For those who would discriminate between what Mr. Traill succinctly terms his generic greatness as thinker and man of letters, and his specific power as poet, it is necessary to disabuse the mind of Browning’s “message.”  The question is not one of weighty message, but of artistic presentation.  To praise a poem because of its optimism is like commending a peach because it loves the sunshine, rather than because of its distinguishing bloom and savour.  The primary concern of the artist must be with his vehicle of expression.  In the instance of a poet, this vehicle is language emotioned to the white-heat of rhythmic music by impassioned thought or sensation.  Schopenhauer declares it is all a question of style now with poetry; that everything has been sung, that everything has been duly cursed, that there is nothing left for poetry but to be the glowing forge of words.  He forgets that in quintessential art there is nothing of the past, nothing old:  even the future has part therein only in that the present is always encroaching upon, becoming, the future.  The famous pessimistic philosopher has, in common with other critics, made, in effect, the same remark—­that Style exhales the odour of the soul:  yet he himself has indicated that the strength of Shakspere lay in the fact that ‘he had no taste,’ that ’he was not a man of letters.’  Whenever genius has displayed epic force it has established a new order.  In the general disintegration and reconstruction of literary ideals thus involved, it is easier to be confused by the novel flashing of strange lights than to discern the central vivifying altar-flame.  It may prove that what seem to us the regrettable accidents of Browning’s genius are no malfortunate flaws, but as germane thereto as his Herculean ruggednesses are to Shakspere, as the laboured inversions of his blank verse are to Milton, as his austere concision is to Dante.  Meanwhile, to the more exigent among us at any rate, the flaws seem flaws, and in nowise essential.

But when we find weighty message and noble utterance in union, as we do in the magnificent remainder after even the severest ablation of the poor and mediocre portion of Browning’s life-work, how beneficent seem the generous gods!  Of this remainder most aptly may be quoted these lines from “The Ring and the Book,”

     “Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore;
      Prime nature with an added artistry.”

How gladly, in this dubious hour—­when, as an eminent writer has phrased it, a colossal Hand, which some call the hand of Destiny and others that of Humanity, is putting out the lights of Heaven one by one, like candles after a feast—­how gladly we listen to this poet with his serene faith in God, and immortal life, and the soul’s unending development!  “Hope hard in the subtle thing that’s Spirit,” he cries in the Prologue to “Pacchiarotto”:  and this, in manifold phrasing, is his leit-motif, his fundamental idea, in unbroken line from the “Pauline” of his twenty-first to the “Asolando” of his seventy-sixth year.  This superb phalanx of faith—­what shall prevail against it?