FOOTNOTES: 

[10] There is one simple story at least which he tells quite admirably, The Pied Piper of Hamelin.  But then, that story, if it is not troubled by intellectual matter, is also not troubled by any deep emotion.  It is told by a poet who becomes a child for children.

* * * * *

CHAPTER X

THE PASSIONS OTHER THAN LOVE

The poems on which I have dwelt in the last chapter, though they are mainly concerned with love between the sexes, illustrate the other noble passions, all of which, such as joy, are forms of, or rather children of, self-forgetful love.  They do not illustrate the evil or ignoble passions—­envy, jealousy, hatred, base fear, despair, revenge, avarice and remorse—­which, driven by the emotion that so fiercely and swiftly accumulates around them, master the body and soul, the intellect and the will, like some furious tyrant, and in their extremes hurry their victim into madness.  Browning took some of these terrible powers and made them subjects in his poetry.  Short, sharp-outlined sketches of them occur in his dramas and longer poems.  There is no closer image in literature of long-suppressed fear breaking out into its agony of despair than in the lines which seal Guido’s pleading in the The Ring and the Book.

                Life is all! 
    I was just stark mad,—­let the madman live
    Pressed by as many chains as you please pile! 
    Don’t open!  Hold me from them!  I am yours,
    I am the Grand Duke’s—­no, I am the Pope’s! 
    Abate,—­Cardinal,—­Christ,—­Maria,—­God, ... 
    Pompilia, will you let them murder me?

But there is no elaborate, long-continued study of these sordid and evil things in Browning.  He was not one of our modern realists who love to paddle and splash in the sewers of humanity.  Not only was he too healthy in mind to dwell on them, but he justly held them as not fit subjects for art unless they were bound up with some form of pity, as jealousy and envy are in Shakespeare’s treatment of the story of Othello; or imaged along with so much of historic scenery that we lose in our interest in the decoration some of the hatefulness of the passion.  The combination, for example, of envy and hatred resolved on vengeance in The Laboratory is too intense for any pity to intrude, but Browning realises not only the evil passions in the woman but the historical period also and its temper; and he fills the poem with scenery which, though it leaves the woman first in our eyes, yet lessens the malignant element.  The same, but of course with the difference Browning’s variety creates, may be said of the story of the envious king, where envy crawls into hatred, hatred almost motiveless—­the Instans Tyrannus.  A faint vein of humour runs through it.  The king