[Footnote A:  Fifine at the Fair, xliv.]

No English poet has spoken more impressively than Browning on the weightier matters of morality and religion, or sought with more earnestness to meet the difficulties which arise when we try to penetrate to their ultimate principles.  His way of poetry is, I think, fundamentally different from that of any other of our great writers.  He often seems to be roused into speech, rather by the intensity of his spiritual convictions than by the subtle incitements of poetic sensibility.  His convictions caught fire, and truth became beauty for him; not beauty, truth, as with Keats or Shelley.  He is swayed by ideas, rather than by sublime moods.  Beneath the endless variety of his poems, there are permanent principles, or “colligating conceptions,” as science calls them; and although these are expressed by the way of emotion, they are held by him with all the resources of his reason.

His work, though intuitive and perceptive as to form, “gaining God by first leap” as all true art must do, leaves the impression, when regarded as a whole, of an articulated system.  It is a view of man’s life and destiny that can be maintained, not only during the impassioned moods of poetry, but in the very presence of criticism and doubt.  His faith, like Pompilia’s, is held fast “despite the plucking fiend.”  He has given to us something more than intuitive glimpses into, the mysteries of man’s character.  Throughout his life he held up the steady light of an optimistic conception of the world, and by its means injected new vigour into English ethical thought.  In his case, therefore, it is not an immaterial question, but one almost forced upon us, whether we are to take his ethical doctrine and inspiring optimism as valid truths, or to regard them merely as subjective opinions held by a religious poet.  Are they creations of a powerful imagination, and nothing more?  Do they give to the hopes and aspirations that rise so irrepressibly in the heart of man anything better than an appearance of validity, which will prove illusory the moment the cold light of critical inquiry is turned upon them?

It is to this unity of his work that I would attribute, in the main, the impressiveness of his deliverances on morality and religion.  And this unity justifies us, I think, in applying to Browning’s view of life methods of criticism that would be out of place with any other English poet.  It is one of his unique characteristics, as already hinted, that he has endeavoured to give us a complete and reasoned view of the ethical nature of man, and of his relation to the world—­has sought, in fact, to establish a philosophy of life.  In his case, not without injustice, it is true, but with less injustice than in the case of any other poet, we may disregard, for our purposes, the artistic method of his thought, and lay stress on its content only.  He has a right to a place amongst philosophers, as Plato has to a place amongst poets.  There is such deliberate earnestness and systematic consistency in his teaching, that Hegel can scarcely be said to have maintained that “The Rational is the Real” with greater intellectual tenacity, than Browning held to his view of life.  He sought, in fact, to establish an Idealism; and that Idealism, like Kant’s and Fichte’s, has its last basis in the moral consciousness.