has a remark upon the great Bossuet, which may with singular aptness
be repeated of Browning: -- "His is the Hebrew genius extended,
fecundated by Christianity, and open to all the acquisitions
of the understanding, but retaining some degree of sovereign interdiction,
and closing its vast horizon precisely where its light ceases."
Browning cannot, or will not, face the problem of the future
except from the basis of assured continuity of individual existence.
He is so much in love with life, for life's sake, that he cannot even credit
the possibility of incontinuity; his assurance of eternity in another world
is at least in part due to his despair at not being eternal in this.
He is so sure, that the intellectually scrupulous detect
the odours of hypotheses amid the sweet savour of indestructible assurance.
Schopenhauer says, in one of those recently-found Annotations of his
which are so characteristic and so acute, "that which is called
`mathematical certainty' is the cane of a blind man without a dog,
or equilibrium in darkness." Browning would sometimes have us accept
the evidence of his `cane' as all-sufficient. He does not entrench himself
among conventions: for he already finds himself within the fortified lines
of convention, and remains there. Thus is true what Mr. Mortimer says
in a recent admirable critique -- "His position in regard
to the thought of the age is paradoxical, if not inconsistent.
He is in advance of it in every respect but one, the most important of all,
the matter of fundamental principles; in these he is behind it.
His processes of thought are often scientific in their precision of analysis;
the sudden conclusion which he imposes upon them is transcendental and inept."
Browning's conclusions, which harmonise so well with
our haphazard previsionings, are sometimes so disastrously facile
that they exercise an insurrectionary influence. They occasionally suggest
that wisdom of Gotham which is ever ready to postulate
the certainty of a fulfilment because of the existence of a desire.