3.  Again, in the leisured upper ranges of thought and emotion, and in the extraordinary complexity of human life which arose, first, out of the more intimate admixture of all classes in our society; and secondly, out of the wider and more varied world-life which increased means of travel and knowledge afforded to men, Tennyson’s smooth, melodious, simple development of art-subjects did not represent the clashing complexity of human life, whether inward in the passions, the intellect or the soul, or in the active movement of the world.  And the other poets were equally incapable of representing this complexity of which the world became clearly conscious.  Arnold tried to express its beginnings, and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them.  He wrote about them; he did not write them down.  Nor did he really belong to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased with its own excitement and entanglement.  He was the child of a world which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes.  Sometimes he felt, as in The New Age, the pleasure of the coming life of the world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet.  But chiefly he saw the disturbance, the unregulated life; and, unable to realise that it was the trouble and wildness of youth, he mistook it for the trouble of decay.  He painted it as such.  But it was really young, and out of it broke all kinds of experiments in social, religious, philosophical and political thought, such as we have seen and read of for the last thirty years.  Art joined in the experiments of this youthful time.  It opened a new fountain and sent forth from it another stream, to echo this attempting, clanging and complicated society; and this stream did not flow like a full river, making large or sweet melody, but like a mountain torrent thick with rocks, the thunderous whirlpools of whose surface were white with foam.  Changing and sensational scenery haunted its lower banks where it became dangerously navigable.  Strange boats, filled with outlandish figures, who played on unknown instruments, and sang of deeds and passions remote from common life, sailed by on its stormy waters.  Few were the concords, many the discords, and some of the discords were never resolved.  But in one case at least—­in the case of Browning’s poetry, and in very many cases in the art of music—­out of the discords emerged at last a full melody of steady thought and controlled emotion as (to recapture my original metaphor) the rude, interrupted music of the mountain stream reaches full and concordant harmony when it flows in peace through the meadows of the valley.

These complex and intercleaving conditions of thought and passion into which society had grown Browning represented from almost the beginning of his work.  When society became conscious of them—­there it found him.  And, amazed, it said, “Here is a man who forty years ago lived in the midst of our present life and wrote about it.”  They saw the wild, loud complexity of their world expressed in his verse; and yet were dimly conscious, to their consolation, that he was aware of a central peace where the noise was quieted and the tangle unravelled.