long-continued study of these sordid and
evil things in Browning. He was not one of our modern realists who love
to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity. Not only was he too
healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit
subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as
jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare's treatment of the story of
Othello; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose
in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the
passion. The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on
vengeance in _The Laboratory_ is too intense for any pity to intrude,
but Browning realises not only the evil passions in the woman but the
historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with
scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens
the malignant element. The same, but of course with the difference
Browning's variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious
king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless--the
_Instans Tyrannus_. A faint vein of humour runs through it. The king
describes what has been; his hatred has passed. He sees how small and
fanciful it was, and the illustrations he uses to express it tell us
that; though they carry with them also the contemptuous intensity of his
past hatred. The swell of the hatred remains, though the hatred is past.
So we are not left face to face with absolute evil, with the corruption
hate engenders in the soul. God has intervened, and the worst of it has
passed away.

Then there is the study of hatred in the _Soliloquy of the Spanish
Cloister_. The hatred is black and deadly, the instinctive hatred of a
brutal nature for a delicate one, which, were it unrelieved, would be
too vile for the art of poetry. But it is relieved, not only by the
scenery, the sketch of the monks in the refectory, the garden of
flowers, the naughty girls seated on the convent bank washing their
black hair, but also by the admirable humour which ripples like laughter
through the hopes of his hatred, and by the brilliant sketching of the
two men. We see them, know them, down to their little tricks at dinner,
and we end by realising hatred, it is true, but in too agreeable a
fashion for just distress.

In other poems of the evil passions the relieving element is pity. There
are the two poems entitled _Before_ and _After_, that is, before and
after the duel