A History of English Literature

the full all its possibilities. Evil exists only to demonstrate the value
of Good and to develop character, which can be produced only by hard and
sincere struggle. Unlike Tennyson, therefore, Browning has full confidence
in present reality--he believes that life on earth is predominantly good.
Nevertheless earthly life is evidently incomplete in itself, and the
central law of existence is Progress, which gives assurance of a future
life where man may develop the spiritual nature which on earth seems to
have its beginning and distinguishes man from the brutes. This future life,
however, is probably not one but many, a long succession of lives, the
earlier ones not so very different, perhaps, from the present one on earth;
and even the worst souls, commencing the next life, perhaps, as a result of
their failure here, at a spiritual stage lower than the present one, must
ultimately pass through all stages of the spiritual process, and come to
stand with all the others near the perfection of God himself. This whole
theory, which, because later thought has largely adopted it from Browning,
seems much less original to-day than when he first propounded it, is stated
and reiterated in his poems with a dynamic idealizing power which, whether
or not one assents to it in details, renders it magnificently stimulating.
It is rather fully expressed as a whole, in two of Browning's best known
and finest poems, 'Rabbi ben Ezra,' and 'Abt Vogler.' Some critics, it
should be added, however, feel that Browning is too often and too
insistently a teacher in his poetry and that his art would have gained if
he had introduced his philosophy much more incidentally.
5. In his social theory Browning differs not only from Tennyson but from
the prevailing thought of his age, differs in that his emphasis is
individualistic. Like all the other Victorians he dwells on the importance
of individual devotion to the service of others, but he believes that the
chief results of such effort must be in the development of the individual's
character, not greatly in the actual betterment of the world. The world,
indeed, as it appears to him, is a place of probation and we cannot expect
ever to make it over very radically; the important thing is that the
individual soul shall use it to help him on his 'lone way' to heaven.
Browning, accordingly, takes almost no interest in the specific social and
political questions of his day, a fact which certainly will not operate
against the permanence of his fame. More detrimental, no doubt, aside from
the actual faults which we have mentioned, will be his rather extravagant
Romanticism--the vehemence of his passion and his insistence on the supreme
value of emotion. With these characteristics classically minded critics
have always been highly impatient, and they will no doubt prevent him from
ultimately taking a place beside Shakspere and the serene Milton; but they
will not seriously interfere, we may be certain, with his recognition as
one of the very great English poets.
ROSSETTI AND THE PRE-RAPHAELITE MOVEMENT. Many of the secondary Victorian
poets must here be passed by, but several of them are too important to be
dismissed without at least brief notice. The middle of the century is
marked by a new Romantic impulse, the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, which begins
with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Rossetti was born in London in 1828. His father
was an Italian, a liberal refugee from the outrageous government of Naples,
and his mother was also half Italian. The household, though poor, was a
center for other Italian exiles, but this early and tempestuous political
atmosphere created in the poet, by reaction, a lifelong aversion for
politics. His desultory education was mostly in the lines of painting and
the Italian and English poets. His own practice in poetry began as early as
is usual with poets, and before he was nineteen, by a special inspiration,
he wrote his best and most famous poem, 'The Blessed Damosel.' In the
school of the Royal Academy of Painting, in 1848, he met William Holman
Hunt and John E. Millais, and the three formed the Pre-Raphaelite