realizing the true idea of this life, and so leading up with energy to the life that may be when this no longer serves. The poet's own energy and freshness are such that he has, far more than most, inward sense of the soul, as Goethe described it, as "an essence that works on from eternity to eternity." And as this sense of power gives him assurance, so it gives him his conception, of a "life to come." It is not a "heaven," a stage of finality and fulfilment. It is the life of the soul, rising and expanding through what may be an "infinite series" of lives, "unhasting, yet unresting," because it serves no "taskmaster," but in love and power fulfils the very spirit of life.

And here the poet approves his grasp of that principle of which I said he is so true an interpreterthe great Christian idea-the idea of spiritual ascent and evolution as the chief law of life. That is the meaning of this life. It is the ground and law of all life to come. If that principle hold good of man, life to come is possible and desirable; if it hold good, life and duty here and hereafter are great-are, in truth, spiritually infinite and of eternal value.

CHAPTER XIII.

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND CASUISTIC STUDIES:
BAN" AND BISHOP BLOUGRAM."

"CALI

"POETRY," said Wordsworth, "is the image of man and nature." And there is nothing clearer in regard to it than this-that in poetry you will find man's thought of man most fully spoken. These poems on "Caliban" and his theology, and on "Bishop Blougram" and his defence of his position as a Roman Catholic bishop in the nineteenth century, are a most pertinent and forcible instance of this law. In their curious interest and picturesque research, their original characterization, and casuistic power and subtlety, they give a striking "image" of man as man is seen in our time. The poet who made them was making a new thing in poetry, but he was acting on the impulse and following the interest proper to the poet as truly as Shakspere when he made his plays, and presented in that way his "image" of man in the age of Elizabeth.

Yet I am aware that many who find "Hamlet"

and "Lear" great and true "images" of man and of human life, would like to give another name to "Caliban" and "Blougram," or, it may be, would like to assign them to another part of literature. And yet, if the matter be looked at on its own merits, it will be seen that these poems have the relation described, and that Browning acted as sincerely and rightly as Shakspere in making them. Shakspere's dramas were not merely a form of art for which the age gave occasion, and in which it took pleasure; they were the fit expression of its thought of human life. We have already seen that nothing is more striking in recent literature than the scope and quality of its interest in man, and this interest is other than the Elizabethan. And Browning's poetry, it was stated, must be judged in relation to that, and not in relation to the older thought. But there are certain points of the modern interest reflected in such poems as these that remain to be noted.

The interest in man, which was at first social and religious, and has in truth remained so, became larger and more varied with the growth of knowledge and the rise of other interests. The extension of science, especially in the departments of man's own history, gave it new material and ideas, and a wider range. It was no longer ethical or spiritual only. It included, more or less, all the facts and questions of man's life, and our researches into the earliest accessible history of man gave it a field of fascinating interest and great extent. I am not, of course, now speaking of

poetry, but of other literature; only both conception and matter have told on poetry, and markedly on Browning's work.

And there is another question related to these researches, and even more distinctive of recent years and ideas, also reflected in the poems now before us —I mean the interest we take in the study of early forms of belief, and in the sources and formation of opinion generally. The natural history of belief, all the forces that enter into and fix or shape belief in interesting cases, is matter of much curiosity to us in our present mood.

Human history we now see to be an evolution of ideas as really as of customs and institutions, stretching back to the beginnings of experience, and forward through phases none can foresee. It is seen that the beliefs of men are very largely fashioned by environment, race, culture, and personal qualities. Belief, in fact, is a vital far more than a logical problem. Variation and development, so far endless and practically infinite-variation and development by selection of the fittest among ideas as among organisms -that, with whatever qualification, is the modern formula for the growth of beliefs.

Now, clearly this process may rouse two sorts of interest-one scientific, the other dramatic; the first in the beliefs themselves, their process and value, the second in their vital bearings, the ways in which they illustrate the man thinking. Browning's is the latter interest, and it is a curious proof of his intellectual

and dramatic energy that he has given such subtle and powerful statement to a special dramatic problem, which you will not find illustrated in any other poet. And in this the poet, in subject and conception, is in sincere relation to his age.

And these poems, related as they both are to the researches and ideas just described, show diversity of power and reach in the studies they represent. Caliban, the study of a crude and simple nature, a primitive mind, if mind it may be called, that worked in that curious brain; Blougram, a complex and cultivated, a powerful and modern mind; yet both dealing with the same problem, both studies of the sources and process of the higher beliefs-of man's conclusion from his experience as to the system amid which he finds himself, and the quality of the law that rules all things.

We shall begin with “Caliban” (vi. 136) as the simpler study, and see how he puts his experience together into a kind of “natural theology." It was a bold and characteristic thing of Browning to try his art, and prove his genius by such a study. Perhaps to him only would the problem have occurred in this way, and no one else could have given it such congruous, subtle, and forcibly dramatic statement.

It is indicative of the range of Shakspere's curiosity, as of his power, that he should have imagined, and in his last play should have embodied, so strange a conception as Caliban. It was natural that a poet of our time should see and work out certain questions only