caring whether they withered the tree for a time--rather than to
describe and sing its outward beauty, its varied foliage, and its ruddy
fruit. And this liking to investigate the hidden inwardness of
motives--which many persons, weary of self-contemplation, wisely prefer
to keep hidden--ran through the practice of all the arts. They became,
on the whole, less emotional, more intellectual. The close marriage
between passion and thought, without whose cohabitation no work of
genius is born in the arts, was dissolved; and the intellect of the
artist often worked by itself, and his emotion by itself. Some of the
parthenogenetic children of these divorced powers were curious products,
freaks, even monsters of literature, in which the dry, cynical, or
vivisecting temper had full play, or the naked, lustful, or cruel
exposure of the emotions in ugly, unnatural, or morbid forms was
glorified. They made an impudent claim to the name of Art, but they were
nothing better than disagreeable Science. But this was an extreme
deviation of the tendency. The main line it took was not so detestable.
It was towards the ruthless analysis of life, and of the soul of man; a
part, in fact, of the general scientific movement. The outward forms of
things charmed writers less than the motives which led to their making.
The description of the tangled emotions and thoughts of the inner life,
before any action took place, was more pleasurable to the writer, and
easier, than any description of their final result in act. This was
borne to a wearisome extreme in fiction, and in these last days a
comfortable reaction from it has arisen. In poetry it did not last so
long. Morris carried us out of it. But long before it began, long before
its entrance into the arts, Browning, who on another side of his genius
delighted in the representation of action, anticipated in poetry, and
from the beginning of his career, twenty, even thirty years before it
became pronounced in literature, this tendency to the intellectual
analysis of human nature. When he began it, no one cared for it; and