveal.  And if his nearness to ourselves makes this more difficult, it also makes it more imperative.  For there is no doubt that, with Carlyle, he is the interpreter of our time, reflecting its confused strength and chaotic wealth.  He is the high priest of our age, standing at the altar for us, and giving utterance to our needs and aspirations, our fears and faith.  By understanding him, we shall, to some degree, understand ourselves and the power which is silently moulding us to its purposes.

It is because I thus regard Browning as not merely a poet but a prophet, that I think I am entitled to seek in him, as in Isaiah or Aeschylus, a solution, or a help to the solution, of the problems that press upon us when we reflect upon man, his place in the world and his destiny.  He has given us indirectly, and as a poet gives, a philosophy of life; he has interpreted the world anew in the light of a dominant idea; and it will be no little gain if we can make clear to ourselves those constitutive principles on which his view of the world rests.

CHAPTER II.

ON THE NEED OF A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE.

  “Art,—­which I may style the love of loving, rage
  Of knowing, seeing, feeling the absolute truth of things
  For truth’s sake, whole and sole, not any good, truth brings
  The knower, seer, feeler, beside,—­instinctive Art
  Must fumble for the whole, once fixing on a part
  However poor, surpass the fragment, and aspire
  To reconstruct thereby the ultimate entire."[A]