So marked is this failure, to my sense, that I cannot refuse the implication which comes along with it: that only theoretically, only as it were by deference to others, did the attribute, in that particular apprehension of it, move him to admiration. I do not, of course, mean anything so inconceivable as that he questioned the loveliness of the "pure in heart"; I mean merely that he questioned the artificial value which has been set upon physical chastity--and that when departure from this was the _circumstance_ through which he had to show the more essential purity, his instinctive scepticism drove him to the forcing of a note which was not really native to his voice. For always (to my sense) when he presents dramatically a girl or woman in the grip of this circumstance, he gives her words, and feelings to express through them, which only the French _mievre_ can justly describe. He does not, in short, reveal her as she is, but only as others see her--and, among those others, not himself. In Browning this might seem the stranger because he was so wholly untouched by cynicism; but here we light upon a curious paradox--the fact that the more "worldly" the writer, the better can he (as a general rule and other things being equal) display this type. It may be that such a writer can regard it analytically, can see what are the elements which make it up; it may be that the deeper reverence felt for it by the idealist is precisely that which draws him toward exaggeration--that his fancy, brooding with closed eyes upon the "thing enskied and sainted," thus becomes inclined to mawkishness . . . it _may_ be, I say, but at the bottom of my heart I do not feel that that is the explanation. One with which I am better satisfied emerges from a line of verse already quoted: "For each man kills the thing he loves"; and the man most apt for such "killing" is precisely he who appraises most shrewdly the thing he kills. As the cool practised libertine is oftenest attracted by the immature girl, so the ardent inexperienced man of any age will be drawn to the older woman; and the psychology of this matter of everyday experience is closely akin to the paradox in artistic creation of which I now speak. Browning, who saw woman so clearly as a creature with her definite and justified demand upon life, saw, by inevitable consequence, that for woman to "depart from innocence" (again, in the conventional sense of the words) is not her most significant error; and this conviction necessarily reacted upon his presentment of those in whom such purity is the most salient quality--a type of which, as I have said, the poet is bound to attempt the portrayal. Browning's instinctive questioning of the "man-made" value then betrays itself--he exaggerates, he loses grasp, for he is singing in a mode not native to his temperament. + + + + +