it is always possible, and whether it is at any time fair to a
poet to define the idea which inspires him, I shall not inquire at
present. No doubt, the interpretation of a poet from first principles
carries us beyond the limits of art; and by insisting on the unity of
his work, more may be attributed to him, or demanded from him, than he
properly owns. To make such a demand is to require that poetry should be
philosophy as well, which, owing to its method of intuition, it can
never be. Nevertheless, among English poets there is no one who lends
himself so easily, or so justly, to this way of treatment as Browning.
Much of his poetry trembles on the verge of the abyss which is supposed
to separate art from philosophy; and, as I shall try to show, there was
in the poet a growing tendency to turn the power of dialectic on the
pre-suppositions of his art. Yet, even Browning puts great difficulties
in the way of a critic, who seeks to draw a philosophy of life from his
poems. It is not by any means an easy task to lift the truths he utters
under the stress of poetic emotion into the region of placid
contemplation, or to connect them into a system, by means of the
principle from which he makes his departure.

The first of these difficulties arises from the extent and variety of
his work. He was prodigal of poetic ideas, and wrote for fifty years on
nature, art, and man, like a magnificent spendthrift of spiritual
treasures. So great a store of knowledge lay at his hand, so real and
informed with sympathy, that we can scarcely find any great literature
which he has not ransacked, any phase of life which is not represented
in his poems. All kinds of men and women, in every station in life, and
at every stage of evil and goodness, crowd his pages. There are few
forms of human character he has not studied, and each individual he has
so caught at the supreme moment of his life, and in the hardest stress
of circumstance, that the inmost working of his nature is revealed. The
wealth is bewildering, and it is hard to follow the central thought,
"the imperial chord, which steadily underlies the accidental mists of
music springing thence."[A]

[Footnote A: _Fifine at the Fair_.]

A second and still graver difficulty lies in the fact that his poetry,
as he repeatedly insisted, is "always dramatic in principle, and so many
utterances of so many imaginary persons, not mine."[B] In his earlier
works, especially, Browning is creative rat