their purpose: they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse underfoot, all the more readily if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second and the third, and every other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious, and never once seem to suspect, so cunning has the devil been with them, that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness."

It is on this side, perhaps, that we can see more clearly than on any other what his French critic, in the 'Revue des Deux Mondes,' M. Emile Montégut, means by calling Hawthorne" un romancier pessimiste." He certainly had his pessimistic moments. "Let us acknowledge it wiser, if not more sagacious, to follow out one's day-dream to its natural consummation, although, if the vision have been worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure." Or again, "We contemplated our existence as hopefully as if the soil beneath our feet had not been fathom-deep with the dust of deluded tions, on every one of which, as on ourselves, the world had imposed itself as a hitherto unwedded bride;" a noticeable passage, because seemingly framed in reference to Emerson's optimism, who had told 'the American scholar' that he gave him "the universe a virgin to-day." But in reality Hawthorne had too much humour to be either a Leopardi or a Schopenhauer. His inquisitorial coldness, and his perfectly neutral analysis of character give him a certain airy scepticism and a kind of cynical aloofness; but such a temper stands at the opposite pole to pessimism,

genera

which is dogmatically and savagely in earnest. He describes himself with felicitous exactness in the attitude of Miles Coverdale. He was a devoted epicure of emotions, and on such moods as robbed the actual world of its solidity he was resolved to pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away.

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66

'ROBERT BROWNING, WRITER OF
PLAYS."

"And Robert Browning, you writer of plays,

Here's a subject made to your hand!'

Dramatic Romances (A Light Woman), vol. iv.

IN an early volume of his collected poems Mr. Browning asserts that "their contents are always dramatic in principle, and so many utterances of so many imaginary persons." Dramatic in principle they undoubtedly are; such strictly lyrical and undramatic pieces as 'Christmas Eve' and 'Easter Day' are exceptions to the general rule, which cannot be recalled without a moment's thought. How clearly in the author's own conception dramatic power is the quality characteristic of his poetic genius, may be gathered from his fondness for such titles as 'Dramatis Personæ,' 'Dramatic Idylls,' 'Men and Women,' 'Dramatic Romances,' and so forth. But the dramatic spirit is one thing, and the power of composing a drama is another. No one would deny that Browning is a dramatist of a high order, and yet many would doubt whether he is what, for purposes of convenient distinction, may be called a 'practical' dramatist. The Ring and the

Book' is quite enough evidence of the possession of the first attribute; it is above all a study of character, in its contrasts between Guido and Pompilia, Caponsacchi and Pope Innocent; the whole treatment and setting are dramatic in the highest degree (as, e. g., in 'Half-Rome,' 'Other Half-Rome,' and the 'Tertium Quid'), being throughout occupied with the vigorous presentment of character in active and generally malevolent manifestations. But when the reader turns from this voluminous poem to one of the professed dramas-say to 'Pippa Passes' or 'Colombe's Birthday'-he is struck with the unreality and impracticability of the play, and the doubt crosses his mind whether Browning can be said to have the dramatic capacity in the limited sense. It is worth considering in what sense such a distinction can be maintained, and to what extent it can be said that Browning possesses the first gift without the second.

Browning is a dramatist for the one and sufficient reason that he is, above all, the student of humanity. Humanity he draws with a loving and patient hand, but on the one condition that it shall be humanity in active and passionate exercise. Not for him, the beauty of repose; the still quiet lights of meditation, removed from the slough and welter of actual struggle, make no appeal; the apathetic calm of a normal human being, exercised on daily uninteresting tasks, is to him well-nigh incomprehensible; storms and thunder, wind and lightning, passion and fury, and masterful strength, something on which he can set the seal of his own rugged, eloquent,

amorphous verse; something which he can probe and analyze and wrap up in the twists and turns of his most idiomatic, most ungrammatical style-these are the subjects which he loves to handle. And so those whose eyes are dazzled by this excess of light, or who lose their breath in this whirl of hurrying ideas, call him unintelligible; while those quiet souls who look for form and measure and control in verse deny that such uncouth and turgid lines are poetry at all. That Browning should have essayed two transcripts from Euripides is a fact not without significance for the critic, for he has thereby opened to us the secrets of his own dramatic aptitudes. For with him, as with Euripides, the humanity he paints is not the dignified, selfish man of Tennyson or Sophocles, with views on 'the decorous' or 'the befitting,' and a conventional regard for respectable deportment, whether towards himself or to his gods; but the wilder, less commonplace, more developed human being, who hates with a will, and loves with a will, regardless of consequence, who cannot deceive himself as to his own motives and despises external morality, a humanity which dares and sins and suffers, and makes a mock, if need be, of gods and heaven.

It is Browning, more than any one else, who makes us realize the volcano of dangerous forces which simmers beneath the smiling commonplaces of ordinary life and established social usage. Humanity with him is not the sententious and balanced hero of classicalism, nor the feverish melodramatic idealist of romantic literature. The times of Corneille and Racine for him are done with