R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

196 Frederick S. Boaspeace that it does not know. But Mr Arnold does all this from theintellectual side—sincerely and delicately, but from the surfaceand never from the centre... .The sign of this limitation, of thisexclusion of this externality of touch is the tinge of consciousintellectual majesty rearing its head above the storm with the'Quos ego' of Virgil's god, that never forsakes these poems ofMr Arnold's even when their 'lyrical cry' is most pathetic. It isthis which identifies him with the sceptics, which renders hispoems, pathetic as they often are, no adequate expression of thepassionate craving of the soul for faith. There is always a tinctureof pride in his confessed inability to believe—a self-congratulationthat he is too clear-eyed to yield to the temptations of the heart.And there follows in illustration Button's masterlyanalysis and discussion of the splendid stanzas in ObermannOnce More describing the victory of the infantChurch over the majestic materialism of Rome—avictory that in Arnold's eyes, but not in Hutton's, wasbased upon a dream.In the essay on 'Mr Browning', Hutton, as might beexpected, is predominantly interested in the poet's* various delineations of the worldly force of ecclesiasticaldignities struggling with, or flavouring, the Catholicfaith'. At a time when Browning's genius was imperfectlyappreciated, and before the propaganda work of theBrowning Societies, Hutton's interpretation of suchpoems as The Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister, The Bishoporders his Tomb, The Epistle, and the speeches of theecclesiastics in The Ring and the Book was valuable toreaders bewildered by the strangeness of the themes ortheir treatment. The critic was an expert guide into whatwas for many at the time an intellectual labyrinth. Buthe was less to be trusted in metrical matters, as when hedeclares that Browning's 'versification is almost alwaysbest when it is nearest to prose, where, as in the dramas,the metre is blank verse without rhyme'. It is surprisingthat a critic of Hutton's quality should lend countenanceto the 'vulgar error' that blank verse is more akin to