nd may defend
accordingly. He would gladly admit that the coarser forms of evil are
passing away; and that it is the creative intention that they should do
so. Evil remains for him nevertheless essential to the variety, and
invested with the dignity of human life; and on no point does he detach
himself so clearly from the humanitarian optimist who regards evil and
its attendant sufferings as a mere disturbance to life. Even where
suffering is not caused by evil doing, he is helped over it by his
individual point of view; because this prevents his ever regarding it as
distinct from the personal compensations which it so often brings into
play. He cannot think of it in the mass; and here again his theism
asserts itself, though in a less obvious manner.

So much of Mr. Browning's moral influence lies in the hopeful religious
spirit which his works reveal, that it is important to understand how
elastic this is, and what seeming contradictions it is competent to
unite. The testimony of one poem might otherwise be set against that of
another with confusing results.

Mr. Browning's paternal grandfather was an Englishman of a west country
stock;[1] his paternal grandmother a Creole. The maternal grandfather
was a German from Hamburg named Wiedemann, an accomplished draughtsman
and musician.[2] The maternal grandmother was completely Scotch.

This pedigree throws a valuable light on the vigour and variety of Mr.
Browning's genius; for it shows that on the ground of heredity they are,
in great measure, accounted for. It contains almost the only facts of a
biographical nature which can be fitly introduced into the present work.

HIS CHOICE AND TREATMENT OF SUBJECT.

VERSIFICATION.

Mr. Browning's choice of subject is determined by his belief that
individual feeling and motive are the only true life: hence the only
true material of dramatic art. He rejects no incident which admits of
development on the side of feeling and motive. He accepts none which
cannot be so developed. His range of subject covers, therefore, a great
deal that is painful, but nothing that is simply repulsive: because the
poetry of human life, that is of individual experience, is absent from
nothing which he portrays.

His treatment of his subject is realistic in so far that it is always
picturesque. It raises a distinct image of the person or action he
intends to describe; but the image is, so to speak, always saturated
with thought: and I shall late