ersons; only (as Shakespeare's only untried style was the
simple one) almost never simple ones; and certainly he has controlled
them all to profoundly interesting artistic ends by his own powerful
personality. The world and all its action, as a show of thought, that
is the scope of his work. It makes him pre-eminently a modern poet--a
poet of the self-pondering, perfectly educated, modern world, which,
having come to the end of all direct and purely external experiences,
must necessarily turn for its entertainment to the world within:--

"The men and women who live and move in that new world of his creation
are as varied as life itself; they are kings and beggars, saints and
lovers, great captains, poets, painters, musicians, priests and Popes,
Jews, gipsies and dervishes, street-girls, princesses, dancers with the
wicked [44] witchery of the daughter of Herodias, wives with the
devotion of the wife of Brutus, joyous girls and malevolent
grey-beards, statesmen, cavaliers, soldiers of humanity, tyrants and
bigots, ancient sages and modern spiritualists, heretics, scholars,
scoundrels, devotees, rabbis, persons of quality and men of low
estate--men and women as multiform as nature or society has made them."

The individual, the personal, the concrete, as distinguished from, yet
revealing in its fulness, the general, the universal--that is Mr.
Browning's chosen subject-matter: "Every man is for him an epitome of
the universe, a centre of creation." It is always the particular soul,
and the particular act or episode, as the flower of the particular
soul--the act or episode by which its quality comes to the test--in
which he interests us. With him it is always "a drama of the interior,
a tragedy or comedy of the soul, to see thereby how each soul becomes
conscious of itself." In the Preface to the later edition of Sordello,
Mr. Browning himself told us that to him little else seems worth study
except the development of a soul, the incidents, the story, of that.
And, [45] in fact, the intellectual public generally agrees with him.
It is because he has ministered with such marvellous vigour, and
variety, and fine skill to this interest, that he is the most modern,
to modern people the most important, of poets.

So much for Mr. Browning's matter; for his manner, we hold Mr. Symons
right in thinking him a master of all the arts of poetry. "These
extraordinary little poems," says Mr. Symons of "Johannes Agricola" and
"Por