The subjects too, though not delightful, are founded on facts of human life. Bishop Blougram was conceived from Cardinal Wiseman’s career, Mr. Sludge from Mr. Home’s. Prince Hohenstiel Schwangau explains and defends the expediency by which Napoleon III. directed his political action. The Inn Album, Red Cotton Nightcap Country, are taken from actual stories that occurred while Browning was alive, and Fifine at the Fair analyses a common crisis in the maturer lives of men and women.  The poems thus keep close to special cases, yet—­and in this the poet appears—­they have an extension which carries them beyond the particular subjects into the needs and doings of a wider humanity.  Their little rivers run into the great sea.  They have then their human interest for a reader who does not wish for beauty, passion, imagination, or the desires of the spirit in his poetry; but who hankers at his solitary desk after realistic psychology, fanciful ethics, curiosities of personal philosophy, cold intellectual play with argument, and honest human ugliness.

Moreover, the method Browning attempts to use in them for the discovery of truth is not the method of poetry, nor of any of the arts.  It is almost a commonplace to say that the world of mankind and each individual in it only arrives at the truth on any matter, large or small, by going through and exhausting the false forms of that truth—­and a very curious arrangement it seems to be.  It is this method Browning pursues in these poems.  He represents one after another various false or half-true views of the matter in hand, and hopes in that fashion to clear the way to the truth.  But he fails to convince partly because it is impossible to give all or enough of the false or half-true views of any one truth, but chiefly because his method is one fitted for philosophy or science, but not for poetry.  Poetry claims to see and feel the truth at once.  When the poet does not assert that claim, and act on it, he is becoming faithless to his art.

Browning’s method in these poems is the method of a scientific philosopher, not of an artist.  He gets his man into a debateable situation; the man debates it from various points of view; persons are introduced who take other aspects of the question, or personified abstractions such as Sagacity, Reason, Fancy give their opinions.  Not satisfied with this, Browning discusses it again from his own point of view.  He is then like the chess-player who himself plays both red and white; who tries to keep both distinct in his mind, but cannot help now and again taking one side more than the other; and who is frequently a third person aware of himself as playing red, and also of himself as playing white; and again of himself as outside both the players and criticising their several games.  This is no exaggerated account of what is done in these poems.  Three people, even when the poems are monologues, are arguing