a mentality so passionately alive that its manifold phases should have all the reality of concrete individualities.  The one reveals individual life to us by the play of circumstance, the interaction of events, the correlative eduction of personal characteristics:  the other by his apprehension of that quintessential movement or mood or phase wherein the soul is transitorily visible on its lonely pinnacle of light.  The elder poet reveals life to us by the sheer vividness of his own vision:  the younger, by a newer, a less picturesque but more scientific abduction, compels the complex rayings of each soul-star to a singular simplicity, as by the spectrum analysis.  The one, again, fulfils his aim by a broad synthesis based upon the vivid observance and selection of vital details:  the other by an extraordinary acute psychic analysis.  In a word, Shakspere works as with the clay of human action:  Browning as with the clay of human thought.

As for the difference in value of the two methods it is useless to dogmatise.  The psychic portraiture produced by either is valuable only so far as it is convincingly true.

The profoundest insight cannot reach deeper than its own possibilities of depth.  The physiognomy of the soul is never visible in its entirety, barely ever even its profile.  The utmost we can expect to reproduce, perhaps even to perceive in the most quintessential moment, is a partially faithful, partially deceptive silhouette.  As no human being has ever seen his or her own soul, in all its rounded completeness of good and evil, of strength and weakness, of what is temporal and perishable and what is germinal and essential, how can we expect even the subtlest analyst to adequately depict other souls than his own.  It is Browning’s high distinction that he has this soul-depictive faculty—­restricted as even in his instance it perforce is—­to an extent unsurpassed by any other poet, ancient or modern.  As a sympathetic critic has remarked, “His stage is not the visible phenomenal England (or elsewhere) of history; it is a point in the spiritual universe, where naked souls meet and wrestle, as they play the great game of life, for counters, the true value of which can only be realised in the bullion of a higher life than this.”  No doubt there is “a certain crudeness in the manner in which these naked souls are presented,” not only in “Strafford” but elsewhere in the plays.  Browning markedly has the defects of his qualities.

As part of his method, it should be noted that his real trust is upon monologue rather than upon dialogue.  To one who works from within outward—­in contradistinction to the Shaksperian method of striving to win from outward forms “the passion and the life whose fountains are within”—­the propriety of this dramatic means can scarce be gainsaid.  The swift complicated mental machinery can thus be exhibited infinitely more coherently and comprehensibly than by the most electric succinct dialogue.  Again and again Browning has nigh foundered in the morass of monologue, but, broadly speaking, he transcends in this dramatic method.