that he had any social views or politics at all. Sixty years in close
contact with this country and its movements, and not a line about them!

He records the politics of the place and people of whom or of which he
is for the moment writing, but he takes no side. We know what they
thought at Rome or among the Druses of these matters, but we do not know
what Browning thought. The art-representation, the _Vorstellung_ of the
thing, is all; the personal view of the poet is nothing. It is the same
in social matters. What he says as a poet concerning the ideas which
should rule the temper of the soul and human life in relation to our
fellow men may be applied to our social questions, and usefully; but
Browning is not on that plane. There are no poems directly applied to
them. This means that he kept himself outside the realm of political and
social discussions and in the realm of those high emotions and ideas out
of which imagination in lonely creation draws her work to light. With
steady purpose he refused to make his poetry the servant of the
transient, of the changing elements of the world. He avoided the
contemporary. For this high reserve we and the future of art will owe
him gratitude.

On the contrast between the theology we find in Tennyson and Browning,
and on the contrast between their ethical positions, it will be wiser
not to speak in this introduction. These two contrasts would lead me too
far afield, and they have little or nothing to do with poetry. Moreover,
Browning's theology and ethics, as they are called, have been discussed
at wearying length for the last ten years, and especially by persons who
use his poetry to illustrate from it their own systems of theology,
philosophy and ethics.

10. I will pass, therefore, to another contrast--the contrast between