passionate men, but the quarrel dealt entirely with the unfortunate condition of Phelps.  Browning beat down his own hat over his eyes; Macready flung Browning’s manuscript with a slap upon the floor.  But all the time it never occurred to the poet that Macready’s conduct was dictated by anything so crude and simple as a desire for money.  Browning was in fact by his principles and his ideals a man of the world, but in his life far otherwise.  That worldly ease which is to most of us a temptation was to him an ideal.  He was as it were a citizen of the New Jerusalem who desired with perfect sanity and simplicity to be a citizen of Mayfair.  There was in him a quality which can only be most delicately described; for it was a virtue which bears a strange resemblance to one of the meanest of vices.  Those curious people who think the truth a thing that can be said violently and with ease, might naturally call Browning a snob.  He was fond of society, of fashion and even of wealth:  but there is no snobbery in admiring these things or any things if we admire them for the right reasons.  He admired them as worldlings cannot admire them:  he was, as it were, the child who comes in with the dessert.  He bore the same relation to the snob that the righteous man bears to the Pharisee:  something frightfully close and similar and yet an everlasting opposite.

CHAPTER III

BROWNING AND HIS MARRIAGE

Robert Browning had his faults, and the general direction of those faults has been previously suggested.  The chief of his faults, a certain uncontrollable brutality of speech and gesture when he was strongly roused, was destined to cling to him all through his life, and to startle with the blaze of a volcano even the last quiet years before his death.  But any one who wishes to understand how deep was the elemental honesty and reality of his character, how profoundly worthy he was of any love that was bestowed upon him, need only study one most striking and determining element in the question—­Browning’s simple, heartfelt, and unlimited admiration for other people.  He was one of a generation of great men, of great men who had a certain peculiar type, certain peculiar merits and defects.  Carlyle, Tennyson, Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, were alike in being children of a very strenuous and conscientious age, alike in possessing its earnestness and air of deciding great matters, alike also in showing a certain almost noble jealousy, a certain restlessness, a certain fear of other influences.  Browning alone had no fear; he welcomed, evidently without the least affectation, all the influences of his day.  A very interesting letter of his remains in which he describes his pleasure in a university dinner.  “Praise,” he says in effect, “was given very deservedly to Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and to that pride of Oxford men, Clough.”  The really striking thing about these three names is the fact that they are united in Browning’s praise in a way in which they are by no means united in each other’s.  Matthew Arnold, in one of his extant letters, calls Swinburne “a young pseudo-Shelley,” who, according to Arnold, thinks he can make Greek plays good by making them modern.  Mr. Swinburne, on the other hand, has summarised Clough in a contemptuous rhyme:—­