ind it came
forward with equally aggressive clearness. It may be repeated, that if
ever he who had the strongest head in the world had gone mad, it would
have been through this turbulent democracy of things. If he looked at
a porcelain vase or an old hat, a cabbage, or a puppy at play, each
began to be bewitched with the spell of a kind of fairyland of
philosophers: the vase, like the jar in the _Arabian Nights_, to send
up a smoke of thoughts and shapes; the hat to produce souls, as a
conjuror's hat produces rabbits; the cabbage to swell and overshadow
the earth, like the Tree of Knowledge; and the puppy to go off at a
scamper along the road to the end of the world. Any one who has read
Browning's longer poems knows how constantly a simile or figure of
speech is selected, not among the large, well-recognised figures
common in poetry, but from some dusty corner of experience, and how
often it is characterised by smallness and a certain quaint exactitude
which could not have been found in any more usual example. Thus, for
instance, _Prince Hohenstiel--Schwangau_ explains the psychological
meaning of all his restless and unscrupulous activities by comparing
them to the impulse which has just led him, even in the act of
talking, to draw a black line on the blotting-paper exactly, so as to
connect two separate blots that were already there. This queer example
is selected as the best possible instance of a certain fundamental
restlessness and desire to add a touch to things in the spirit of
man. I have no doubt whatever that Browning thought of the idea after
doing the thing himself, and sat in a philosophical trance staring at
a piece of inked blotting-paper, conscious that at that moment, and in
that insignificant act, some immemorial monster of the mind, nameless
from the beginning of the world, had risen to the surface of the
spiritual sea.

It is therefore the very essence of Browning's genius, and the very
essence of _The Ring and the Book_, that it should be the enormous
multiplication of a small theme. It is the extreme of idle criticism
to complain that the story is a current and sordid story, for the
whole object of the poem is to show what infinities of spiritual good
and evil a current and sordid story may contain. When once this is
realised, it explains at one stroke the innumerable facts about the
work. It explains, for example, Browning's detailed and picturesque
account of the glorious dust-bin of odds and e