light; and they are skilled in a moral casuistry by which they justify
to themselves the darkening of the light that is in them. The passionate
natures have an intelligence of their own; they follow a gleam which is
visible to them if not to others; they discover, or rather they are
discovered by, some truth which flashes forth in one inspired
moment--the master-moment of a lifetime; they possess the sublime
certainty of love, loyalty, devotion; if they err through a heroic
folly and draw upon themselves ruin in things temporal, may there not be
some atom of divine wisdom at the heart of the folly, which is itself
indestructible, and which ensures for them a welfare out of time and
space? Prophet and casuist--Browning is both; and to each he will
endeavour to be just; but his heart must give a casting vote, and this
cannot be in favour of the casuist. Every self-transcending passion has
in it a divine promise and pledge; even the passion of the senses if it
has hidden within it one spark of self-annihilating love may be the
salvation of a soul. It is Ottima, lifted above her own superb
voluptuousness, who cries--"Not me--to him, O God, be merciful." The
region of untrammelled, unclouded passion, of spiritual intuition, and
of those great words from heaven, which pierce "even to the dividing
asunder of the joints and marrow," is, for Browning's imagination, the
East. The nations of the West--and, before all others, the Italian
race--are those of a subtly developed intelligence. The worldly art of a
Church-man, ingenuities of theology having aided in refining ingenuities
of worldliness, is perhaps the finest exemplar of unalloyed western
brain-craft. But Italy is also a land of passion; and therefore at once,
for its ardours of the heart--seen not in love alone but in carven
capital and on frescoed wall--and for its casuistries of intellect,
Browning looks to Italy for the material best fitted to his artistry.
Between that group of personages whom we may call his characters of
passion and that group made up of his characters of intelligence, lie