[Footnote 117:  By the Fireside.]

The exploring, in-and-out scrutinising instincts of Browning’s imagination equally left their vivid impress upon his treatment of character.  If the sharp nodosities of character caught his eye, its mysterious recesses and labyrinthine alleys allured his curiosity; this lover of “clefts,” this pryer among tangled locks and into the depths of flower-bells, peered into all the nooks and chambers of the soul with inexhaustible enterprise.  It is hard to deny that even The Ring and the Book itself suffers something from the unflagging zest with which the poet pursues all the windings of popular speculation, all the fretwork of Angelo de Hyacinthis’s forensic and domestic futilities.  The poem is a great poetic Mansion, with many chambers, and he will lead us sooner or later to its inner shrine; but on the way there are “closets to search and alcoves to importune,”—­

“The day wears,
And door succeeds door,
We try the fresh fortune,
Range the wide house from the wing to the centre.”

For the most part, after the not wholly successful experiment of direct analysis in Sordello, he chose to make his men and women the instruments of their own illumination; and this was a second source of his delight in the dramatic monologue.  He approached all problematic character with a bias towards disbelieving appearances, which was fed, if not generated, by that restlessly exploring instinct of an imagination that spontaneously resolved surface and solidity into integument and core.  Not that Browning always displays the core; on the contrary, after elaborately removing an imposing mask from what appears to be a face, he will hint that the unmasked face is itself a mask.  “For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.”  Browning is less concerned to “save” the subjects of his so-called “Special Pleadings” than to imagine them divested of the gross disguises of public rumour about them; not naked as God made them, but clothed in the easy undress of their own subtly plausible illusions about themselves.  But the optimist in him is always alert, infusing into the zest of exploration a cheery faith that behind the last investiture lurks always some soul of goodness, and welcoming with a sudden lift of verse the escape of some diviner gleam through the rifts, such as Blougram’s—­

     “Just when we’re safest comes a sunset touch.”

Yet it is hardly a paradox to say that his faith throve upon the obstacles it overcame.  He imagined yet more vividly than he saw, and the stone wall which forbade vision but whetted imagination, acquired an ideal merit in his eyes because it was not an open door.  In later life he came with growing persistence to regard the phenomenal world as a barrier of illusion between man and truth.  But instead of chilling his faith, the obstacle only generated that poet’s philosophy of the “value of a lie” which perturbs the less experienced reader of Fifine.  “Truth” was “forced to manifest itself through falsehood,” won thence by the excepted eye, at the rare season, for the happy moment, till “through the shows of sense, which ever proving false still promise to be true,” the soul of man worked its way to its final union with the soul of God.[118]