CHAPTER VII.

AFTERMATH.

      Which wins—­Earth’s poet or the Heavenly Muse?
      —­Aristophanes’ Apology.

The publication of The Ring and the Book marks in several ways a turning-point in Browning’s career.  Conceived and planned before the tragic close of his married life, and written during the first desolate years of bereavement, it is, more than any other of his greater poems, pervaded by his wife’s spirit, a crowning monument to his Lyric Love.  But it is also the last upon which her spirit left any notable trace.  With his usual extraordinary recuperative power, Browning re-moulded the mental universe which her love had seemed to complete, and her death momentarily to shatter, into a new, lesser completeness.  He lived in the world, and frankly “liked earth’s way,” enjoying the new gifts of friendship and of fame which the years brought in rich measure.  The little knot of critics whose praise even of Men and Women and Dramatis Personae; had been little more than a cry in the wilderness, found their voices lost in the chorus of admiration which welcomed the story of Pompilia.  Some stout recalcitrants, it is true, like Edward FitzGerald, held their ground.  And while the tone of even hostile criticism became respectful, enough of it remained to provide objects, seven years later, for the uproarious chaff of Pacchiarotto.

From 1869 to 1871 Browning published nothing, and he appears also to have written nothing beyond a sonnet commemorating Helen, the mother of Lord Dufferin (dated April 26, 1870), almost the only set of fourteen lines in his works of which not one proclaims his authorship.  But the decade which followed was more prolific than any other ten years of his life.  Between 1871 and 1878 nine volumes in swift succession allured, provoked, or bewildered the reading world.  Everything was now planned on a larger scale; the vast compass and boundless volubility of The Ring and the Book became normal.  He gave free rein to his delight in intricate involutions of plot and of argument; the dramatic monologue grew into novels in verse like Red-cotton Night-cap Country and The Inn Album; and the “special pleaders,” Hohenstiel and Juan, expounded their cases with a complexity of apparatus unapproached even by Sludge.  A certain relaxation of poetic nerve is on the whole everywhere apparent, notwithstanding the prodigal display of crude intellectual power.  His poetic alchemy is less potent, the ore of sordid fact remains sordid still.  Not that his high spirituality is insecure, his heroic idealism dimmed; but they coalesce less intimately with the alert wit and busy intelligence of the mere “clever man,” and seek their nutriment and material more readily in regions of legend and romance, where the transmuting work of imagination has been already done.  It is no accident that his lifelong delight in the ideal figures of Greek