II

[Illustration: THE LOVER]

I

LOVERS MEETING

Browning believed in love as the great adventure of life--the thing
which probes, reveals, develops, proclaims or condemns. This faith is
common to most poets, or at any rate profession of this faith; but in
him, who was so free from sentimentality, it is more inspiring than in
any other, except perhaps George Meredith. Meredith too is without
sentimentality; but he has more of hardness, shall I say? in his general
outlook--more of the inclination to dwell on scientific or naturalistic
analogies with human experience. In Browning the "peculiar grace" is his
passion for humanity _as_ humanity. It gives him but moderate joy to
trace those analogies; certainly they exist (he seems to say), but let
us take them for granted--let us examine man as a separate phenomenon,
so far as it is feasible thus to do. Moreover, his keenest interest,
next to mankind, was art in all its branches--a correlative aspect, that
is to say, of the same phenomenon. Thus each absorption explains and
aids the other, and we begin to perceive the reason for his triumphs in
expression of our subtlest inward life. Man _was_, for him, the proper
study of mankind; of all great poets, he was the most "social," and
that in the genial, not the satiric, spirit--differing there from Byron,
almost the sole other singer of whom it may be said (as Mr. Arthur
Symons has said) that for him "society exists as well as human nature."
Where Browning excels is in the breadth and kindliness of his outlook;
and again, this breadth and this kindliness are entirely unsentimental.

In a "man of the world," then, such as he, belief in love is the more
inspiring. But for all his geniality, there is no indulgence for
flabbiness--there is little sympathy, indeed, for any of the weaker
ways. After _Pauline_--rejected utterance of his green-sickness--the
wan, the wistful, moods of love find seldom recognition; there are no
withdrawals "from all fear" into the woman's arms, and no looking up,
"as I might kill her and be loved the more," into the man's eyes. For
love is to make us greater, not smaller, than ourselves. It can indeed
_do all_ for us, and will do all, but we must for our part be doing
something too. Nor shall one lover cast the burden on the other. That
other will answer all demands, will lift all loads that may be lifted,
but no _claim_ shall be formulated on either side. This is the true
faith, the true