observation; and if it should ever lead him to play the part of a satirist, the satire must needs be rather that of love than of malice.  One who esteemed so highly the work of Balzac and of Flaubert might well be surmised to have something in his composition of what we now call the realist in art; and the work of the realist might serve to sustain and vindicate the idealist’s ventures of imaginative faith.  The picture of the lath-and-plaster entry of “Mount Zion” and of the pious sheep—­duly indignant at the interloper in their midst—­who one by one enter the fold, if not worthy of Cervantes or of Shakespeare, is hardly inferior to the descriptive passages of Dickens, and it is touched, in the manner of Dickens, with pity for these rags and tatters of humanity.  The night, the black barricade of cloud, the sudden apparition of the moon, the vast double rainbow, and He whose sweepy garment eddies onward, become at once more supernatural and more unquestionably real because sublimity springs out of grotesquerie.  Is the vision of the face of Christ an illusion?

    The whole face turned upon me full,
     And I spread myself beneath it,
     As when the bleacher spreads, to seethe it
    In the cleansing sun, his wool,—­
     Steeps in the flood of noontide whiteness
    Some defiled, discoloured web—­
     So lay I saturate, with brightness.

Is this a phantom or a dream?  Well, at least it is certain that the witness has seen with his mortal eyes the fat weary woman, and heard the mighty report of her umbrella, “wry and flapping, a wreck of whalebones.”  And the fat woman of Mount Zion Chapel, with Love Lane at the back of it, may help us to credit the awful vision of the Lord.

Thus the poem has the imaginative sensuousness which art demands; it is not an argument but a series of vivid experiences, though what is sensuous is here tasked in the service of what is spiritual, and a commentary is added.  The central idea of the whole is that where love is, there is Christ; and the Christ of this poem is certainly no abstraction, no moral ideal, no transcendental conception of absolute charity, but very God and very man, the Christ of Nazareth, who dwelt among men, full of grace and truth.  Literary criticism which would interpret Browning’s meaning in any other sense may be ingenious, but it is not disinterested, and some side-wind blows it far from the mark.

Love with defective knowledge, he maintains, is of more spiritual worth than knowledge with defective love.  Desiring to give salience to this idea, he deprives his little pious conventicle of every virtue except one—­“love,” and no other word is written on each forehead of the worshippers.  Browning, the artist and student of art, was not insensible to the spiritual power of beauty; and beauty is conspicuously absent from the praise and prayer that went up from Mount Zion chapel; its forms of worship are burlesque and uncouth.  Browning, the lover of knowledge, was not insensible to the value of intelligence in things of religion; and the congregation of Mount Zion sit on “divinely flustered” under