work waits until a prolonged casuistry has accomplished its utmost; falsehood seems almost more needful in the process of the poet than truth.  And yet it is never actually so.  Rather to the poet, as a moral explorer, it appeared a kind of cowardice to seek truth only where it may easily be found; the strenuous hunter will track it through all winding ways of error; it is thrown out as a spot of intense illumination upon a background of darkness; it leaps forth as the flash of the search-light piercing through a mist.  The masculine characters in the poems are commonly made the exponents of Browning’s intellectual casuistry—­a Hohenstiel-Schwangau, an Aristophanes; and they are made to say the best and the most truthful words that can be uttered by such as they are and from such positions as theirs; the female characters, a Balaustion, the Lady of Sorrows in The Inn Album, and others are often revealers of sudden truth, which with them is either a divine revelation—­the vision seen from a higher and clearer standpoint—­or a dictate of pure human passion.  Eminent moments in life had an extraordinary interest for Browning—­moments when life, caught up out of the habitual ways and the lower levels of prudence, takes its guidance and inspiring motive from an immediate discovery of truth through some noble ardour of the heart.  Therefore it did not seem much to him to task his ingenuity through almost all the pages of a laborious book in creating a tangle and embroilment of evil and good, of truth and falsehood, in view of the fact that a shining moment is at last to spring forward and do its work of severing absolutely and finally right from wrong, and shame from a splendour of righteousness.  Browning’s readers longed at times, and not without cause, for the old directness and the old pervading presence of spiritual and impassioned truth.[102]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 93:  Letter to Miss Blagden, Feb. 24, 1870, given by Mrs Orr, p. 287.]

[Footnote 94:  Vivid descriptions of Le Croisic at an earlier date may be found in one of Balzac’s short stories.]

[Footnote 95:  Life of Jowett by Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell, i. 400, 401.]

[Footnote 96:  A repeated invitation in 1877 was also declined.  In 1875 Browning was nominated by the Independent Club to the office of Lord Rector of Glasgow University.]

[Footnote 97:  Such a book would naturally attract Browning, who, like his father, had an interest in celebrated criminal cases.  In his Memories (p. 338), Kegan Paul records his surprise at a dinner-party where the conversation turned on murder, to find Browning acquainted “to the minutest detail” with every cause celebre of that kind within living memory.]

[Footnote 98:  An Artist’s Reminiscences, by R. Lehmann (1894), p. 224.]

[Footnote 99:  Rossetti Papers, p. 302.]

[Footnote 100:  So the story was told by Dante Rossetti, as recorded by Mrs Gilchrist; she says that she believed the story was told of himself by Carlyle.]