* * * * *

On the night of Browning’s death a new star suddenly appeared in Orion.  The coincidence is suggestive if we like to indulge in the fancy that in that constellation—­

     “No more subjected to the change or chance
      Of the unsteady planets——­”

gleam those other “abodes where the Immortals are.”  Certainly, a wandering fire has passed away from us.  Whither has it gone?  To that new star in Orion:  or whirled to remote silences in the trail of lost meteors?  Whence, and for how long, will its rays reach our storm and gloom-beleaguered earth?

Such questions cannot meanwhile be solved.  Our eyes are still confused with the light, with that ardent flame, as we knew it here.  But this we know, it was indeed “a central fire descending upon many altars.”  These, though touched with but a spark of the immortal principle, bear enduring testimony.  And what testimony!  How heartfelt:  happily also how widespread, how electrically stimulative!

But the time must come when the poet’s personality will have the remoteness of tradition:  when our perplexed judgments will be as a tale of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It is impossible for any student of literature, for any interested reader, not to indulge in some forecast as to what rank in the poetic hierarchy Robert Browning will ultimately occupy.  The commonplace as to the impossibility of prognosticating the ultimate slow decadence, or slower rise, or, it may be, sustained suspension, of a poet’s fame, is often insincere, and but an excuse of indolence.  To dogmatise were the height of presumption as well as of folly:  but to forego speculation, based upon complete present knowledge, for an idle contentment with narrow horizons, were perhaps foolisher still.  But assuredly each must perforce be content with his own prevision.  None can answer yet for the generality, whose decisive franchise will elect a fit arbiter in due time.

So, for myself, let me summarise what I have already written in several sections of this book, and particularly in the closing pages of Chapter VI.  There, it will be remembered—­after having found that Browning’s highest achievement is in his second period—­emphasis was laid on the primary importance of his life-work in its having compelled us to the assumption of a fresh critical standpoint involving the construction of a new definition.  In the light of this new definition I think Browning will ultimately be judged.  As the sculptor in “Pippa Passes” was the predestinated novel thinker in marble, so Browning himself appears as the predestinated novel thinker in verse; the novel thinker, however, in degree, not in kind.  But I do not for a moment believe that his greatness is in his status as a thinker:  even less, that the poet and the thinker are indissociable.  Many years ago Sainte-Beuve destroyed this shallow artifice of pseudo-criticism:  “Venir nous dire que tout poete de talent est, par essence, un grand penseur, et que tout vrai penseur est necessairement artiste et poete, c’est une pretention insoutenable et que dement a chaque instant la realite.”