In Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) which next appeared, the imaginative elements, as we have seen, are still alive and happy; and though they only emerge at intervals in its continuation, Aristophanes’ Apology (1875), yet they do emerge.  Meanwhile, between Balaustion’s Adventure and the end of 1875, he produced four poems—­Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society; Fifine at the Fair; Red Cotton Nightcap Country, or Turf and Towers; and The Inn Album.  They are all long, and were published in four separate volumes.  In them the intellectual elements have all but completely conquered the imaginative.  They are, however, favourite “exercise-places” for some of his admirers, who think that they derive poetic pleasures from their study.  The pleasure these poems give, when they give it, is not altogether a poetic pleasure.  It is chiefly the pleasure of the understanding called to solve with excitement a huddle of metaphysical problems.  They have the name but not the nature of poetry.

They are the work of my Lord Intelligence—­attended by wit and fancy—­who sits at the desk of poetry, and with her pen in his hand.  He uses the furniture of poetry, but the goddess herself has left the room.  Yet something of her influence still fills the air of the chamber.  In the midst of the brilliant display that fancy, wit, and intellect are making, a soft steady light of pure song burns briefly at intervals, and then is quenched; like the light of stars seen for a moment of quiet effulgence among the crackling and dazzling of fireworks.

The poems are, it is true, original.  We cannot class them with any previous poetry.  They cannot be called didactic or satirical.  The didactic and satirical poems of England are, for the most part, artificial, concise, clear.  These poems are not artificial, clear or concise.  Nor do they represent the men and women of a cultured, intellectual and conventional society, such as the poetry of Dryden and Pope addressed.  The natural man is in them—­the crude, dull, badly-baked man—­what the later nineteenth century called the real man.  We see his ugly, sordid, contemptible, fettered soul, and long for Salinguerra, or Lippo Lippi, or even Caliban.  The representations are then human enough, with this kind of humanity, but they might have been left to prose.  Poetry has no business to build its houses on the waste and leprous lands of human nature; and less business to call its work art.  Realism of this kind is not art, it is science.

Yet the poems are not scientific, for they have no clarity of argument.  Their wanderings of thought are as intertangled as the sheep-walks on league after league of high grasslands.  When one has a fancy to follow them, the pursuit is entertaining; but unless one has the fancy, there are livelier employments.  Their chief interest is the impression they give us of a certain side of Browning’s character.  They are his darling debauch of cleverness, of surface-psychology.  The analysis follows no conventional lines, does not take or oppose any well-known philosophical side.  It is not much more than his own serious or fantastic thinking indulging itself with reckless abandon—­amusing itself with itself.  And this gives them a humanity—­a Browning humanity—­outside of their subjects.