n the villain the pure and
disinterested gentleman that most villains firmly believe themselves
to be, or until he had taken the comic man as seriously as it is the
custom of comic men to take themselves. And in this Browning is beyond
all question the founder of the most modern school of poetry.
Everything that was profound, everything, indeed, that was tolerable
in the aesthetes of 1880, and the decadent of 1890, has its ultimate
source in Browning's great conception that every one's point of view
is interesting, even if it be a jaundiced or a blood-shot point of
view. He is at one with the decadents, in holding that it is
emphatically profitable, that it is emphatically creditable, to know
something of the grounds of the happiness of a thoroughly bad man.
Since his time we have indeed been somewhat over-satisfied with the
moods of the burglar, and the pensive lyrics of the receiver of stolen
goods. But Browning, united with the decadents on this point, of the
value of every human testimony, is divided from them sharply and by a
chasm in another equally important point. He held that it is necessary
to listen to all sides of a question in order to discover the truth of
it. But he held that there was a truth to discover. He held that
justice was a mystery, but not, like the decadents, that justice was a
delusion. He held, in other words, the true Browning doctrine, that in
a dispute every one was to a certain extent right; not the decadent
doctrine that in so mad a place as the world, every one must be by the
nature of things wrong.

Browning's conception of the Universe can hardly be better expressed
than in the old and pregnant fable about the five blind men who went
to visit an elephant. One of them seized its trunk, and asserted that
an elephant was a kind of serpent; another embraced its leg, and was
ready to die for the belief that an elephant was a kind of tree. In
the same way to the man who leaned against its side it was a wall; to
the man who had hold of its tail a rope, and to the man who ran upon
its tusk a particularly unpleasant kind of spear. This, as I have
said, is the whole theology and philosophy of Browning. But he differs
from the psychological decadents and impressionists in this important
point, that he thinks that although the blind men found out very
little about the elephant, the elephant was an elephant, and was there
all the time. The blind men formed mistaken theories because an
elephant is