Hardly another poet in the whole course of English literature has met with such violent and continuous partisanship as Robert Browning. When Wordsworth put forth his epoch-making little volume of Lyrical Ballads, he too met derision, but it lasted only twenty years. By the time he reached middle age his position as a master was assured, and his limitations were well understood. Over Browning disputation has continued longer. Throughout his life and during the quarter-century since his death he has had ardent assailants and just as ardent defenders. Persons of standing declare the man a barbarian, who broke into the fair fields of verse with poetry cacophonous in sound, obscure in expression, and shocking in subject. On the other hand, there are those who regard Browning as half divine. He is a prophet, they say, and has so disclosed to them the significance of their personal lives that they cannot hear any criticism of him without a shiver. Sometimes Browning is set up in laudatory antagonism to Tennyson, or Tennyson in antagonism to Browning; and certainly these poets do differ fundamentally. But are their differences disparaging or supplemental? I believe I shall find the safest approach to my heated subject if, without praise or blame, I coolly note some of the points of contrast between the two.

Neo-Realism, we shall all agree, has come to stay. Though the most recent of philosophical movements, it has already made an abiding impression on contemporary thought. Less noisy than Pragmatism, less fashionable than Bergson's Intuitionism, it has yet quietly won over to its side a far larger number of the younger students of philosophy than one would suspect from the comparatively small amount of Neo-Realistic literature. What is even more striking, its criticisms of Idealism have had at least this effect, that many thinkers who are commonly labelled “Idealists” have hastened to dissociate themselves once more in the most explicit terms from that sort of Idealism of which the watchword is Berkeley's esse est percipi. The so-called “Objective Idealists” have become noticeably more objective. To have compelled this re-alignment is in itself no small achievement to the credit of Neo-Realism.

During the last quarter-century more investigation than ever before has been going on into the unconscious activities of the human mind, or, as the investigators have preferred to call it, the sub-conscious mind. This has led in psychology to the study of apparitions and the various forms of telepathy, and in religion to a revival of Quietism. Religious bodies as far from Quakerism as the Episcopal Church are holding retreats for meditation, silent prayer, “the practice of the presence of God.” The exclusion of worldly thought is pointed to as the means for the opening of the soul to the incoming of the Divine; and some are following the Mystic Way through its steps of Purgation, Illumination, and Ecstasy to its goal of absorption into God in the Unitive Life.