have come have closer relations with this poet and his work than obtained between him and the earlier years of the century. That decade through which we are being borne rapidly is more responsive to, and puts a higher value on, the convictions and principles on the interests and ideals, of this poetry than earlier decades of the century did. Regarded in this way, the rise of Browning Societies and the wider care for Browning's poetry acquire what may seem an unexpected, but is surely a real significance as an index of changes and movements greater and deeper than any changes of literary fashion as such. From this point of view, we must try to reach the significance and ascertain the relations of the poetry in question; and to do this it may be best to go straight to the heart of

matters.

Our age has been constantly called the Age of Science, and by that has been mostly meant physical or natural science. Our greatest advances were there, our ruling ideas were determined and, in the case of many minds, exhausted by the generalizations of that science. Our whole bent of mind was fixed by scientific curiosity, our standard of belief by the methods, conceptions, and hypotheses of modern physics. Our image of the whole was formed of the matter and bounded by the scope of physical ideas. That was the state of things as regards the mode and measure of thought for perhaps a quarter of the century, say from 1850 to 1875. But that is no longer a fair, not to say a sufficient or complete,

description of the temper and thought of our time. Many still hold, no doubt, by physical science as the ruling factor and only legitimate sovereign of the world of thought, and by them our characteristics are drawn from that point of view. They are such as these: our interest in and regard for facts; our bias to what is real; our demand for exactness of knowledge, for stringency of reasoning; our distaste for hypotheses, except those of physics-these are our qualities and virtues. And as art-work and theories about art always in time take their colour and scope from the larger ideas that are governing the age—from its view of the world and life-so our art-work in its various kinds and media has reflected this ruling spirit. And those who argue from the scientific basis of thought -content and even resolved to make it the measure of things every way-have set forth, in regard to art, that imagination and beauty in the old senses, and all spiritual elements, have practically gone out of art because out of belief and life, and ought even to be excluded deliberately and completely, that we may have art rest sincerely on knowledge. They would tell us that now we are to have, and in the future can only have, a literature of fact, not a literature of emotions and ideals any more.

Such, then, has been the mode, and thus has it been argued by those who have been ruled by the dominant ideas of the years above mentioned, and much of it continues still. But, looking at the matter in a historic and not at all in a dogmatic way or

spirit, have we not got a little beyond that time and phase of thought? To many of the most active and representative minds of those years, it did seem as if we had reached the final phase of human culture and belief. Can that mode of thought be now regarded as an exhaustive and final philosophy of man? Rather what is it we see by help of the test above given, and from that point of view-that is, by taking our higher and more vital literature as a clue to the inner life and intimate thought of the present time? Is it not the fact, in the terms of philosophy, that a sensational and virtually physical philosophy is giving way befor an idealistic and virtually spiritual philosophy?—a mode of thought deriving from Hume and concluding on Comte or Mill is giving place to a mode of thought deriving from Kant and Hegel, and as yet without conclusion, but profoundly convinced that the only conclusions that can be agreeable to experience and adequate to the nature of man must be sought on that ground, found at that level and in that direction? The oracle speaks there, though no philosophy has yet been able to interpret its message; the great problems are thinkable and soluble there, though no "system" has yet resolved them.

Or the matter may be put in other terms and from another side-in the terms and on the grounds of literature purely. Looking at it thus, what does the records how? We find that our century's literature began with the transcendentalism of Wordsworth and the idealism of Shelley. Neither of these, it is

true, rested on quite definite grounds of thought, on philosophic grounds. But that does not affect their value as regards our inquiry, or it may be that it adds to their value as implying a deeper grasp and a more vital impulse. But those impulses, with their ideas, seemed for a time to have been exhausted, and to have been replaced by work involving no transcendental ideas, carrying no ideal impulses, but resting on positive ideas and physical conceptions. Yet now is it not the fact that the idealism of the earlier years of the century is coming back into our literature-not in the old ideas, certainly, but all the more for that in a truly romantic spirit and scope? And this idealism has come upon us again, in part out of the old, old depths of spiritual thought and passion; in part out of our science and what may be called our realistic passion, our concentration upon fact and law outside us, and our new sense of the ultimate things always come upon by man's mind, whatever line it may take. Thus it happens that the new idealism comes enlarged because informed by the results and expanded by the ideas of modern knowledge, by its great conception of the history, order, and extent of the universe. It comes, therefore, with fresh and deeper sense of the insoluble mystery, yet certain grandeur, of the system in which we have our part. It comes also with fresh conviction that the great things of man's own mind and history, the poetry and religion of the race, nobly interpreted and spiritually affirmed, provide, if not a

key to the "great secret," yet a clue guiding us among the questions that arise at the end of all knowledge, and among the things that wait at the end of all experience.

The relations of Browning's art and thought to the course of things thus generally described, and to the movements upon which it is set, is a matter of such importance that it must be early and frankly considered in the study of his poetry. We shall find in it a reason for the interest his work has at present for so many minds. We shall see how far the work itself is interpreted by the principles of the movement. But it will be said that they do poetry a disservice who involve it in such matters, or connect it with changes in the "course of thought" at all. Poetry, which should be a transcript and almost a substantive part of life, should spring from deeper and rise to higher points. And if Browning, as many suspect, has much to do with these things, the difficulty and peculiarity of his poetry is explained. We must, and can best, meet this question at a later point, in considering the quality and motive of this poetry. Here it is enough to say that a poet like Browning, dealing with human life as he does, must work on some basis of thought, must hold some positive relation to the great ideas that divide and distinguish minds. And if so, then it is necessary to know this to read him well. Now, Browning's work is in real and deep sympathy, and even agreement, with the spiritual and ideal return of thought in our time; and