At both these points Browning differed from Tennyson.  He was not the politician, not the sociologist, only the poet.  No trace of the British Constitution is to be found in his poetry; no one could tell from it that he had any social views or politics at all.  Sixty years in close contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!

He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he is for the moment writing, but he takes no side.  We know what they thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know what Browning thought.  The art-representation, the Vorstellung of the thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing.  It is the same in social matters.  What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but Browning is not on that plane.  There are no poems directly applied to them.  This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light.  With steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the transient, of the changing elements of the world.  He avoided the contemporary.  For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning, and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser not to speak in this introduction.  These two contrasts would lead me too far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry.  Moreover, Browning’s theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology, philosophy and ethics.

10.  I will pass, therefore, to another contrast—­the contrast between them as Artists.

A great number of persons who write about the poets think, when they have said the sort of things I have been saying, that they have said either enough, or the most important things.  The things are, indeed, useful to say; they enable us to realise the poet and his character, and the elements of which his poetry is made.  They place him in a clear relation to his time; they distinguish him from other poets, and, taken all together, they throw light upon his work.  But they are not half enough, nor are they the most important.  They leave out the essence of the whole matter; they leave out the poetry.  They illuminate the surface of his poetry, but they do not penetrate into his interpretation, by means of his special art, and under the influence of high emotion, of the beautiful and sublime Matter of thought and feeling which arises out of Nature and Human Nature, the two great subjects of song; which Matter the poets