decipher his message, it turns out to be something quite obvious, like the immortality of the soul, or the rights of love, or the fact that human motives are mixed. The cause of the obscurity is that the poet has invented a perverse way of telling these things; he likes to play around the outside of a subject, approach it from a dozen different angles, and set you the task of piecing the thing together from hints and glimpses.

He is an enormously learned person, and has rummaged in a thousand old dust-bins of history, and acquired a million details of names and places and things; he pays you the generally quite undeserved compliment of assuming that you know all this as well as he does. If he wishes to tell you about some unknown musician in the court of some obscure Renaissance ruler, he will begin by talking about a ring this musician used to wear, and the first dozen lines of the poem will depend upon an ancient Greek legend concerning the stone that is in the ring. If you don't know the legend about the stone in the ring of the musician in the court of the Renaissance ruler, why then the opening of the poem has no meaning to you, and the Browning Society might hold a hundred sessions on the subject without making head or tail of it. Such writing is simply a bad joke; it is one of the many forms of leisure-class art perversions.

When Browning chooses to write real poetry, he can make it just as simple and as melodious as Tennyson's, and far more passionate. He invented a new and fascinating poetical form, the dramatic lyric, or dramatic soliloquy. He will take some strange and complicated character, whom he has picked up in the junk-rooms of the past, and let this character start to talk and reveal himself to you-not merely the things he wants you to know, but the things he is trying to hide from you, and which he lets slip between the lines. Thus we have Mr. Sludge, the spiritualist medium, who would have converted Mrs. Browning if the poet had not kicked him out of the house. Thus we have Bishop Blougram, an elegant and thoroughly modern Catholic prelate, discussing with an intimate friend over the wine and cigars the delicate question of how he justifies himself for feeding base superstition to the people, who want it and can't get along without it

Browning knew how to be direct, when his feelings were deeply enough stirred. He was direct when he dealt with the old poet Wordsworth and his apostasy from the cause of freedom. Anyone can understand the title, "The Lost Leader," and the opening lines:

Just for a handful of silver he left us,
Just for a riband to stick in his coat.

Likewise, when the Brownings went to Italy and took fire at the struggle of the Italian people for freedom, everybody understood the poetry they wrote home; even the Austrian police understood it, for they opened Browning's mail, to his furious indignation. Likewise, when Mrs. Browning died and some persons proposed to write her biography without her husband's permission, the husband was able to make known his opposition. He spoke of "the paws of these blackguards in my bowels," and said he would "stop the scamp's knavery along with his breath."

For his master-work, to which he devoted his later years, Browning made a peculiar selection. It was a time when democracy was breaking into the world of culture, in spite of all the opposition of academic authority. We shall find poets and novelists in every country persisting in dealing with vulgar reality, instead of with mythological demigods and romantic conquerors. Browning went for his story to an old scandal pamphlet he picked up in a second-hand bookshop of Florence. He might as well have picked up a scrap of a Hearst newspaper from the gutter, for it dealt with a sensational murder story, what is called a "crime of passion." An elderly merchant in Rome had killed his wife, and at his trial he proved that she had run away with a young priest. The priest maintained that the elopement had been a chaste one; he was trying to save the girl from the cruelty of her husband.

Browning, in telling the story, adopts the ultra-modern device of the open forum: all sides shall have a hearing. In "The Ring and the Book" you read nine long narratives of the same events. You hear Half Rome, which sides with the husband; then you hear the Other Half Rome, which sides with the wife. You hear the husband, the wife, the young priest, the lawyers for each side, and the pope, rendering judgment. When you get through

with all this reading you have learned several important lessons: you have learned that life is a complicated thing, and truth very difficult to arrive at; you have learned that good and evil live side by side in the same human heart; you have learned to think for yourself, and not to believe everything you hear; finally, you have learned that the most sordid human events offer a potential literary masterpiece-requiring only a man of genius to penetrate the hearts of the persons involved!

CHAPTER LXXI

OFFICIAL PESSIMISM

In this writer's youth, when he was struggling to earn a living in New York, there was one magazine which was open to new ideas, the "Independent." Its literary editor was Paul Elmer More, and he gave me a chance to write book reviews for him-and then, alas! decided that he could find other people whose writing he preferred. Mr. More evolved into a critic, and has published I don't know how many volumes of what he calls the "Shelburne Essays." Up to a few years ago, when Professor Sherman made his appearance, I used to say that More was the one literary conservative in America who was not intellectually contemptible; the one man who combined scholarship with a perfectly definite and consistent point of view, no sentimentality, and no water-tight compartments in his brain.

In the third volume of the "Shelburne Essays" Mr. More has one dealing with Byron's "Don Juan." I smile when I reflect with what contempt Mr. More would greet the proposition that he should read a modern writer as slangy, as licentious, and as popular as Byron! But "Don Juan" was written a hundred years ago; so it is a “classic," and Mr. More greets its author as the last of the great pessimists, one who had the wit to recognize the futility of human life, and the courage to speak his conclusions plainly.

Things have changed since Byron's day, Mr. More explains. "We, who have approached the consummation of the world's hope, know that happiness and peace and the fulfilment of desires are about to settle down and

brood for ever more over the lot of mankind." This, I had better explain, is sarcasm on Mr. More's part. He is irritated because modern scientific people have presumed to think that human problems can be solved. He is so much irritated that he turns his essay on Byron into a series of sneers at "the new dispensation of official optimism." For example, this kind of thing:

Next year, or the next, some divine invention shall come which will prove this melancholy of the poets to have been only a childish ignorance of man's sublimer destiny; some discovery of a new element more wonderful than radium will render the ancient brooding over human feebleness a matter of laughter and astonishment; some acceptance of the larger brotherhood of the race will wipe away all tears and bring down upon earth the fair dream of heaven, a reality and a possession forever; some new philosophy of the soul will convert the old poems of conflict into meaningless fables, stale and unprofitable.

What is the meaning of this attitude of envenomed resentment at the idea of a hope for mankind? We shall note it again and again among the poets and critics of the ancient regime-of what we may call "the old dispensation of official pessimism." It used to puzzle me that scholars and thinkers should be so malicious and perverted as to find pleasure in trampling upon human aspiration; but after years of pondering I think I understand it. These gentlemen are guests at a banquet, who, seeing the food too long delayed, and despairing of anything better, have filled their bellies with husks and straw; and now, when they are full, and can no longer eat, they see the good food coming to the table!

It was a perfectly natural thing for an ancient to be pessimistic. He saw the world as a place of blind cruelty, the battle-ground of forces which he did not understand; and what guarantee could he have that the feeble intellect of man would ever tame these giants? So he made for himself a philosophy of stern resignation, and an art of beautiful but mournful despair. The scholars and lovers of old things have identified themselves and their reputations with these ancient dignities and renunciations, these tender and touching griefs; and how shall they express their irritation when bumptious youth arises, and proceeds to take charge of life, to abolish pestilence and famine, poverty, war, crime-and perhaps, in the end, even old age and death?

All this is preliminary to the introduction of another Victorian poet; one who moved me deeply in my youth, and still holds my undimmed affection. I would choose Matthew Arnold as the perfect exemplar of the "classical" attitude toward life; that is, resignation, at once pathetic and heroic, to the pitiful fate of mankind on earth. Listen to him at his best:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The author of these lines was the son of a great teacher, and therefore had no money. He spent thirty years of his life as an inspector of schools; a most pitiful destiny for a poet-traveling all over England to hear little children recite the list of the kings and the counties, and tell the number of legs on a spider. The fountain of his poetry dried up, and he became a critic, not merely of English letters but of English life; in many ways the most radical and most intelligent critic that Victorian England had. He preached the gospel of sweetness and light; also, alas, he went on the war-path against an infamous bill which was being agitated in Parliament, to permit a man to violate the old Mosaic code by marrying the sister of his deceased wife!

Matthew Arnold insisted that it wasn't on account of Moses, but on account of a thing he called "delicacy." You cannot travel in Victorian England without encountering phenomena like this. You will be introduced to what appears to you a perfectly sane and self-contained and cultivated gentleman, wearing exactly the correct frock-coat and tie; but then, you will happen to touch one of his tribal taboos, and suddenly he will shriek, and tear off his shirt, and pull out a sharp knife, and begin to slash himself, and dance and whirl in a holy frenzy.

-Ogi, wishing to make sure about this point, goes to the source of all information on the subject of refinement in sex matters. "Tell me," he says, "if you were to die,