Browning was never wild enough to think of. No one will ever forget the
first time he read Patmore's hint that the cosmos is a thing that God
made huge only "to make dirt cheap"; just as nobody will ever forget the
sudden shout he uttered when he first heard Mrs. Todgers asked for the
rough outline of a wooden leg. These things are not jokes, but
discoveries. But the very fact that Patmore was, as it were, the
Catholic Browning, keeps him out of the Victorian atmosphere as such.
The Victorian English simply thought him an indecent sentimentalist, as
they did all the hot and humble religious diarists of Italy or Spain.
Something of the same fate followed the most powerful of that last
Victorian group who were called "Minor Poets." They numbered many other
fine artists: notably Mr. William Watson, who is truly Victorian in that
he made a manly attempt to tread down the decadents and return to the
right reason of Wordsworth--

"I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness as a gift."

But none of them were able even to understand Francis Thompson; his
sky-scraping humility, his mountains of mystical detail, his occasional
and unashamed weakness, his sudden and sacred blasphemies. Perhaps the
shortest definition of the Victorian Age is that he stood outside it.




CHAPTER IV

THE BREAK-UP OF THE COMPROMISE