1891.] 5o [Bache. 



necessarily tins his medium through which he must address his 

 world, and it is for his world, if it incline to love him, to study 

 to become familiar with the medium in which the message of 

 the seer is at first enshrouded. But even undeniable greatness 

 in literature, and such is Browning's, does not depend upon ob- 

 scurity, but must needs be lessened, not increased by obscurity. 

 Neither does personality, inseparable from utterance, enhance, 

 but, on the contrary, it limits literary greatness. Unless we are 

 to renounce existing standards, obscurity cannot be admitted as 

 a merit, but must be recognized as a defect. Mr. Moulton 

 mentioned The Ring and the Book as perhaps the greatest of 

 all poems, and therefore, inferentially, Browning as perhaps the 

 greatest of all poets. The work is marvelously fine, despite fit- 

 ful, but by no means continuous obscurity, despite portions in 

 which its style is too Hudibrastic to suit the graveness of the 

 theme, and most notably of all (because it might so easily have 

 been otherwise by a halt in time), despite the lameness of its 

 ending. Browning himself sa} T s, in the very first line of the su- 

 perfluous last part of the poem, " Here were the end, had any- 

 thing an end ; " yet relentlessly goes on to reflections of the late 

 actors on the scene, now tame and uninteresting, with even 

 mention that Guido died penitent (with short shrift it must 

 have been, an hour or so at most, including the procession to 

 the place of execution) ; for which the reader cares not a jot, 

 such terrorized reconciliation of life with death being the com- 

 mon end of darkest criminality in face of unexpected retri- 

 bution. Fearful is the anticlimax, with its additional Byronic 

 looking towards and mention of the " British Public," when, 

 merely by omission, the grandest possible climax lay just before 

 the author, where the doomed iniscreant, Guido, renouncing on 

 the instant his mock heroics and blatant atheism, as he hears 

 his executioners at his cell's door, every shred of pretense fall- 

 ing from his naked hideousness, cries, "Abate, — Cardinal, — 

 Christ, — Maria, — God, .... Pompilia, will you let them murder 

 me ? " The tale is told. There is a natural ending, beyond which 

 extension is but injury: even the epilogue is out of date. But 

 such things apart, can it possibly be thought as worthy of exist- 

 ence as the first part of Faust, which, if men remain as men now 

 are, must endure until earth, grown cold and lifeless, still rolls 

 on through space. To address his world, a limited world, a less 



