Browning and His Century
by Helen A. Clarke · English · Gutenberg #38874 · 485,848 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Browning and His Century
Author: Helen A. Clarke
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BROWNING AND HIS CENTURY
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
BROWNING'S ITALY
BROWNING'S ENGLAND
A GUIDE TO MYTHOLOGY
ANCIENT MYTHS IN MODERN POETS
LONGFELLOW'S COUNTRY
HAWTHORNE'S COUNTRY
THE POETS' NEW ENGLAND
[Illustration: BROWNING AT 23 (LONDON 1835)]
Browning and His Century
BY HELEN ARCHIBALD CLARKE
Author of "_Browning's Italy_,"
"_Browning's England_," etc.
ILLUSTRATED FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
GARDEN CITY NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1912
_Copyright, 1912, by_
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO.
_All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian_
To
THE BOSTON BROWNING SOCIETY
IN COMMEMORATION OF THE
BROWNING CENTENARY--1812-1912
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
THE BATTLE OF MIND AND SPIRIT 3
CHAPTER II
THE CENTURY'S END: PROMISE OF PEACE 77
CHAPTER III
POLITICAL TENDENCIES 118
CHAPTER IV
SOCIAL IDEALS 174
CHAPTER V
ART SHIBBOLETHS 217
CHAPTER VI
CLASSIC SURVIVALS 277
CHAPTER VII
PROPHETIC VISIONS 342
ILLUSTRATIONS
Browning at 23 (London 1835) _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
Paracelsus 38
Herbert Spencer 94
David Strauss 112
Cardinal Wiseman 120
William Ewart Gladstone 160
William Morris 196
John Burns 208
Alfred Tennyson 250
A. C. Swinburne 260
Dante Gabriel Rossetti 266
George Meredith 272
Euripides 296
Aristophanes 306
Walter Savage Landor 330
Browning at 77 (1889) 360
BROWNING AND HIS CENTURY
PROLOGUE
TO ROBERT BROWNING
"Say not we know but rather that we love,
And so we know enough." Thus deeply spoke
The Sage; and in men's stunted hearts awoke
A haunting fear, for fain are they to prove
Their life, their God, with yeas and nays that move
The mind's uncertain flow. Then fierce outbroke,--
Knowledge, the child of pain shall we revoke?
The guide wherewith men climb to things above?
Nay, calm your fears! 'Tis but the mere mind's knowing,
The soul's alone the poet worthy deeming.
Let mind up-build its entities of seeming
With toil and tears! The toil is but for showing
How much there lacks of truth. But 'tis no dreaming
When sky throbs back to heart, with God's love beaming.
I
THE BATTLE OF MIND AND SPIRIT
During the nineteenth century, which has already receded far enough into
the perspective of the past for us to be able to take a comprehensive view
of it, the advance guard of the human race found itself in a position
entirely different from that ever before occupied by it. Through the
knowledge of cosmic, animal, and social evolution gradually accumulated by
the laborious and careful studies of special students in every department
of historical research and scientific experiment, a broader and higher
state of self-consciousness was attained. Mankind, on its most perceptive
plane, no longer pinned its faith to inherited traditions, whether of
religion, art, or morals. Every conceivable fact and every conceivable
myth was to be tested in the laboratory of the intellect, even the
intellect itself was to undergo dissection, with the result that, once for
all, it has been decided what particular range of human knowledge lies
within the reach of mental perception, and what particular range of human
knowledge can be grasped only through spiritual perception.
Such a momentous decision as this in the history of thought has not been
reached without a long and protracted struggle extending back into the
early days of Christianity, nor, it may be said, is the harmony as yet
complete, for there are to-day, and perhaps always will be, human beings
whose consciousness is not fully orbed and who either seek their point of
equilibrium too entirely in the plane of mind or too entirely in the plane
of spirit.
In the early days, before Christianity came to bring its "sword upon
earth," there seems to have been little or no consciousness of such a
struggle. The ancient Hindu, observing Nature and meditating upon the
universe, arrived intuitively at a perception of life and its processes
wonderfully akin to that later experimentally proved by the nineteenth
century scientist, nor did he have a suspicion that such truth was in any
way antagonistic to religious truth. On the contrary, he considered that,
by it, the beauty and mystery of religion was immeasurably enhanced, and,
letting his imagination play upon his intuition, he brought forth a theory
of spiritual evolution in which the world to-day is bound to recognize
many elements of beauty and power necessary to any complete conception of
religion in the future.
Even the Babylonians made their guesses at an evolutionary theory of the
universe. Greek philosophy, later, was permeated with the idea, it having
been derived by them perhaps from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians,
or if the theories of Aryan migrations be correct, perhaps through
inheritance from a remote Aryan ancestry.
When Christian thought gained its hold upon the world, the account of
creation given in Genesis became so thoroughly impressed upon the minds of
men that it was regarded as the orthodox view, rooted in divine
revelation, and to question it was to incur the danger of being called an
atheist, with its possibly uncomfortable consequences of being martyred.
Strangely enough, the early Church adopted into its fold many pagan
superstitions, such as a belief in witchcraft and in signs and wonders, as
well as some myths, but this great truth upon which the pagan mind had
stumbled, it would have none of.
These two circumstances--the adoption on the part of Christianity of pagan
superstitions and its utter repudiation of the pagan guesses upon
evolution, carrying within it the germs of truth, later to be unearthed by
scientific research--furnished exactly the right conditions for the
throwing down of the gauntlet between the mind and the spirit. The former,
following intellectual guidance, found itself coming more and more into
antagonism with the spirit, not yet freed from the trammels of
imagination. The latter, guided by imagination, continued to exercise a
mythopoeic faculty, which not only brought it more and more into
antagonism with the mind, but set up within its own realm an internecine
warfare which has blackened the pages of religious history with crimes and
martyrdoms so terrible as to force the conviction that the true devil in
antagonism to spiritual development has been the imagination of mankind,
masquerading as verity, and not yet having found its true function in art.
Regarded from the point of view of the student of intellectual
development, this conflict of two thousand years has the fascination of a
great drama of which the protagonist is the mind struggling to free the
spirit from its subjection to the evil aspects of the imagination. Great
thinkers in the field of science, philosophy, and religion are the
_dramatis personae_, and in the onward rush of this world-drama the
sufferings of those who have fallen by the way seem insignificant.
But when the student of history takes his more intimate survey of the
purely human aspects of the struggle, heartrending, indeed, become the
tragedies resulting from the exercise of human bigotry and stupidity.
Indignation and sorrow take possession of us when we think upon such a
spectacle as that of Roger Bacon, making ready to perform a few scientific
experiments before a small audience at Oxford, confronted by an uproar in
which monks, fellows, and students rushed about, their garments streaming
in the wind, crying out, "Down with the magician!" And this was only the
beginning of a persecution which ended in his teaching being solemnly
condemned by the authorities of the Franciscan order and himself thrown
for fourteen years into prison, whence he issued an old and broken man of
eighty.
More barbarous still was the treatment of Giordano Bruno, a strange sort
of man who developed his philosophy in about twenty-five works, some
prose, some poetry, some dialogues, some comedies, with such enticing
titles as "The Book of the Great Key," "The Explanation of the Thirty
Seals," "The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast," "The Threefold
Minimum," "The Composition of Images," "The Innumerable, the Immense and
the Unfigurable." His utterances were vague, especially to the intellects
of his time, yet not so vague that theology, whether Catholic or
Calvinistic, did not at once take fright.
He held that the investigation of nature in the unbiased light of reason
is our only guide to truth. He rejected antiquity, tradition, faith, and
authority; he exclaimed, "Let us begin by doubt. Let us doubt till we
know." Acting upon these principles, he began to unfold again that current
of Greek thought which the system imposed by the Church had intercepted
for more than a thousand years, and arrived at a conception of evolution
prefiguring the modern theories.
He conceived the law of the universe to be unceasing change. "Each
individual," he declared, "is the resultant of innumerable individuals;
each species is the starting point for the next." Furthermore, he
maintained that the perfecting of the individual soul is the aim of all
progress.
Tenets so opposite to the orthodox view of special creation and the fall
of man could not be allowed to go unchallenged. It is to be remembered
that he was a priest in holy orders in the Convent of St. Dominic, and in
the year 1576 he was accused by the Provincial of his order of heresy on
one hundred and thirty counts. He did not await his trial, but fled to
Rome, thence to northern Italy, and became for some years a wanderer. He
was imprisoned at Geneva; at Toulouse he spent a year lecturing on
Aristotle; in Paris, two years as professor extraordinary in the Sorbonne;
three years in London, where he became the friend of Sir Philip Sidney,
and influenced the philosophy of both Bacon and Shakespeare. Oxford,
however, was unfriendly to his teachings and he was obliged to flee from
England also. Then he wandered for five years from city to city in
Germany--at one time warned to leave the town, at another excommunicated,
at another not even permitted to lodge within the gates. Finally, he
accepted the invitation of a noble Venetian, Zuane Mocenigo, to visit
Venice and teach him the higher and secret learning. The two men soon
quarreled, and Bruno was betrayed by the count into the hands of the
Inquisition. He was convicted of heresy in Venice and delivered to the
Inquisition in Rome. He spent seven years in its dungeons, and was again
tried and convicted, and called upon to recant, which he stoutly refused
to do. Sentence of death was then passed upon him and he was burned at the
stake on February 17, 1600, on the Campo de' Fiori, where there now stands
a statue erected by Progressive Italy in his honor.
His last words were, "I die a martyr, and willingly." Then they cast his
ashes into the Tiber and placed his name among the accused on the rolls of
the Church. And there it probably still remains, for no longer ago than
1889, when his statue was unveiled on the ninth of June, on the site of
his burning, in full view of the Vatican, Pope Leo XIII, it is said,
refused food and spent hours in an agony of prayer at the foot of the
statue of St. Peter. Catholic, and even Protestant, denunciation of Bruno
at this time showed that the smoke from this particular battle in the war
of mind with spirit was still far from being laid.
With the fate of Giordano Bruno still fresh in his mind, Galileo succumbed
to the demands of the Inquisition and recanted, saying that he no longer
believed what he, himself, with his telescope had proved to be true.
"I, Galileo, being in my seventieth year, being a prisoner and on my
knees, and before your Eminences, having before my eyes the Holy
Gospel, which I touch with my hands, abjure, curse, and detest the
error and the heresy of the movement of the earth."
If this recantation had brought any comfort or peace into his life it
might have been hard to forgive Galileo's perjury of himself. His
persecution, however, continued to the end. He was exiled from his family
and friends, and, even when he had become blind and wasted by sorrow and
disease, he was still closely watched lest he might utter the awful heresy
that the earth moved.
A hundred years later than this, when Buffon attempted to teach the simple
truths of geology, he was deposed from his high position and made to
recant by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. The man who promulgated
geological principles, as firmly established to-day as that of the
rotation of the earth upon its axis, was forced to write: "I declare that
I had no intention to contradict the text of Scripture; that I believe
most firmly all therein related about the creation, both as to order of
time and matter of fact. I abandon everything in my book respecting the
formation of the earth, and generally all which may be contrary to the
narrative of Moses."
Such are the more heinous examples of the persecution of the men who
discovered the truths of science. To these should be added the wholesale
persecution of witches and magicians, for unusual knowledge of any sort
ran the chance of being regarded as contrary to biblical teaching and of
being attributed to the machinations of the Prince of Darkness.
Every new step made in the direction of scientific truth has had thus to
face the most determined opposition. Persecution by torture and death died
out, but up to the nineteenth century, and well on through it,
denunciation, excommunication, suppression, the loss of honorable
positions have all been used as weapons by church or university in the
attempt to stamp out whatever it considered dangerous and subverting
doctrines of science.
The decisive battle was not to be inaugurated until the latter half of the
nineteenth century, with the advent in the field of such names in science
as Spencer, Darwin, Tyndall and Huxley, and such names in biblical
criticism as Strauss and Renan.
The outposts, it is true, had been won by advancing scientific thought,
for step by step the Church had compromised, and had admitted one
scientific doctrine after another as not incompatible with biblical truth.
But now, not only theology, the imperfect armor in which the spirit had
been clothed, was attacked, but the very existence of spirit itself was to
be questioned. The thinking world was to be divided into materialists and
supernaturalists. Now, at last, mind and spirit, who in the ages long gone
had been brothers, were to stand face to face as enemies. Was this mortal
combat to end in the annihilation of either, or would this, too, end in a
compromise leading to harmony?
At the dawn of this century, in 1812, came into the world its master
poetic mind. I say this to-day without hesitation, for no other English
poet of the century has been so thoroughly aware of the intellectual
tendencies of his century, and has so emotionalized them and brought them
before us under the humanly real conditions of dramatic utterance.
It is not surprising, considering this fact, that in his second poem,
written in 1835, Browning ventures into the arena and at once tackles the
supreme problem of the age, what is to be the relation of mind and spirit?
It is characteristic of the poetic methods, which dominated his work, that
he should have presented this problem through the personality of a
historical figure who played no inconsiderable part in the intellectual
development of his time, though not a man to whom general historians have
been in the habit of assigning much space in their pages. Browning,
however, as Hall Griffin informs us, had been familiar with the name of
Paracelsus from his childhood, of whom he had read anecdotes in a queer
book, Wanley's "Wonders of the Little World." Besides, his father's
library, wherein as a boy he was wont to browse constantly, contained the
_Opera Omnia_ of Paracelsus.
With the confidence of youth and of genius the poet attempts in this poem
a solution of the problem. To mind he gives the attribute of knowledge, to
spirit the attribute of love.
The poem as a whole does not concern us here except as a background for
its final thoughts. In order, however, to put the situation clearly before
readers not already familiar with it, I venture to transcribe a portion of
a former analysis of my own.
Paracelsus aspires to the acquisition of absolute knowledge and feels born
within him the capabilities for attaining this end, and, when attained, it
is to be devoted to enlarging the possibilities of man's life. The whole
race is to be elevated at once. Man may not be doomed to cope with
seraphs, yet by the exercise of human strength alone he hopes man may one
day beat God's angels.
He is a revolter, however, against the magical and alchemistic methods of
his age, which seek for the welfare of men through the elixir of youth or
the philosopher's stone. He especially disclaims such puerile schemes in
the passionate moment when he has realized how futile all his lifelong
efforts have been. He stands, indeed, at the threshold of a new world. He
has a glimmering of the true scientific methods which would discover first
the secrets of life's laws, and then use these natural laws to bring about
life's betterment, instead of hoping for salvation through the discovery
of some magic secret by means of which life's laws might be overcome. Yet
he is sufficiently of his own superstitious age to desire and expect
fairly magical results from the laws he hopes to discover. The creed which
spurs him to his quest is his belief that truth is inborn in the soul, but
to set this truth free and make it of use to mankind correspondences in
outer nature must be found. An intuitive mind like Paracelsus's will
recognize these natural corollaries of the intuition wherever it finds
them; and these are what Paracelsus goes forth over the earth to seek
and find, sure he will "arrive." One illustration of the results so
obtained is seen in the doctrine of the signatures of plants according to
which the flowers, leaves, and fruits of plants indicate by their color or
markings, etc., the particular diseases they are intended to cure. The
real Paracelsus practised medicine upon this theory.
Though such methods are a long distance from those of the modern
scientist, who deduces his laws from careful and patient observation of
nature, they go a step toward his in seeking laws in nature to correspond
to hypotheses born of intuition.
Browning's presentation of the attitude of mind and the place held by
Paracelsus in the development of science is exactly in line with the most
recent criticisms of this extraordinary man's life. According to these he
fluctuated between the systems of magic then prevalent and scientific
observation, but always finally threw in the balance of his opinion on the
side of scientific ways of working; and above all made the great step from
a belief in the influence of nature upon man to that of the existence of
parallelisms between nature processes and human processes.
Though he thus opened up new vistas for the benefit of man, he must
necessarily be a failure, from his own point of view, with his "India" not
found, his absolute truth unattained; and it is upon this side that the
poet dwells. For a moment he is somewhat reassured by the apparition of
Aprile, scarcely a creature of flesh and blood, more the spirit of art who
aspires to love infinitely and has found the attainment of such love as
impossible as Paracelsus has found the attainment of knowledge. Both have
desired to help men, but Paracelsus has desired to help them rather
through the perfecting, even immortalizing, of their physical being;
Aprile, through giving man, as he is, infinite sympathy and through
creating forms of beauty which would show him his own thoughts and hopes
glorified by the all-seeing touch of the artist.
Paracelsus recognizes his deficient sympathy for mankind, and tries to
make up for it in his own way by giving out of the fulness of his
knowledge to men. The scornful and proud reformer has not, however, truly
learned the lesson of love, and verily has his reward when he is turned
against by those whom he would teach. Then the old ideal seizes upon him
again, and still under the influence of Aprile he seeks in human
experience the loves and passions of mankind which he learns through
Aprile he had neglected for the ever-illusive secret, but neither does
success attend him here, and only on his deathbed does his vision clear
up, and he is made to indulge in a prophetic utterance quite beyond the
reach of the original Paracelsus.
In this passage is to be found Browning's first contribution to a solution
of the great problem. That it is instinct with the idea of evolution has
become a commonplace of Browning criticism, a fact which was at least
independently or, as far as I know, first pointed out by myself in an
early essay upon Browning. At the time, I was reading both Browning and
Spencer, and could not but be impressed by the parallelisms in thought
between the two, especially those in this seer-like passage and "The Data
of Ethics."
Writers whose appreciation of a poet is in direct ratio to the number of
exact historical facts to be found in a poem like to emphasize this fact
that the doctrine of evolution can be found in the works of Paracelsus.
Why not? Since, as we have seen it had been floating about in
philosophical thought in one form or another for some thousands of years.
Indeed, it has been stated upon good authority that the idea of a gradual
evolution according to law and of a God from whom all being emanates,
from whom all power proceeds, is an inherent necessity of the Aryan mind
as opposed to the Semitic idea of an outdwelling God and of
supernaturalism. Thus, all down the ages the Aryan mind has revolted from
time to time against the religious ideas superimposed upon it by the
Semitic mind. This accounts for the numerous heresies within the bosom of
the Church as well as for the scientific advance against the superstitions
of the Church.
Generalizations of this sweeping order are apt to contain only partial
truth. It would probably be nearer the whole truth, as we are enabled
to-day to trace historical development, to say that, starting with
opposite conceptions, these two orders of mind have worked toward each
other and the harmonization of their respective points of view, and,
furthermore, that this difference in mind belongs to a period prior even
to the emergence of the Aryan or the Semitic. Researches in mythology and
folklore seem to indicate that no matter how far back one may go in the
records of human thought there will be found these two orders of mind--one
which naturally thinks of the universe as the outcome of law, and one
which naturally thinks of it as the outcome of creation. There are
primitive myths in which mankind is supposed to be descended from a
primitive ancestor, which may range all the way from a serpent to an oak
tree, or, as in a certain Zulu myth, a bed of reeds growing on the back of
a small animal. And there are equally primitive myths in which mankind is
created out of the trees or the earth by an external agent, varying in
importance from a grasshopper to a more or less spiritual being.
Browning did not need to depend upon Paracelsus for his knowledge of
evolution. He may not have known that the ancient Hindu in the dim mists
of the past had an intuition of the cosmic egg from which all life had
evolved, and that he did not know of the theory as it is developed in the
great German philosophers we are certain, because he, himself, asseverated
that he had never read the German philosophers, but it is hardly possible
that he did not know something of it as it appears in the writings of the
Greek philosophers, for Greek literature was among the earliest of his
studies. He might, for instance, have taken a hint from the speculations
of that half mythical marvel of a man, Empedocles, with which the
Paracelsus theory of the universe, as it appears in the passage under
discussion, has many points of contact.
According to Empedocles, the four primal elements, earth, air, fire and
water, are worked upon by the forces of love and discord. By means of
these forces, out of the primal elements are evolved various and horrible
monstrosities before the final form of perfection is reached. It is true
he did not correctly imagine the stages in the processes of evolution, for
instead of a gradual development of one form from another, he describes
the process as a haphazard and chaotic one. "Many heads sprouted up
without necks, and naked arms went wandering forlorn of shoulders, and
solitary eyes were straying destitute of foreheads." These detached
portions of bodies coming together by haphazard produced the earlier
monstrous forms. "Many came forth with double faces and two breasts, some
shaped like oxen with a human front, others, again, of human race with a
bull's head." However, the latter part of the evolutionary process as
described by Empedocles, when Love takes command, seems especially
pertinent as a possible source of Browning's thought:
"When strife has reached the very bottom of the seething mass, and
love assumes her station in the center of the ball, then everything
begins to come together, and to form one whole--not instantaneously,
but different substances come forth, according to a steady process of
development. Now, when these elements are mingling, countless kinds of
things issue from their union. Much, however, remains unmixed, in
opposition to the mingling elements, and these, malignant strife still
holds within his grasp. For he has not yet withdrawn himself
altogether to the extremities of the globe; but part of his limbs
still remain within its bounds, and part have passed beyond. As
strife, however, step by step retreats, mild and innocent love pursues
him with her force divine; things which had been immortal instantly
assume mortality; the simple elements become confused by interchange
of influences. When these are mingled, then the countless kinds of
mortal beings issue forth, furnished with every sort of form--a sight
of wonder."
Though evolution was no new idea, it had been only a hypothesis arrived at
intuitionally or suggested by crude observations of nature until by
perfected methods of historical study and of scientific experimentation
proof was furnished of its truth as a scientific verity.
Let us glance at the situation at the time when Paracelsus was published.
In 1835 science had made great strides in the direction of proving the
correctness of the hypothesis. Laplace had lived and died and had given to
the world in mathematical reasoning of remarkable power proof of the
nebular hypothesis, which was later to be verified by Fraunhofer's
discoveries in spectrum analysis. Lamarck had lived and died and had
given to the world his theory of animal evolution. Lyall in England had
shown that geological formations were evolutionary rather than
cataclysmal. In fact, greater and lesser scientific lights in England and
on the continent were every day adding fresh facts to the burden of proof
in favor of the hypothesis. It was in the air, and denunciations of it
were in the air.
Most interesting of all, however, in connection with our present theme is
the fact that Herbert Spencer was still a lad of fifteen, who was
independently of Darwin to work out a complete philosophy of evolution,
which was to be applied in every department of cosmic, geologic, plant,
animal and human activity, but (and this is of special interest) he was
not to give to the world his plan for a synthetic philosophy until 1860,
and not to publish his "First Principles" until 1862, nor the first
instalment of the "Data of Ethics," the fruit of his whole system, until
1879.
Besides being familiar with the idea as it crops out in Greek thought, it
is impossible that the young Browning was not cognizant of the scientific
attitude of the time. In fact, he tells us as much himself, for when
Doctor Wonivall asked him some questions as to his attitude toward Darwin,
Browning responded in a letter: "In reality all that seems proved in
Darwin's scheme was a conception familiar to me from the beginning."
Entirely familiar with the evolutionary idea, then, however he may have
derived it, it is just what might be expected that he should have worked
it into Paracelsus's final theory of life. The remarkable thing is that he
should have applied its principles in so masterly a fashion--namely, that
he should have made a complete philosophical synthesis by bringing the
idea of evolution to bear upon all natural, human and spiritual processes
of growth twenty-five years before Herbert Spencer, who is regarded on
this particular ground as the master mind of the century, gave his
synthetic philosophy of evolution to the world.
A momentary glance at the passage in question will make this clear.
Paracelsus traces first development as illustrated in geological forms:
"The center-fire heaves underneath the earth,
And the earth changes like a human face;
The molten one bursts up among the rocks,
Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright
In hidden mines, spots barren river beds,
Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask."
Next he touches upon plant life and animal life. The grass grows bright,
the boughs are swollen with blooms, ants make their ado, birds fly in
merry flocks, the strand is purple with its tribe of nested limpets,
savage creatures seek their loves in wood and plain. Then he shows how in
all this animal life are scattered attributes foreshadowing a being that
will combine them. Then appears primitive man, only half enlightened, who
gains knowledge through the slow, uncertain fruit of toil, whose love is
not serenely pure, but strong from weakness, a love which endures and
doubts and is oppressed. And out of the travail of the human soul as it
proceeds from lower to higher forms is finally evolved self-conscious
man--man who consciously looks back upon all that has preceded him and
interprets nature by means of his own human perceptions. The winds are
henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, a querulous mutter or a quick, gay
laugh, never a senseless gust, now man is born.
But development does not end with the attainment of this
self-consciousness. After this stage has been reached there continues an
evolution which is distinctively spiritual, a tendency to God. Browning
was not content with the evolution of man, he was prophetic of the final
flowering of man in the superman, although he had never heard of
Nietszche.
The corollary to this progressive theory of life, a view held by
scientific thinkers, is that sin is not depravity, but is merely a lack of
development. Paracelsus is therefore made wise to know even hate is but a
mask of love, to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to sympathize,
even be proud of man's half-reasons, faint aspirings, dim struggles for
truth--all with a touch of nobleness despite their error, upward tending
all, though weak.
Though there are points of contact between the thought of the true
Paracelsus and of Browning, the points of contact between Spencer and
Browning are far more significant, for Browning seems intuitively to have
perceived the fundamental truths of social and psychic evolution at the
early age of twenty-three--truths which the philosopher worked out only
after years of laborious study.
We, who, to-day, are familiar with the application of the theory of
evolution to every object from a dustpan to a flying machine, can hardly
throw ourselves into the atmosphere of the first half of the last century
when this dynamic ideal was flung into a world with static ideals. The
Christian world knew little and cared less about the guesses of Greek
philosophers, whom they regarded when they did know about them as
unregenerate pagans. German thought was caviare to the general, and what
new thought of a historical or scientific nature made its way into the
strongholds of conservatism filled people with suspicion and dread. Such a
sweeping synthesis, therefore, as Browning gives of dawning scientific
theories in Paracelsus was truly phenomenal. That it did not prove a bone
of contention and arouse controversies as hot as those which were waged
later around such scientific leaders as Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and
Clifford was probably due to the circumstance that the poem was little
read and less understood, and also to the fact that it contained other
elements which overlaid the bare presentation of the doctrines of
evolution.
So far I have spoken only of the form of the Paracelsus theory of life,
but a theory of life to be complete must have soul as well as form. Only
in adding the soul side to his theory of life does Browning really give
his solution of the problem, what is to be the relation of mind and
spirit?
One other point of resemblance is to be noted between the thought of
Browning's Paracelsus and Herbert Spencer. They agree that ultimate
knowledge is beyond the grasp of the intellect. Neither was this a new
idea; but up to the time of Spencer it was taken simply as a negative
conclusion. Spencer, however, having found this negation makes it the body
of his philosophy--a body so shadowy that many of his critics consider it
too ghostly to stand as a substantial basis for philosophical thought. He
regards the failure of the intellect to picture the nature of the absolute
as the most certain proof that our intuitions of its existence are
trustworthy, and upon this he bases all religious aspiration. Like the
psalmist, he exclaims, "Who by searching can find out God?"
The attitude of Paracelsus is identical as far as the intellect is
concerned. His life, spent in the search for knowledge, had proved it to
him. But he does not, like Spencer, make it the body of his philosophy.
Through the influence of Aprile he is led to a definite conception of the
Infinite as a Being whose especial characteristic is that he feels!--feels
unbounded joy in his own creations. This is eminently an artist's or
poet's perception of the relation of God to his universe. As Aprile in one
place says, "God is the perfect poet, who in his person acts his own
creations."
As I have already pointed out, the evil of pain, of decay, of degeneration
is taken no account of.
There is the constant passing onward from joy to joy. All the processes of
nature from the simplest to the most complex bring, in their turn, a
delight to their Creator until man appears, and is not only a joy to his
Creator, but is the first in the order of creation to share in the joy of
existence, the first to arrive at the full consciousness of beauty. So
overwhelming is this consciousness of beauty that man perceives it
struggling for expression in the hates and fallacies of undeveloped
natures.
All this is characteristic of the artistic way of looking at life. The
artist is prone either to ignore the ugly or to transmute it by art into
something possessing beauty of power if not of loveliness. What are plays
like "Hamlet" and "Macbeth," "Brand" and "Peer Gynt," music like "Tristan
and Isolde" or the "Pathetic Symphony," Rodin's statues, but actual,
palpable realizations of the fact that hate is but a mask of love, or that
human fallacies and human passions have within them the seeds of immense
beauty if only there appear the artist who can bring them forth. If this
is true of the human artist, how much more is it true of the divine
artist in whose shadow, as Pompilia says, even a Guido may find healing.
The optimism of such a theory of existence is intoxicating. Not only does
this artist-man look backward and rejoice in all the beauty of past phases
of creation, but he looks forward to endless progression in the enjoyment
of fresh phases of beauty--"a flying point of bliss remote." This is a
universe in which the Prometheus of the old myths is indeed unbound.
Mankind is literally free to progress forever upward. If there are some
men in darkness, they are like plants in mines struggling to break out
into the sunlight they see beyond.
The interesting question arises here, was Browning, himself, entirely
responsible for the soul of his Paracelsus theory of life or was there
some source beyond him from which he drew inspiration?
It has frequently been suggested that Aprile in this poem is a sort of
symbolic representation of Shelley. Why not rather a composite of both
Shelley and Keats, the poet of love and the poet of beauty? An examination
of the greatest poems of these two writers, "Prometheus Unbound" and
"Hyperion," will bring out the elements in both which I believe entered
into Browning's conception.
In the exalted symbolism of the "Prometheus Unbound" Shelley shows that,
in his view, evil and suffering were not inherent in the nature of things,
the tyranny of evil having gained its ascendancy through the persistence
of out-worn ideals, such as that of Power or Force symbolized in the Greek
idea of Jupiter. Prometheus is the revolting mind of mankind, enslaved by
the tyranny of Jupiter, hating the tyrant, yet determined to endure all
the tyrant can inflict upon him rather than admit his right to rule. The
freeing of Prometheus and the dethronement of Jupiter come through the
awakening in the heart of Prometheus of pity for the tyrant--that is,
Prometheus has learned to love his enemies as he loves his friends. The
remainder of the poem is occupied with showing the effects upon humanity
of this universal awakening of love.
In the fine passage where the Spirit of the Earth hears the trumpet of the
Spirit of the Hour sound in a great city, it beholds all ugly human shapes
and visages which had caused it pain pass floating through the air, and
fading still
"Into the winds that scattered them, and those
From whom they passed seemed mild and lovely forms
After some foul disguise had fallen, and all
Were somewhat changed, and after brief surprise
And greetings of delighted wonder, all
Went to their sleep again."
And the Spirit of the Hour relates:
"Soon as the sound had ceased whose thunder filled
The abysses of the sky and the wide earth,
There was a change: the impalpable thin air
And the all-circling sunlight were transformed
As if the sense of love dissolved in them
Had folded itself around the sphered world."
In the meantime, the over-souls of humanity--Prometheus, symbolic of
thought or knowledge, is reunited to Asia, his spouse, symbolic of Nature
or emotion, from whom he has long been separated and together with Asia's
sisters, Panthea and Ione--retire to the wonderful cave where they are
henceforth to dwell and where their occupations are inspired by the most
childlike and exalted moods of the soul.
Before considering the bearing of their life of love and art in the cave
upon the character of Aprile let us turn our attention for a moment to a
remarkable passage in "Hyperion," which poem was written as far back as
1820. Keats, like Shelley, deals with the dethronement of gods, but it
is the older dynasty of Titans--Saturn and Hyperion usurped by Jupiter and
Apollo. Shelley's thought in the "Prometheus" is strongly influenced by
Christian ideals, but Keats's is thoroughly Greek.
The passing of one series of gods and the coming into power of another
series of gods was a familiar idea in Greek mythology. It reflected at
once the literal fact that ever higher and higher forces of nature had
been deified by them, beginning with crude Nature gods and ending with
symbols of the most ideal human attributes, and at the same time that
their thought leaned in the direction of interpreting nature as an
evolutionary process. Seizing upon this, Keats has presented in the words
of the old Titan Oceanus a theory of the evolution of beauty quite as
startling as a prophecy of psychological theories upon this subject as
Browning's is of cosmic and social theories. Addressing Saturn, Oceanus
says:
"We fall by course of Nature's law, not force
Of thunder, or of love....
... As thou wast not the first of powers
So art thou not the last; it cannot be:
From chaos and parental darkness came
Light, the first fruits of that intestine broil,
That sullen ferment, which for wondrous ends
Was ripening in itself. The ripe hour came
And with it light, and light, engendering
Upon its own producer, forthwith touched,
The whole enormous matter into life.
Upon that very hour, our parentage
The Heavens and the Earth were manifest;
Then thou first-born, and we the giant-race,
Found ourselves ruling new and beauteous realms
* * * * *
As Heaven and Earth are fairer far
Than chaos and blank darkness, though once chiefs,
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship
And thousand other signs of purer life,
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquered than by us the rule
Of shapeless chaos. For 'tis the eternal law
That first in beauty should be first in might.
Yea, by that law, another race may drive
Our conquerors to mourn as we do now."
There is in the attitude of Oceanus a magnificent acceptance of this
ruthless course of nature reminding one of that taken by such men as
Huxley and Clifford in the face of their own scientific discoveries, but
one is immediately struck by the absence of love in the idea. An Apollo,
no matter what new beauty he may have, himself, to offer, who yet
disregards the beauty of Hyperion and calmly accepts the throne of the sun
in his stead, does not satisfy us. What unreason it is that so splendid a
being as Hyperion should be deposed! As a matter of fact, he was not
deposed. He is left standing forever in our memories in splendor like the
morn, for Keats did not finish the poem and no picture of the enthroned
Apollo is given. Perhaps Keats remembered his earlier utterance, "A thing
of beauty is a joy forever," and cared for his own Hyperion too much to
banish him for the sake of Apollo.
Be that as it may, the points in relation to our subject are that
Shelley's emphasis is upon the conservation of beauty, while Keats's
emphasis is upon the evolution of new beauty.
In the cave where Prometheus and Asia dwell--the cave of universal
spirit--is given forth the inspiration to humanity for painting, poetry
and arts, yet to be born, and all these arts return to delight them,
fashioned into form by human artists. Love is the ruling principle.
Therefore all forms of beautiful art are immortal. Aprile,[1] as he
first appears, is an elaboration upon this idea. He would love all
humanity with such intensity that he would immortalize in all forms of
art--painting, poetry, music--every thought and emotion of which the human
soul is capable, and this done he would say:
"His spirits created--
God grants to each a sphere to be its world,
Appointed with the various objects needed
To satisfy its own peculiar want;
So, I create a world for these my shapes
Fit to sustain their beauty and their strength."
In short, he would found a universal art museum exactly like the cave in
which Prometheus dwelt. The stress is no more than it is in Shelley upon a
search for new beauty, and there is not a hint that a coming beauty shall
blot out the old until Aprile recognizes Paracelsus as his king. Then he
awakes to the fact that his own ideal has been partial, because he has
not been a seeker after knowledge, or new beauty, and in much the same
spirit as Oceanus, he exclaims:
"Lo, I forget my ruin, and rejoice
In thy success, as thou! Let our God's praise
Go bravely through the world at last! What care
Through me or thee?"
But Paracelsus had learned a lesson through Aprile which the Apollo of
Keats had not learned. He does not accept kingship at the expense of
Aprile as Apollo would do at the expense of Hyperion. He includes in his
final theory of life all that is beautiful in Aprile's or Shelley's ideal
and adds to it all that is beautiful of the Keats ideal. The form of his
philosophy is evolutionary, and up to the time of his meeting with Aprile
had expressed itself as the search for knowledge. Through Aprile his
philosophy becomes imbued with soul, the attributes of which are the
spirit of love and the spirit of beauty, one of which conserves and
immortalizes beauty, the other of which searches out new beauty.
So, working hand in hand, they become one, while the search for knowledge,
thus spiritualized, becomes the search for beauty always inspired by love.
The aim of the evolutionary process thus becomes the unfolding of ever
new phases of beauty in which God takes endless delight, and to the final
enjoyment of which mankind shall attain.
To sum up, Browning's solution of the problem in the Paracelsus theory of
life is reached not only through a synthesis of the doctrines of evolution
as applied to universal activities, cosmic and human, prophetic, on the
one hand, of the most advanced scientific thought of the century, but it
is a synthesis of these and of the art-spirit in its twofold aspect of
love and beauty as already expressed in the poetry of Shelley and Keats.
It is not in the least probable that Browning set to work consciously to
piece together these ideals. That is not the method of the artist! But
being familiar to him in the two best beloved poets of his youth, they had
sunk into his very being, and welled forth from his own subconsciousness,
charged with personal emotion, partly dramatic, partly the expression of
his own true feeling at the time, and the result be it said is one of the
most inspiring and beautiful passages in English poetry.
[Illustration: PARACELSUS]
At the end of his life and the end of the century Herbert Spencer, who had
spent years of labor to prove the fallacies in all religious dogmas, and
who had insisted upon religion's being entirely relegated to
intellectually unknowable regions of thought, spoke in his autobiography
of the mysteries inherent in life, in the evolution of human beings, in
consciousness, in human destiny--mysteries that the very advance of
science makes more and more evident, exhibits as more and more profound
and impenetrable, adding:
"Thus religious creeds, which in one way or other occupy the sphere
that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the
more, the more it seeks, I have come to regard with a sympathy based
on community of need: feeling that dissent from them results from
inability to accept the solutions offered, joined with the wish that
solutions could be found."
Loyal to the last to his determination to accept as knowledge only what
the intellect could prove, he never permitted himself to come under the
awakening influence of an Aprile, yet like Browning's ancient Greek,
Cleon, he longed for a solution of the mystery.
At the dawn of the century, and in his youth, Browning ventured upon a
solution. In the remainder of this and the next chapter I shall attempt to
show what elements in this solution the poet retained to the end of his
life, how his thought became modified, and what relation his final
solution bears to the final thought of the century.
In this first attempt at a synthesis of life in which the attributes
peculiar to the mind and to the spirit are brought into harmonious
relationship, Browning is more the intuitionalist than the scientist. His
convictions well forth with all the force of an inborn revelation, just as
kindred though much less rational views of nature's processes sprang up in
the mind of the ancient Hindu or the ancient Greek.
The philosophy of life herein flashed out by the poet was later to be
elaborated fully on its objective or observational side by Spencer--the
philosopher par excellence of evolution--and finally, also, of course, on
the objective side, to become an assured fact of science through the
publication in 1859 of Darwin's epoch-making book, "The Origin of
Species," wherein the laws, so disturbing to many at the time, of natural
selection and the survival of the fittest were fully set forth.
While the genetic view of nature, as the phraseology of to-day goes, had
been anticipated in writers on cosmology like Leibnitz and Laplace, in
geology by such men as Hutton and Lyall, and had entered into the domain
of embryology through the researches of Von Baer, and while Spencer had
already formulated a philosophy of evolution, Darwin went out into the
open and studied the actual facts in the domain of living beings. His
studies made evolution a certainty. They revealed the means by which its
processes were accomplished, and in so doing pointed to an origin of man
entirely opposed to orthodox views upon this subject. Thus was inaugurated
the last great phase in the struggle between mind and spirit.
Henceforth, science stood completely revealed as the unflinching searcher
of truth. Intuition was but a handmaid whose duty was to formulate working
hypotheses, to become scientific law if provable by investigation or
experiment, to be discarded if not.
The aspects which this battle has assumed in the latter half of the
century have been many and various. Older sciences with a new lease of
life and sciences entirely new have advanced along the path pointed out by
the doctrines of evolution. Battalions of determined men have held aloft
the banner of uncompromising truth. Each battalion has stormed truth's
citadel only to find that about its inmost reality is an impregnable wall.
The utmost which has been attained in any case is a working hypothesis,
useful in bringing to light many new objective phenomena, it is true,
but, in the end, serving only to deepen the mystery inherent in the nature
of all things.
Such a working hypothesis was the earlier one of gravitation whose laws of
action were elaborated by Sir Isaac Newton, and by the great mind of
Laplace were still further developed with marvelous mathematical precision
in his "Mechanique Celeste."
Such another hypothesis is that of the atomic theory of the constitution
of matter usually associated with the name of Dalton, though it has
undergone many modifications from other scientific thinkers. Of this
hypothesis Theodore Merz writes in his history of nineteenth-century
scientific thought:
"As to the nature of the differences of the elements, the atomic view
gives no information; it simply asserts these differences, assumes
them as physical constants, and tries to describe them by number and
measurement. The atomic view is therefore at best only a provisional
basis, a convenient resting place, similar to that which Newton found
in physical astronomy, and on which has been established the
astronomical view of nature."
The vibratory theories of the ether, the theories of the conservation of
energy, the vitalistic view of life, the theory of parallelism of physical
and psychical phenomena are all such hypotheses. They have been of
incalculable value in helping to a larger knowledge of the appearances of
things, and in the formation of laws of action and reaction, but in no way
have they aided in revealing the inner or transcendent realities of the
myriad manifestations of nature and life!
During the last half of the century this truth has forced itself with ever
increasing power upon the minds of scientists, and has resulted in many
divisions among the ranks. Some rest upon phenomena as the final reality;
hence materialistic or mechanical views of life. Some believe that the
only genuine reality is the one undiscoverable by science; hence new
presentations of metaphysical views of life.
During these decades the solid phalanx of religious believers has
continued to watch from its heights with more or less of fear the advance
of science. Here, too, there has been division in the ranks. Many
denounced the scientists as the destroyers of religion; others like the
good Bishop Colenso could write such words as these in 1873: "Bless God
devoutly for the gift of modern science"; and who ten years earlier had
expressed satisfaction in the fact that superstitious belief in the letter
of the Bible was giving way to a true appreciation of the real value of
the ancient Hebrew Scriptures as containing the dawn of religious light.
From another quarter came the critical students of the Bible, who
subjected its contents to the keen tests of historical and archaeological
study. Serene, above all the turmoil, was the small band of genuine
philosophers who, like Browning's own musician, Abt Vogler, knew the very
truth. No matter what disturbing facts may be brought to light by science,
be it man's descent from Anthropoids or a mechanical view of sensation,
they continue to dwell unshaken in the light of a transcendent truth which
reaches them through some other avenue than that of the mind.
Browning belonged by nature in this last group. Already in "Sordello" his
attention is turned to the development of the soul, and from that time on
to the end of his career he is the champion of the soul-side of existence
with all that it implies of character development--"little else being
worth study," as he declared in his introduction to a second edition of
the poem written twenty years after its first appearance.
On this rock, the human soul, he takes his stand, and, though all the
complex waves of the tempest of nineteenth-century thought break against
his feet, he remains firm.
Beginning with "Sordello," it is no longer evolution as applied to every
aspect of the universe but evolution as applied to the human spirit which
has his chief interest. Problems growing out of the marvelous developments
of such sciences as astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry or biology do
not enter into the main body of the poet's thought, though there are
allusions many and exact which show his familiarity with the growth of
these various objective sciences during his life.
During all the middle years of his poetic career the relations of the mind
and the spirit seemed to fascinate Browning, especially upon the side of
the problems connected with the supernatural bases of religious
experience. These are the problems which grew out of that phase of
scholarly advance represented by biblical criticism.
Such a poem as "Saul," for example, though full of a humanity and
tenderness, as well as of a sheer poetic beauty, which endear it alike to
those who appreciate little more than the content of the poem, and to
those whose appreciation is that of the connoisseur in poetic art, is
nevertheless an interpretation of the origin of prophecy, especially of
the Messianic idea, which places Browning in the van of the thought of the
century on questions connected with biblical criticism.
At the time when "Saul" was written, 1845, modern biblical criticism had
certainly gained very little hearing in England, for even as late as 1862
Bishop Colenso's enlightened book on the Pentateuch was received, as one
writer expresses it, with "almost unanimous disapprobation and widespread
horror."
Critics of the Bible there had been since the seventeenth century, but
they had produced a confused mass of stuff in their attacks upon the
authenticity of the Bible against which the orthodox apologists had
succeeded in holding their own. At the end of the eighteenth and the dawn
of the nineteenth century came the more systematic criticism of German
scholars, echoes of whose theories found their way into England through
the studies of such men as Pusey. But these, though they gave full
consideration to the foremost of the German critics of the day, ranged
themselves, for the most part, on the side of orthodoxy.
Eichhorn, one of the first of the Germans to be studied in England, had
found a point of departure in the celebrated "Wolfenbuettel Fragments,"
which had been printed by Lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer
Reimarus discovered in the Wolfenbuettel library. These fragments represent
criticism of the sweepingly destructive order, characteristic of what has
been called the naturalistic school. Although Eichhorn agreed with the
writer of the "Fragments" that the biblical narratives should be divested
of all their supernatural aspects, he did not interpret the supernatural
elements as simply frauds designed to deceive in order that personal ends
might be gained. He restored dignity to the narrative by insisting at once
upon its historical verity and upon a natural interpretation of the
supernatural--"a spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity
itself," which might result from primitive misunderstanding of natural
phenomena, from the poetical embellishment of facts, or the symbolizing of
an idea.
Doctor Paulus, in his commentary on the Gospels (1800), carried the idea
still farther, and the rationalistic school of Bible criticism became an
assured fact, though Kant at this time developed an entirely different
theory of Bible interpretation, which in a sense harked back to the older
allegorical interpretation of the Bible.
He did not trouble himself at all about the historical accuracy of the
narratives. He was concerned only in discovering the idea underlying the
stories, the moral gist of them in relation to human development. With the
naturalists and the rationalists, he put aside any idea of Divine
revelation. It was the moral aspiration of the authors, themselves, which
threw a supernatural glamour over their accounts of old traditions and
turned them into symbols of life instead of merely records of bona fide
facts of history. The weakness of Kant's standpoint was later pointed out
by Strauss, whose opinion is well summed up in the following paragraph.
"Whilst Kant sought to educe moral thoughts from the biblical writings,
even in their historical part, and was even inclined to consider these
thoughts as the fundamental object of the history: on the other hand he
derived these thoughts only from himself and the cultivation of his age,
and therefore could seldom assume that they had actually been laid down by
the authors of these writings; and on the other hand, and for the same
reason, he omitted to show what was the relation between these thoughts
and those symbolic representations, and how it happened that the one came
to be expressed by the other."
The next development of biblical criticism was the mythical mode of
interpretation in which are prominent the names of Gabler, Schelling,
Bauer, Vater, De Wette, and others. These critics among them set
themselves the difficult task of classifying the Bible narratives under
the heads of three kinds of myths: historical myths, philosophical myths,
and poetical myths. The first were "narratives of real events colored by
the light of antiquity, which confounded the divine and the human, the
natural and the supernatural"; the second, "such as clothe in the garb of
historical narrative a simple thought, a precept, or an idea of the time";
the third, "historical and philosophical myths partly blended together and
partly embellished by the creations of the imagination, in which the
original fact or idea is almost obscured by the veil which the fancy of
the poet has woven around it."
This sort of interpretation, first applied to the Old Testament, was later
used in sifting history from myth to the New Testament.
It will be seen that it has something in common with both the previously
opposed views. The mythical interpretation agrees with the old allegorical
view in so far that they both relinquish historical reality in favor of
some inherent truth or religious conception of which the historical
semblance is merely the shell. On the other hand it agrees with the
rationalistic view in the fact that it really gives a natural explanation
of the process of the growth of myths and legends in human society.
Immediate divine agency controls in the allegorical view, the spirit of
individuals or of society controls in the mythical view.
Neither the out-and-out rationalists nor the orthodox students of the
Bible approved of this new mode of interpretation, which was more or less
the outcome of the study of the sacred books of other religions. In 1835,
however, appeared an epoch-making book which subjected the New Testament
to the most elaborate criticism based upon mythical and legendary
interpretation. This was the "Life of Jesus, Critically Examined," by Dr.
David Friedrich Strauss. This book caused a great stir in the theological
world of Germany. Strauss was dismissed from his professorship in the
University of Tuebingen in consequence of it. Not only this, but in 1839,
when he was appointed professor of Church History and Divinity at the
University of Zurich, he was compelled at once to resign, and the
administration which appointed him was overthrown. This veritable bomb
thrown into the world of theology was translated by George Eliot, and
published in England in 1846.
Through this translation the most advanced German thought must have become
familiar to many outside the pale of the professional scholar, and among
them was, doubtless, the poet Browning, if indeed he had not already
become familiar with it in the original. When the content and the thought
of Browning's poems upon religious subjects are examined, it becomes
certain that he was familiar with the whole trend of biblical criticism in
the first half of the century and of its effect upon certain of the
orthodox churchmen, and that with full consciousness he brought forward in
his religious poems, not didactically, but often by the subtlest
indirections, his own attitude toward the problems raised in this
department of scientific historical inquiry.
Some of the problems which occupied his attention, such as that in "The
Death in the Desert," are directly traceable to the influence of Strauss's
book. Whether he knew of Strauss's argument or not when he wrote "Saul,"
his treatment of the story of David and Saul is not only entirely in
sympathy with the creed of the German school of mythical interpreters, but
the poet himself becomes one of the myth makers in the series of
prophets--that is, he takes the idea, the Messianic idea, poetically
embellishes an old tradition, making it glow with humanness, throws into
that idea not only a content beyond that which David could have dreamed
of, but suggests a purely psychical origin of the Messianic idea itself in
keeping with his own thought on the subject.
The history of the origin and growth of the Messianic ideal as traced by
the most modern Jewish critics claims it to have been a slow evolution in
the minds of the prophets. In Genesis it appears as the prophecy of a time
to come of universal happiness promised to Abraham, through whose seed all
the peoples of the earth shall be blessed, because they had hearkened unto
the voice of God. From a family ideal in Abraham it passed on to being a
tribal ideal with Jacob, and with the prophets it became a national ideal,
an aspiration toward individual happiness and a noble national life. Not
until the time of Isaiah is a special agent mentioned who is to be the
instrument by means of which the blessing is to be fulfilled, and there we
read this prophecy: "There shall sprout forth a shoot from the stem of
Jesse, upon whom will rest the spirit of Yahveh, the spirit of wisdom
and understanding, of counsel and strength, of the knowledge and fear of
God. He will not judge according to appearance, nor will he according to
hearsay. He will govern in righteousness the poor, and judge with equity
the humble of the earth. He will smite the mighty with the rod of his
mouth, and the wicked with the breath of his lips."
The ideal expressed here of a great and wise national ruler who would
bring about the realization of liberty, justice and peace to the Hebrew
nation, and not only to them but to all mankind, becomes in the prophetic
vision of Daniel a mystic being. "I saw in the visions of night, and
behold, with the clouds of heaven came down as a likeness of the son of
man. He stepped forward to the ancient of days. To him was given dominion,
magnificence and rule. And all the peoples, nations and tongues did homage
to him. His empire is an eternal empire and his realm shall never cease."
In "Saul" Browning makes David the type of the prophetic faculty in its
complete development. His vision is of an ideal which was not fully
unfolded until the advent of Jesus himself--the ideal not merely of the
mythical political liberator but of the spiritual saviour, who through
infinite love would bring redemption and immortality to mankind. David
in the poem essays to cheer Saul with the thought of the greatness that
will live after him in the memory of others, but his own passionate desire
to give something better than this to Saul awakens in him the assurance
that God must be as full of love and compassion as he is. Thus Browning
explains the sudden awakening of David, not as a divine revelation from
without, but as a natural growth of the human spirit Godward. This new
perception of values produces the ecstasy during which David sees his
visions, the "witnesses, cohorts" about him, "angels, powers, the
unuttered, unseen, the alive, the aware."
This whole conception was developed by Browning from the single phrase in
I Samuel: "And David came to Saul, and stood before him: and he loved him
greatly." In thus making David prophesy of an ideal which had not been
evolved at his time, Browning indulges in what the biblical critic would
call prophecy after the fact, and so throws himself in on the side of the
mythical interpreters of the Bible.
He has taken a historical narrative, embellished it poetically as in the
imaginary accounts of the songs sung by David to Saul, and given it a
philosophical content belonging on its objective side to the dawn of
Christianity in the coming of Jesus himself and on its subjective side to
his (the poet's) own time--that is, the idea of internal instead of
external revelation--one of the ideas about which has been waged the
so-called conflict of Science and Religion as it was understood by some of
the most prominent thinkers of the latter half of the century. In this,
again, it will be seen that Browning was in the van of the thought of the
century, and still more was he in the van in the psychological tinge which
he gives to David's experience. Professor William James himself could not
better have portrayed a case of religious ecstasy growing out of genuine
exaltation of thought than the poet has in David's experience.
This poem undoubtedly sheds many rays of light upon the feelings, at the
time, of its writer. While he was a profound believer in the spiritual
nature and needs of man, he was evidently not opposed to the contemporary
methods of biblical criticism as applied to the prophecies of the Old
Testament, for has he not himself worked in accord with the light such
criticism had thrown upon the origin of prophecy? Furthermore, the poem is
not only an instance of his belief in the supremacy of the human spirit,
but it distinctly repudiates the Comtian ideal of a religion of humanity,
and of an immortality existing only in the memory of others. The Comte
philosophy growing out of a material conception of the universe and a
product of scientific thought has been one of the strong influences
through the whole of the nineteenth century in sociology and religion.
While it has worked much good in developing a deeper interest in the
social life of man, it has proved altogether unsatisfactory and barren as
a religious ideal, though there are minds which seem to derive some sort
of forlorn comfort from this religion of positivism--from such hopes as
may be inspired by the worship of Humanity "as a continuity and solidarity
in time" without "any special existence, more largely composed of the dead
than of the living," by the thought of an immortality in which we shall be
reunited with the remembrance of our "grandsires" like Tyltyl and Mytyl in
Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird."
Here, as always, the poet throws in his weight on the side of the
paramount worth of the individual, and of a conception of life which
demands that the individual shall have a future world in which to overcome
the flaws and imperfections incident to earthly life.
Although, as I have tried to show, this poem undoubtedly bears witness to
Browning's awareness to the thought currents of the day, it is couched in
a form so dramatic, and in a language so poetic, that it seems like a
spontaneous outburst of belief in which feeling alone had played a part.
Certainly, whatever thoughts upon the subject may have been stowed away in
the subconscious regions of the poet's mind, they well up here in a
fountain of pure inspiration, carrying the thought forward on the wings of
the poet's own spirit.
Poems reflecting several phases of the turmoil of religious opinion rife
in mid-century England are "Christmas Eve" and "Easter Day." Baffling they
are, even misleading to any one who is desirous of finding out the exact
attitude of the poet's mind, for example, upon the rival doctrines of a
Methodist parson and a German biblical critic.
The Methodist Chapel and the German University might be considered as
representative of the extremes of thought in the more or less prescribed
realm of theology, which largely through the influence of the filtering in
of scientific and philosophic thought had divided itself into many sects.
Within the Church of England itself there were high church and low
church, broad church and Latitudinarian, into whose different shades of
opinion it is not needful to enter here. Outside of the Established Church
were the numerous dissenters, including Congregationalists, Baptists,
Quakers, Methodists, Swedenborgians, Unitarians, and numerous others.
There was one broad line of division between the Established Church and
the dissenting bodies. In the first was inherent the ancient principle of
authority, while the principle of self-government in matters of faith
guided all the dissenters in their search for the light.
It is not surprising that with so many differing shades of opinion within
the bosom of the Anglican Church it should, in the earlier half of the
century, have lost its grip upon not only the people at large, but upon
many of its higher intellects. The principle of authority seemed to be
tottering to its fall. In this crisis the Roman Catholic Church exercised
a peculiar fascination upon men of intellectual endowment who, fearing the
direction in which their intellect might lead them, turned to that church
where the principle of authority kept itself firmly rooted by summarily
dismissing any one who might question it. It is of interest to remember
that at the date when this poem was written the Tractarian Movement, in
which was conspicuous the Oxford group of men, had succeeded in carrying
over four hundred clergymen and laity into the Catholic Church.
Those who were unafraid followed the lead of German criticism and French
materialism, but the large mass of common people found in Methodism the
sort of religious guidance which it craved.
To this sect has been attributed an unparalleled influence in the moral
development of England. By rescuing multitudes from ignorance and from
almost the degradation of beasts, and by fostering habits of industry and
thrift, Methodism became a chief factor in building up a great,
intelligent and industrious middle-class. Its influence has been felt even
in the Established Church, and as its enthusiastic historians have pointed
out, England might have suffered the political and religious convulsions
inaugurated by the French Revolution if it had not been for the saving
grace of Methodism.
Appealing at first to the poor and lowly, suffering wrong and persecution
with its founder, Wesley, it was so flexible in its constitution that
after the death of Wesley it broadened out and differentiated in a way
that made it adaptable to very varied human needs. In consequence of this
it finally became a genuine power in the Church and State of Great
Britain.
The poem "Christmas Eve" becomes much more understandable when these facts
about Methodism are borne in mind--facts which were evidently in the
poet's mind, although the poem itself has the character of a symbolic
rather than a personal utterance. The speaker might be regarded as a type
of the religious conscience of England. In spite of whatever direct
visions of the divine such a type of conscience may gain through the
contemplation of nature and the revelations of the human heart, its
relations to the past cause it to feel the need of some sectarian form of
religion--a sort of inherited need to be orthodox in one form or another.
This religious conscience has its artistic side; it can clothe its inborn
religious instincts in exquisite imaginative vision. Also, it has its
clear-sighted reasoning side. This is able unerringly to put its finger
upon any flaw of doctrine or reasoning in the forms of religion it
contemplates. Hence, Catholic doctrine, which was claiming the allegiance
of those who were willing to put their troublesome intellects to sleep
and accept authority where religion was concerned, does not satisfy this
keen analyzer. Nor yet is it able to see any religious reality in such a
myth of Christ rehabilitated as an ethical prophet as the Goettingen
professor constructs in a manner so reminiscent of a passage in Strauss's
"Life of Jesus," where he is describing the opinions of the rationalists'
school of criticism, that a comparison with that passage is enlightening.
Having swept away completely the supernatural basis of religion, the
rationalist is able still to conceive of Jesus as a divine Messenger, a
special favorite and charge of the Deity:
"He had implanted in him by God the natural conditions only of that
which he was ultimately to become, and his realization of this destiny
was the result of his own spontaneity. His admirable wisdom he
acquired by the judicious application of his intellectual powers and
the conscientious use of all the aids within his reach; his moral
greatness, by the zealous culture of his moral dispositions, the
restraint of his sensual inclinations and passions, and a scrupulous
obedience to the voice of his conscience; and on these alone rested
all that was exalted in his personality, all that was encouraging in
his example."
The difficulty to this order of mind of the direct personal revelation
lies in the fact that it is convincing only to those who experience it,
having no basis in authority, and may even for them lose its force.
What then is the conclusion forced upon this English religious conscience?
Simply this: that, though failing both from the intellectual and the
aesthetic standpoint, the dissenting view was the only religious view of
the time possessing any genuine vitality. It represented the progressive,
democratic religious force which was then in England bringing religion
into the lives of the people with a positiveness long lost to the Anglican
Church. The religious conscience of England was growing through this
Methodist movement. This is why the speaker of the poem chooses at last
that form of worship which he finds in the little chapel.
While no one can doubt that the exalted mysticism based upon feeling, and
the large tolerance of the poem, reflect most nearly the poet's personal
attitude, on the other hand it is made clear that in his opinion the
dissenting bodies possessed the forms of religious orthodoxy most potent
at the time for good.
In "Easter Day," the doubts and fears which have racked the hearts and
minds of hundreds and thousands of individuals, as the result of the
increase of scientific knowledge and biblical criticism are given more
personal expression. The discussion turns principally upon the relation of
the finite to the Infinite, a philosophical problem capable of much
hair-splitting controversy, solved here in keeping with the prevailing
thought of the century--namely, that the finite is relative and that this
relativity is the proof of the Infinite.
The boldness of this statement, one such as might be found in the pages of
Spencer, is by Browning elaborated with pictorial and emotional power.
Only by a marvelous vision is the truth brought home to the speaker that
the beauties and joys of earth are not all-sufficient, but that they are
in the poet's speech but partial beauty, though through this very
limitation they become "a pledge of beauty in its plenitude," gleams
"meant to sting with hunger for full light." It is not, however, until
this see-er of visions perceives the highest gleam of earth that he is
able to realize through the spiritual voice of his vision that the nature
of the Infinite is in its essence Love, the supreme manifestation of which
was symbolized in the death and resurrection of Christ.
This revelation is nevertheless rendered null by the man's conviction that
the vision was merely such "stuff as dreams are made on." At the end as
at the beginning he finds it hard to be a Christian.
His vision, which thus symbolizes his own course of emotionalized
reasoning, brings hope but not conviction. Like the type in "Christmas
Eve," conviction can come to him only through a belief in supernatural
revelation. He is evidently a man of broad intellectual endowment, who
cannot, as the Tractarians did, lay his mind asleep, and rest in the
authority of a church, nor yet can he be satisfied with the unconscious
anthropomorphism of the sectarian. He doubts his own reasoning attempts to
formulate religious doctrines, he doubts even the revelations of his own
mystic states of consciousness; hence there is nothing for him but to
flounder on through life as best he can, hoping, fearing, doubting, as
many a serious mind has done owing to the nineteenth-century reaction
against the supernatural dogmas of Christianity. Like others of his ilk,
he probably stayed in the Anglican Church and weakened it through his
latitudinarianisms.
A study in religious consciousness akin to this is that of Bishop
Blougram. Here we have not a generalized type as in "Christmas Eve," nor
an imaginary individual as in "Easter Day," but an actual study of a real
man, it being no secret that Cardinal Wiseman was the inspiration for the
poem.
Wiseman's influence as a Catholic in the Tractarian movement was a
powerful one, and in the poet's dissection of his psychology an attempt is
made to present the reasoning by means of which he made his appeal to less
independent thinkers. With faith as the basis of religion, doubt serves as
a moral spur, since the will must exercise itself in keeping doubt
underfoot. Browning, himself, might agree that aspiration toward faith was
one of the tests of its truth, he might also consider doubt as a spur to
greater aspiration, but these ideals would connote something different to
him from what he makes them mean to Blougram. The poet's aspiration would
be toward a belief in Omniscient Love and Power, his doubts would grow out
of his inability to make this ideal tally with the sin and evil he beholds
in life. Blougram's consciousness is on a lower plane. His aspiration is
to believe in the dogmas of the Church, his doubts arise from an
intellectual fear that the dogmas may not be true. Where Browning seems to
miss comprehension of such a nature as Blougram's is in failing to
recognize that on his own plane of consciousness genuine feeling and the
perception of beauty play at least as large a part in the basis of his
faith as utilitarian and instinctive reasoning do. While this poem shows
in its references to the scientific theories of the origin of morals and
its allusions to Strauss, as well as in the indirect portrayal of
Gigadibs, the man emancipated from the Church, how entirely familiar the
poet was with the currents of religious and scientific thought, it falls
short as a fair analysis of a man who is acknowledged to have wielded a
tremendous religious influence upon Englishmen of the caliber of Cardinal
Newman, Kingsley, Arnold, and others.
If we leave out of account its connection with a special individual, the
poem stands, however, as a delightful study of a type in which is depicted
in passingly clever fashion methods of reasoning compounded of tantalizing
gleams of truth and darkening sophistication.
The poem which shows most completely the effect of contemporary biblical
criticism on the poet is "A Death in the Desert." It has been said to be
an attempt to meet the destructive criticism of Strauss. The setting of
the poem is wonderfully beautiful, while the portrayal of the mystical
quality of John's reasoning is so instinct with religious feeling that it
must be a wary reader indeed who does not come from the reading of this
poem with the conviction that here, at least, Browning has declared
himself unflinchingly on the side of supernatural Christianity in the face
of the battering rams of criticism and the projectiles of science.
But if he be a wary reader, he will discover that the argument for
supernaturalism only amounts to this--and it is put in the mouth of John,
who had in his youth been contemporary with Christ--namely, that miracles
had been performed when only by means of them faith was possible, though
miracles were probably not what those who believed in them thought they
were. Here is the gist of his defence of the supernatural:
"I say, that as a babe, you feed awhile,
Becomes a boy and fit to feed himself,
So, minds at first must be spoon-fed with truth:
When they can eat, babes'-nurture is withdrawn.
I fed the babe whether it would or no:
I bid the boy or feed himself or starve.
I cried once, 'That ye may believe in Christ,
Behold this blind man shall receive his sight!'
I cry now, 'Urgest thou, _for I am shrewd
And smile at stories how John's word could cure--
Repeat that miracle and take my faith_?'
I say, that miracle was duly wrought
When save for it no faith was possible.
Whether a change were wrought in the shows o' the world,
Whether the change came from our minds which see
Of shows o' the world so much as and no more
Than God wills for his purpose,--(what do I
See now, suppose you, there where you see rock
Round us?)--I know not; such was the effect,
So faith grew, making void more miracles,
Because too much they would compel, not help.
I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And has so far advanced thee to be wise.
Wouldst thou improve this to re-prove the proved?
In life's mere minute, with power to use the proof,
Leave knowledge and revert to how it sprung?
Thou hast it; use it and forthwith, or die!"
The important truth as seen by John's dying eyes is that faith in a
beautiful ideal has been born in the human soul. Whether the accounts of
the exact means by which this faith arose were literally true is of little
importance, the faith itself is no less God-given, as another passage will
make clear:
"Man, therefore, thus conditioned, must expect
He could not, what he knows now, know at first;
What he considers that he knows to-day,
Come but to-morrow, he will find misknown;
Getting increase of knowledge, since he learns
Because he lives, which is to be a man,
Set to instruct himself by his past self;
First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn,
Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind,
Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law.
God's gift was that man should conceive of truth
And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake
As midway help till he reach fact indeed."
The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the
theology of Schleiermacher, a resume of which the poet might have found in
Strauss's "Life of Jesus." Although Schleiermacher accepted and even went
beyond the negative criticism of the rationalists against the doctrines of
the Church, he sought to retain the essential aspects of positive
Christianity. He starts out from the consciousness of the Christian, "from
that internal experience resulting to the individual from his connection
with the Christian community, and he thus obtains a material which, as its
basis of feeling, is more flexible and to which it is easier to give
dialectically a form that satisfies science."
Again, "If we owe to him [Jesus] the continual strengthening of the
consciousness of God within us, this consciousness must have existed in
him in absolute strength, so that it or God in the form of the
consciousness was the only operative force within him." In other words, in
Jesus was the supreme manifestation of God in human consciousness. This
truth, first grasped by means which seemed miraculous, is finally
recognized in man's developing consciousness as a consummation brought
about by natural means. John's reasoning in the poem can lead to no other
conclusion than this.
Schleiermacher's theology has, of course, been objected to on the ground
that if this incarnation of God was possible in one man, there is no
reason why it should not frequently be possible. This is the orthodox
objection, and it is voiced in the comment added by "One" at the end of
the poem showing the weakness of John's argument from the strictly
orthodox point of view.
With regard to the miracles being natural events supernaturally
interpreted--that is an explanation familiar to the biblical critic, and
one which the psychologist of to-day is ready to support with numberless
proofs and analyses. How much this poem owes to hints derived from
Strauss's book is further illustrated by the "Glossa of Theotypas," which
is borrowed from Origen, whose theory is referred to by Strauss in his
Introduction as follows: "Origen attributes a threefold meaning to the
Scriptures, corresponding with his distribution of the human being into
three parts, the liberal sense answering to the body, the moral to the
soul, and the mystical to the spirit."
On the whole, the poem appears to be influenced more by the actual
contents of Strauss's book than to be deliberately directed against his
thought, for John's own reasoning when his feelings are in abeyance might
be deduced from more than one passage in this work wherein are passed in
review the conclusions of divers critics of the naturalist and rationalist
schools of thought.
The poem "An Epistle" purports to give a nearly contemporary opinion by an
Arab physician upon the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. We have here,
on the one hand, the Arab's natural explanation of the miracle as an
epileptic trance prolonged some three days, and Lazarus's interpretation
of his cure as a supernatural event. Though absolutely skeptical, the Arab
cannot but be impressed with the beliefs of Lazarus, because of their
revelation of God as a God of Love. Thus Browning brings out the power of
the truth in the underlying ideas of Christianity, whatever skepticism may
be felt as to the letter of it.
The effect of the trance upon the nature of Lazarus is paralleled to-day
by accounts, given by various persons, of their sensations when they
have sunk into unconsciousness nigh unto death. I remember reading of a
case in which a man described his feeling of entire indifference as to the
relations of life, his joy in a sense of freedom and ineffable beauty
toward which he seemed to be flying through space, and his disinclination
to be resuscitated, a process which his spirit was watching from its
heights with fear lest his friends should bring him back to earth. This
higher sort of consciousness seems to have evolved in some people to-day
without the intervention of such an experience as that of Lazarus or one
such as that of the above subject of the Society for Psychical Research.
In describing Lazarus to have reached such an outlook upon life, Browning
again ranges himself with the most advanced psychological thought of the
century. Hear William James: "The existence of mystical states absolutely
overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and
ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states
merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of
consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition,
gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before
us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our
active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything
that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic
rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials
have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new
meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more
enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether
mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows
through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive
world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical
windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider
world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of
this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal
regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and
its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider
world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and
subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary
naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet
the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing
with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in
our approach to the final fulness of the truth."
The vision of Lazarus belongs to the beatific realm, and the naturalistic
Arab has a longing for similar strange vision, though he calls it a
madman's, for--
"So, the All-Great, were the All-Loving too--
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, 'O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee.'"
A survey of Browning's contributions to the theological differences of the
mid-century would not be complete without some reference to "Caliban" and
"Childe Roland." In the former, the absurdities of anthropomorphism, of
the God conceived in the likeness of man, are presented with dramatic and
ironical force, but, at the same time, is shown the aspiration to
something beyond, which has carried dogma through all the centuries,
forward to ever purer and more spiritual conceptions of the absolute. In
the second, though it be a purely romantic ballad, there seems to be
symbolized the scientific knight-errant of the century, who, with belief
and faith completely annihilated by the science which allows for no realm
of knowledge beyond its own experimental reach, yet considers life worth
living. Despite the complex interpretations which have issued from the
oracular tripods of Browning Societies, one cannot read the last lines of
this poem--
"Dauntless the slug-horn to my lips I set,
And blew, '_Childe Roland to the dark Tower came_'"--
without thinking of the splendid courage in the face of disillusionment of
such men of the century as Huxley, Tyndall or Clifford.
When we ask, where is Browning in all this diversity of theological
opinion? we can only answer that beyond an ever-present undercurrent of
religious aspiration there is no possibility of pinning the poet to any
given dogmas. Everywhere we feel the dramatic artist. In "Paracelsus" the
philosophy of life was that of the artist whose adoration finds its
completion in beauty and joy; now the poet himself is the artist
experiencing as Aprile did, this beauty and joy in a boundless sympathy
with many forms of mystical religious ecstasy. Every one of these poems
presents a conflict between the doubts born of some phase of theological
controversy and the exaltation of moments or periods of ecstatic vision,
and though nowhere is dogmatic truth asserted with positiveness,
everywhere we feel a mystic sympathy with the moving power of religious
aspiration, a sympathy which belongs to a form of consciousness perhaps
more inclusive than the religious--namely, a poetic consciousness, able at
once to sympathize with the content and to present the forms of mystic
vision belonging to various phases of human consciousness.
II
THE CENTURY'S END: PROMISE OF PEACE
Passing onward from this mid-century phase of Browning's interest in what
I have called the battle of the mind and the spirit, we find him in his
later poems taking up the subject in its broader aspects, more as he
treated it in "Paracelsus," yet with a marked difference in temper. God is
no longer conceived of merely as a divine creator, joying in the wonder
and beauty of his creations. The ideal of the artist has been modified by
the observation of the thinker and the feeling induced by human rather
than by artistic emotion. Life's experiences have shown to the more
humanly conscious Browning that the problem of evil is not one to be so
easily dismissed. The scientist may point out that evil is but lack of
development, and the lover and artist may exult when he sees the wonderful
processes of nature and mind carrying forward development until he can
picture a time when the evil shall become null and void, but the human,
feeling being sees the misery and the unloveliness of evil. It does not
satisfy him to know that it is lack of development or the outcome of lack
of development, nor yet that it will grow less as time goes on he ponders
the problem, "why is evil permitted, how is it to be harmonized with the
existence of a universe planned upon a scheme which he believes to be the
outcome of a source all-powerful and all-loving!"
About this problem and its corollary, the conception of the infinite,
Browning's latter-day thought revolves as it did in his middle years about
the basis of religious belief.
It is one of the strange freaks of criticism that many admirers of
Browning's earlier work have failed to see the importance of his later
poems, especially "Ferishtah's Fancies," and "The Parleyings," not only as
expressions of the poet's own spiritual growth, but as showing his mental
grasp of the problems which the advance of nineteenth-century scientific
thought brought to the fore in the last days of the century.
The date at which various critics have declared that Browning ceased to
write poetry might be considered an index of the time when that critic's
powers became atrophied. No less a person than Edmund Gosse is of the
opinion that since 1868 the poet's books were chiefly valuable as keeping
alive popular interest in him, and as leading fresh generations of readers
to what he had already published. Fortunately it has long been admitted
that Homer sometimes nods, though not with such awful effect as was said
to attend the nods of Jove. Hence, in spite of Mr. Gosse's undoubted
eminence as a critic, we may dare to assume that in this particular
instance he fell into the ancient and distinguished trick of nodding.
If Mr. Gosse were right, it would practically put on a par with a mere
advertising scheme many poems which have now become household favorites.
Take, for example, "Herve Riel." Think of the blue-eyed Breton hero whom
all the world has learned to love through Browning, tolerated simply as an
index finger to "The Pied Piper of Hamelin." Take, too, such poems, as
"Donald." This man's dastardly sportsmanship is so vividly portrayed that
it has the power to arouse strong emotion in strong men, who have been
known literally to break down in the middle of it through excess of
feeling; "Ivan Ivanovitch," in which is embodied such fear and horror that
weak hearts cannot stand the strain of hearing it read; the story of the
dog Tray, who rescued a drowning doll with the same promptitude as he
did a drowning child--at the relation of whose noble deeds the eyes of
little children grow eager with excitement and sympathy. And where is
there in any poet's work a more vivid bit of tragedy than "A Forgiveness?"
And would not an unfillable gap be left in the ranks of our friends of the
imaginative world if Balaustion were blotted out?--the exquisite lyric
girl, brave, tender and with a mind in which wisdom and wit are fair play
fellows.
As Carlyle might say, "Verily, verily, Mr. Gosse, thou hast out-Homered
Homer, and thy nod hath taken upon itself very much the semblance of a
snore."
These and many others which might be mentioned since the date when Mr.
Gosse autocratically put up the bars to the poet's genius are now
universally accepted. There are others, however, such as "The Red Cotton
Night-cap Country," "The Inn Album," "Aristophanes' Apology," "Fifine at
the Fair," which are liable at any time to attacks from atrophied critics,
and among these are the groups of poems which are to form the center of
our present discussion.
Without particularizing either critics or criticism it may be said that
criticism of these poems divides itself into the usual three
branches--one which objects to their philosophy, one which objects to
their art, one which finds them difficult of comprehension at all. This
last criticism may easily be disposed of by admitting it is in part true.
The mind whose highest reaches of poetic inspiration are ministered unto
by such simple and easily understandable lyrics as "Twinkle, twinkle,
little star," might not at once grasp the significance of the Parleying
with George Bubb Dodington. Indeed, it may be surmised that some minds
might sing upon the starry heights with Hegel and fathom the equivalence
of being and non-being, and yet be led into a slough of despond by this
same cantankerous George.
But a poetical slough of despond may be transfigured in the twinkling of
an eye--after a proper amount of study and hard thinking--into an elevated
plateau with prospects upon every side, grand or terrible or smiling.
Are we never to feel spurred to any poetical pleasure more vigorous than
dilly-dallying with Keats while we feast our eyes upon the wideness of the
seas? or lazily floating in a lotus land with Tennyson, perhaps, among the
meadows of the Musketaquid, in canoes with silken cushions? Beauty and
peace are the reward of such poetical pleasures. They fall upon the spirit
like the "sweet sound that breathes upon a bank of violets, stealing and
giving odor," but shall we never return from the land where it is always
afternoon? Is it only in such a land as this that we realize the true
power of emotion? Rather does it conduce to the slumber of emotion, for
progress is the law of feeling as it is the law of life, and many times we
feel--yes, feel--with tremendous rushes of enthusiasm like climbing
Matterhorns with great iron nails in our shoes, with historical and
archaeological and philosophical Alpen-stocks in our hands, and when we
reach the summit what unsuspected beauties become ours!
Then let us hear no more of the critic who wishes Browning had ceased to
write in 1868 or at any other date. It may be said of him, not as of
Whitman, "he who reads my book touches a man," but "he who reads my poems
from start to finish grasps the life and thought of a century."
There will be no exaggeration in claiming that these two series of poems
form the keystone to Browning's whole work. They are like a final
synthesis of the problems of existence which he has previously portrayed
and analyzed from myriad points of view in his dramatic presentation of
character and his dramatic interpretations of spiritual moods.
In "Pauline," before the poet's personality became more or less merged in
that of his characters, we obtain a direct glimpse of the poet's own
artistic temperament, and may literally acquaint ourselves with those
qualities which were to be a large influence in moulding his work.
As described by himself, the poet of "Pauline" was
"Made up of an intensest life,
Of a most clear idea of consciousness
Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;
And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:
But linked in me to self-supremacy,
Existing as a center to all things,
Most potent to create and rule and call
Upon all things to minister to it."
This sense of an over-consciousness is the mark of an objective poet--one
who sympathizes with all the emotions and aspirations of
humanity--interprets their actions through the light of this sympathy, and
at the same time keeps his own individuality distinct.
The poet of this poem discovers that he can no longer lose himself with
enthusiasm in any phase of life; but what does that mean to a soul
constituted as his? It means that the way has been cleared for the birth
of that greater, broader love of the fully developed artist soul which,
while entering into sympathy with all phases of life, finds its true
complement only in an ideal of absolute Love.
This picture of the artist aspiring toward the absolute by means of his
large human sympathy may be supplemented by the theory of man's relation
to the universe involved in "Paracelsus" as we have seen.
From this point in his work, Browning, like the Hindu Brahma, becomes
manifest not as himself, but in his creations. The poet whose portrait is
painted for us in "Pauline" is the same poet who sympathetically presents
a whole world of human experiences to us, and the philosopher whose
portrait is drawn in "Paracelsus" is the same who interprets these human
experiences in the light of the great life theories therein presented.
But as the creations of Brahma return into himself, so the human
experiences Browning has entered into artistic sympathy with return to
enrich his completed view of the problems of life, when, like his own
Rabbi Ben Ezra, he reaches the last of life for which the first was
planned in these "Fancies" and "Parleyings."
Though these two groups of poems undoubtedly express the poet's own mature
conclusions, they yet preserve the dramatic form. Several things are
gained in this way: First, the poems are saved from didacticism, for the
poet expresses his opinions as an individual, and not in his own person as
a seer, trying to implant his theories in the minds of disciples. Second,
variety is given and the mind stimulated by having opposite points of view
presented, while the thought is infused with a certain amount of emotional
force through the heat of argument.
It has frequently been objected, not only of these poems, but upon general
grounds, that philosophical and ethical problems are not fit subjects for
treatment in poetry. There is one point which the critic of aesthetics
seems in danger of never realizing--namely, that the law of evolution is
differentiation, in art as well as in cosmic, organic, and social life. It
is just as prejudiced and unforeseeing in these days to limit poetry to
this or that kind of a subject, or to say that nothing is dramatic which
does not deal with immediate action, as it would have been for Homer to
declare that no poem would ever be worthy the name that did not contain
a catalogue of ships.
These facts exist! We have dramas dealing merely with action, dramas in
which character development is of prime importance; dramas wherein action
and character are entirely synchronous; and those in which the action
means more than appears upon the surface, like Hauptmann's "Sunken Bell,"
or Ibsen's "Master Builder"; then why not dramas of thought and dramas of
mood when the brain and heart become the stage of action instead of an
actual stage.
Surely such an extension of the possibilities of dramatic art is a
development quite natural to the intellectual ferment of the nineteenth
century. As the man in "Half Rome" says, "Facts are facts and lie not, and
the question, 'How came that purse the poke o' you?' admits of no reply."
By using the dramatic form, the poet has furthermore been enabled to give
one a deep sense of the characteristics peculiar to the century. The
latter half of Victorian England in its thought phases lives just as
surely in these poems as Renaissance Italy in its art phases in "Fra Lippo
Lippi," "Andrea del Sarto," and the rest; and this is true though the
first series is cast in the form of Persian fables and the second in the
form of "Parleyings" with worthies of past centuries.
It may be worth while for the benefit of the reader not thoroughly
familiar with these later poems to pass quickly in review the problems in
them upon which Browning bends his poet's insight.
Nothing bears upon the grounds of moral action more disastrously than
blind fatalism, and while there have been many evil forms of this doctrine
in the past there has probably been none worse than the modern form,
because it seems to have sanction in the scientific doctrines of the
conservation of energy, the persistence of heredity, and the survival of
the fittest. Even the wise and the thoughtful with wills atrophied by
scientific phases of fatalism allow themselves to drift upon what they
call the laws of development, possessing evidently no realizing sense that
the will of man, whether it be in the last analysis absolutely free or
not, is a prime factor in the working of these laws. Such people will
hesitate, therefore, to throw in their voices upon either side in the
solution of great national problems, because, things being bound to follow
the laws of development, what matters a single voice! Such arguments were
frequently heard among the wise in our own country during the Cuban and
Philippine campaigns. Upon this attitude of mind the poet gives his
opinion in the first of "Ferishtah's Fancies," "The Eagle." It is a strong
plea for the exercise of those human impulses that lead to action. The
will to serve the world is the true force from God. Every man, though he
be the last link in a chain of causes over which he had no control, can,
at least, have a determining influence upon the direction in which the
next link shall be forged. Ferishtah appears upon the scene, himself, a
fatalist, leaving himself wholly in God's hands, until he is taught by the
dream God sent him that man's part is to act as he saw the eagle act,
succoring the helpless, not to play the part of the helpless birdlings.
Another phase of the same thought is brought out in "A Camel Driver,"
where the discussion turns upon punishment. The point is, if, as Ferishtah
declares, the sinner is not to be punished eternally, then why should man
trouble himself to punish him? Universalist doctrines are here put into
the mouth of Ferishtah, and not a few modern philanthropists would agree
with Ferishtah's questioners that punishment for sins (the manifestations
of inherited tendencies for which the sinners are not responsible) is no
longer admissible. Ferishtah's answer amounts to this. That no matter what
causes for beneficent ends may be visible to the Divine mind in the
allowance of the existence of sin, nor yet the fact that Divine love
demands that punishment shall not be eternal; man must regard sin simply
from the human point of view as absolute evil, and must will to work for
its annihilation. It follows then that the punishing of a sinner is the
means by which he may be taught to overcome the sin. There is the added
thought, also, that the suffering of the conscience over the subtler sins
which go unpunished is all the hell one needs.
Another doctrine upon which the nineteenth-century belief in progress as
the law of life has set its seal is that of the pursuit of happiness, or
the striving for the greatest good of the whole number in which oneself is
not to be excluded. With this doctrine Browning shows himself in full
sympathy in "Two Camels," wherein Ferishtah contends that only through the
development of individual happiness and the experiencing of many forms of
joyousness can one help others to happiness and joyousness, while in "Plot
Culture" the enjoyment of human emotion as a means of developing the soul
is emphasized.
The relation of good and evil in their broader aspects occupy the poet's
attention in others of this group. Nineteenth-century thought brought
about a readjustment of these relations. Good and evil as absolutely
definable entities gave place to the doctrine that good and evil are
relative terms, a phrase which we sometimes forget must be understood in
two ways: first, that good and evil are relative to the state of society
in which they exist. What may be good according to the ethics of a Fejee
Islander would not hold in the civilized society of to-day. This is the
evil of lack of development which in the long run becomes less. On the
other hand, there is the evil of suffering and pain which it is more
difficult to reconcile with the idea of omnipotent power. In "Mihrab
Shah," Browning gives a solution of this problem in consonance with the
idea that were it not for evil we should not have learned how to
appreciate the good, to work for it, and, in doing so, bring about
progress.
To his pupil, worried over this problem, Ferishtah points out that evil in
the form of bodily suffering has given rise to the beautiful sentiments of
pity and sympathy. Having proved in this way that good really grows out of
evil, there is still the query, shall evil be encouraged in order that
good may be evolved? "No!" Ferishtah declares, man bound by man's
conditions is obliged to estimate as "fair or foul right, wrong, good,
evil, what man's faculty adjudges as such," therefore the man will do all
he can to relieve the suffering or poor Mihrab Shah with a fig plaster.
The final answers, then, which Browning gives to the ethical problems
which grew out of the acceptance of modern scientific doctrines are, in
brief, that man shall use that will-power of which he feels himself
possessed--the power really distinguishing him from the brute creation--in
working against whatever appears to him to be evil; while that good for
which he shall work is the greatest happiness of all.
In the remaining poems of the group we have the poet's mature word upon
the philosophical doctrine of the relativity of knowledge, a doctrine
which received the most elaborate demonstration from Herbert Spencer in
many directions. It is insisted upon in "Cherries," "The Sun," in "A Bean
Stripe also Apple Eating," and especially in that remarkable poem, "A
Pillar at Sebzevar." That knowledge fails is the burden of these poems.
Knowledge the golden is but lacquered ignorance, as gain to be
mistrusted. Curiously enough, this contention of Browning's has been the
cause of most of the criticisms against him as a thinker, yet the deepest
thinkers of to-day as well as many in the past have held the opinion in
some form or another that the intellect was unable to solve the mysterious
problems of the universe. Even the metaphysicians who build their unstable
air castles on _a priori_ ideas declare these ideas cannot be matters of
mere intellectual perception, but must be intuitions of the higher reason.
Browning, however, does not rest in the mere assertion that the intellect
fails. From this truth, so disconcerting to many, he draws immense
comfort. Though intellectual knowledge be mistrusted as gain, it is not to
be mistrusted as means to gain, for through its very failure it becomes a
promise of greater things.
"Friend," quoth Ferishtah in "A Pillar of Sebzevar,"
"As gain--mistrust it! Nor as means to gain:
Lacquer we learn by: cast in firing-pot,
We learn--when what seemed ore assayed proves dross
Surelier true gold's worth, guess how purity
I' the lode were precious could one light on ore
Clarified up to test of crucible.
The prize is in the process: knowledge means
Ever-renewed assurance by defeat
That victory is somehow still to reach."
For men with minds of the type of Spencer's this negative assurance of the
Infinite is sufficient, but human beings as a rule will not rest satisfied
with such cold abstractions. Though Job said thousands of years ago, "Who
by searching can find out God," mankind still continues to search. They
long to know something of the nature of the divine as well as to be
assured of its existence. In this very act of searching Browning declares
the divine becomes most directly manifest.
From the earliest times of which we have any record man has been aspiring
toward God. Many times has he thought he had found him, but with enlarged
perceptions he discovered later that what he had found was only God's
image built up out of his own human experiences.
This search of man for the divine is described with great power and
originality in the Fancy called "The Sun," under the symbol of the man who
seeks the prime Giver that he may give thanks where it is due for a
palatable fig. This search for God, Browning calls love, meaning by that
the moving, aspiring force of the whole universe in its multifarious
manifestations, from the love that goes forth in thanks for benefits
received, through the aspiration of the artist toward beauty, of the
lover toward human sympathy, even of the scientist toward knowledge, to
the lover of humanity like Ferishtah, who declares, "I know nothing save
that love I can, boundlessly, endlessly."
The poet argues from this that if mankind has with ever-increasing fervor
aspired toward a God of Love, and has ever developed toward broader
conceptions of human love, it is only reasonable to infer that in his
nature God has some attribute which corresponds to human love, though it
transcend our most exalted imagining of it.
At the end of the century a book was written in America in which an
argument similar to this was used to prove the existence of God. This book
was "Through Nature to God," by John Fiske, whose earlier work, "Cosmic
Philosophy," did much to familiarize the American reading public with the
evolutionary philosophy of Spencer.
Fiske claimed that his theory was entirely original, yet no one familiar
with the thought of Browning could fail to see the similarity of their
points of view. Fiske based his proof upon analogies drawn from the
evolution of organic life in following out the law of the adjustment of
inner to outer relations. For example, since the eye has through aeons
of time gradually adjusted itself into harmony with light, why should not
man's search for God be the gradual adjustment of the soul into harmony
with the infinite spirit? This adjustment, as Browning expresses it, is
that of human love to divine love.
[Illustration: HERBERT SPENCER]
Other modern thinkers, notably Schleiermacher in Germany and Shaftsbury in
England, have placed the basis of religious truth in feeling. The idea is
thus not a new one. Yet in Browning's treatment of it the conception has
taken on new life, partly because of the intensity of conviction with
which it is expounded in these later poems, and partly because of its
having been so closely knit into the scientific thought of the century.
Optimistically the thought is finally rounded out in "A Bean Stripe also
Apple Eating," in which Ferishtah argues that life in spite of the evil in
it seems to him on the whole good. He cannot believe that evil is not
meant to serve a good purpose since he is so sure that God is infinite in
love.
From all this it will be seen that Browning accepts with Spencerians the
negative proof of God growing out of the failure of intellect to grasp the
realities underlying all phenomena, but adds to it the positive proof
based upon emotion. The true basis of belief is the intuition of God
that comes from the direct revelation of feeling in the human heart, which
has been at once the motive force of the search for God and the basis of a
conception of the nature of God.
It was a stroke of genius on the part of the poet to present such problems
in Persian guise, for Persia stands in Zoroastrianism for the dualism
which Ferishtah with his progressive spirit decries in his recognition of
the part evil plays in the development of good, and through Mahometanism
for the Fatalism Ferishtah learned to cast from him. The Persian
atmosphere is preserved throughout not only by the introduction constantly
of Persian allusions traceable to the great Persian epic, "The Shah
Nameh," but by the telling of fables in the Persian manner to point the
morals intended.
With the exception of the first Fancy, derived from a fable of Bidpai's,
we have the poet's own word that all the others are inventions of his own.
These clever stories make the poems lively reading in spite of their
ethical content. Ferishtah is drawn with strong strokes. Wise and clever
he stands before us, reminding us at times of Socrates--never at a loss
for an answer no matter what bothersome questions his pupils may
propound.
If we see the thoughtful and brilliant Browning in the "Fancies" proper,
we perhaps see even more clearly the emotional and passionate Browning in
the lyrics which add variety and an unwonted charm to the whole. This
feature is also borrowed from Persian form, an interesting example of
which has been given to English readers in Edwin Arnold's "Gulistan" or
"Rose Garden" of the poet Sa'di. Indeed Browning evidently derived the
hint for his humorous prologue in which he likens the poems to follow to
an Italian dish made of ortolans on toast with a bitter sage leaf,
symbolizing sense, sight, and song from Sa'di's preface to the "Rose
Garden," wherein he says, "Yet will men of light and learning, from whom
the true countenance of a discourse is not concealed, be well aware that
herein the pearls of good counsel which heal are threaded on strings of
right sense; that the bitter physic of admonition is constantly mingled
with the honey of good humor, so that the spirits of listeners grow not
sad, and that they remain not exempt from blessings of acceptance."
A further interest attaches to these lyrics because they form a series of
emotional phases in the soul-life of two lovers whom we are probably
justified in regarding as Mr. and Mrs. Browning. One naturally thinks of
them as companion pictures to Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the
Portuguese." In these the sunrise of a great love is portrayed with
intense and exalted passion, while the lyrics in "Ferishtah's Fancies"
reflect the subsequent development of such a love, through the awakening
of whole new realms of feeling, wherein love for humanity is enlarged
criticism from the one beloved welcome; all the little trials of life
dissolved in the new light; and divine love realized with a force never
before possible.
Do we not see a living portrait of the two poets in the lyric "So the head
aches and the limbs are faint?" Many a hint may be found in the Browning
letters to prove that Mrs. Browning with just such a frail body possessed
a fire of spirit that carried her constantly toward attainment, while he,
with all the vigor of splendid health, could with truth have frequently
said, "In the soul of me sits sluggishness." These exquisite lyrics,
which, whether they conform to Elizabethan models or not, are as fine as
anything ever done in this form, are crowned by the epilogue in which we
hear the stricken husband crying out to her whom twenty years earlier he
had called his "lyric love," in a voice doubting, yet triumphing in the
thought that his lifelong optimism is the light radiating from the halo
which her human love had irised round his head.
No more emphatic way than the interspersion of these emotional lyrics
could have been chosen to bring home the poet's conviction of the value of
emotion in finding a positive basis for religious belief.
In the "Parleyings" the discussions turn principally upon artistic
problems and their relation to modern thought. Four out of the seven were
inspired by artist, poet or musician. The forgotten worthies whom Browning
rescued from oblivion make their appeal to him upon various grounds that
connect them with the present.
Bernard de Mandeville evidently caught Browning's fancy, because in his
satirical poem, "The Grumbling Hive," he forestalled, by a defence of the
Duke of Marlborough's war policy, the doctrine of the relativity of good
and evil. This subject, though so fully treated in the "Fancies," still
continued to fascinate Browning, who seemed to feel the need of thinking
his way through all its implications. Fresh interest is added in this
case because the objector in the argument was the poet's contemporary
Carlyle, whose well-known pessimism in regard to the existence of evil is
graphically presented.
Browning clenches his side of the argument with an original and daring
variation upon the Prometheus myth led up to by one of the most
magnificent passages in the whole range of his poetry, and probably the
finest example anywhere in literature of a description of nature as
interpreted by the laws of cosmic evolution. A comparison of this passage
with the one in "Paracelsus" brings out very clearly the exact measure of
the advance in the poet's thought during the fifty years between which
they were written--1835 and 1887. While in the "Paracelsus" passage it is
the thought of the joy in the creator's soul for his creations, and the
participation of mankind in this joy of progression while pleasure climbs
its heights forever and forever, which occupies the poet's mind, in the
later passage, there is no attempt at a definite conception of the divine
nature. Force represented in the sunlight is described as developing life
upon the earth. The thrill of this life-giving power is felt by all
things, and is unquestioningly accepted and delighted in.
"Everywhere
Did earth acknowledge Sun's embrace sublime
Thrilling her to the heart of things: since there
No ore ran liquid, no spar branched anew,
No arrowy crystal gleamed, but straightway grew
Glad through the inrush--glad nor more nor less
Than, 'neath his gaze, forest and wilderness,
Hill, dale, land, sea, the whole vast stretch and spread,
The universal world of creatures bred
By Sun's munificence, alike gave praise."
Man alone questions. His mind reaches out for knowledge of the cause; he
would know its nature. Man's mind will not give any definite answer to
this question. But Prometheus offered an artifice whereby man's mind is
satisfied. He drew sun's rays into a focus plain and true. The very sun in
little: made fire burn and henceforth do man service. Denuded of its
scientific and mystical symbolism, Browning thus makes the Prometheus myth
teach his favorite doctrine, namely, that the image of love formed in the
human heart by means of the burning glass supplied by sense and feeling is
a symbol of infinite love.
Daniel Bartoli, a Jesuit of the seventeenth century who is dyed and doubly
dyed in superstition, is set up by Browning in the next poem simply to be
knocked down again upon the ground that all the legendary saints he
worshipped could not compare with a real woman the poet knows. The
romantic story of the lady is told in Browning's most fascinating
narrative style, so rapid and direct that it has all the force of a
dramatic sketch. The heroine's claim upon the poet's admiration consists
in her recognition of the sacredness of love, which she will not dishonor
for worldly considerations, and finding her betrothed incapable of
attaining her height of nobleness, she leaves him free.
This story bears upon the poet's philosophy as it reflects his attitude
toward human love, which he considers so clearly a revelation that any
treatment of it not absolutely noble and true to the highest ideals is a
sin against heaven itself.
George Bubb Dodington is the black sheep of these later poems. He gives
the poet an opportunity to let loose all his subtlety and sarcasm, while
the reader may exercise his wits in discovering that the poet _assumes_ to
agree with Dodington in his doubtful doctrine of serving the state with an
eye always upon his own private welfare, and pretends to criticise him
only for his method of attaining his ends. His method is to disclaim that
he works for any other good than that of the State--a proposition so
preposterous in his case that nobody would believe it. The poet then
presents what purports to be the correct method of successful
statesmanship--namely, to pose as a superior being endowed with the divine
right to rule, treating everybody as his puppet, and entirely scornful of
any criticisms against himself. If he will adopt this attitude he may
change his tactics every year and the people, instead of suspecting his
sincerity, will think that he has wise reasons beyond their insight for
his changes. The poem is a powerful, intensely cynical argument against
the imperialistic temper and in favor of liberal government. This means
for the individual not only the right but the power to judge for himself,
instead of being obliged to depend, because of his own inefficiency, upon
the leadership of the over-man, whose intentions are unfortunately too
seldom to be trusted.
The poet called from the shades by Browning, Christopher Smart, is
celebrated in the world of criticism for having only once in his life
written a great poem. The eulogies upon the beauties of "The Song of
David" might not be echoed by all lay readers of poetry; nor is it of any
moment whether Browning actually agreed with the conclusions of the
critics, since the episode is used merely as a text for discussing the
problem of beauty versus truth in art. Should the poet's province be
simply to record his vision of the beauty and the strength of nature and
the universe--visions which come to him in moments of inspiration such as
that which came once to Christopher Smart? Browning answers the question
characteristically with his feet upon the earth. The visions of poets
should not be considered as ends in themselves, but as material to be used
for greater ends.
The poet should find his inspiration in the human heart, and climb to
heaven by its means, not investigate the heavens first. Diligently must he
study mankind, and teach as man may through his knowledge.
In "Francis Furini" the subject is the nude in art. The keynote is struck
by the poet's declaring he will never believe the tale told by Baldinicci
that Furini ordered all his pictures in which there were nude figures
burned. He expresses his indignation at the tale vigorously at some
length, showing plainly his own sympathies.
The passage in the poem bearing more especially upon the present
discussion is the lecture by Furini imagined by the poet to have been
delivered before a London audience. It is a long and recondite speech in
which the scientific and the intuitional methods of arriving at truth
are compared. While the scientific method is acknowledged to be of value,
the intuitional method is claimed as by far the more important.
A philippic against Greek art and its imitation is delivered by the poet
in the "Parleying with Gerard de Lairesse," whom he makes the scapegoat of
his strictures, on the score of a book Lairesse wrote in which was
described a walk through a Dutch landscape when every feature was
transmogrified by classic imaginings.
To this good soul, an old sepulcher struck by lightning became the tomb of
Phaeton, and an old cartwheel half buried in the sand near by, the Chariot
of the Sun.
In a spirit of bravado Browning proceeds to show what he himself could
make of a walk provided he condescended to illuminate it by classic
metaphor and symbol, and a remarkable passage is the result. It occupies
from the eighth to the twelfth stanza. It is meant to be in derision of a
grandiloquent, classically embroidered style but so splendid is the
language, so haunting the pictures, the symbolism so profound that it is
as if a God were showing some poor weakling mortal how not to do it--and
through his omniscience must perforce create something wondrously
beautiful. The double feeling produced in reading this passage only adds
to its interest. After thus classicizing in a manner that might make
Euripides, himself, turn green with envy, he nonchalantly remarks:
"Enough, stop further fooling," and to show how a modern poet greets a
landscape he flings in the perfectly simple and irresistible little lyric:
"Dance, yellows, and whites and reds."
The poet's strictures upon classicism are entirely consonant with his
philosophy, placing as he does the paramount importance on living
realities, "Do and nowise dream," he exclaims:
"Earth's young significance is all to learn;
The dead Greek love lies buried in its urn
Where who seeks fire finds ashes."
The "Parleying" with Charles Avison is more a poem of moods than any of
the others. The poet's profound appreciation of music is reflected in his
claiming it as the highest artistic expression possible to man. Sadness
comes to him, however, at the thought of the ephemeralness of its forms, a
fact that is borne in on him because of the inadequateness of Avison's
old march styled "grand." He finally emerges triumphantly from this mood
of sadness through the realization that music is the most perfect symbol
of the evolution of spirit, of which the central truth--
"The inmost care where truth abides in fulness"--
as Paracelsus expresses it, remains always permanent, while the form is
ever changing, but though ever changing it is of absolute value to the
time when the spirit found expression in it. Furthermore, in any form once
possessing beauty, by throwing one's self into its historical atmosphere
the beauty may be regained.
The poem has, of course, a still larger significance in relation to all
forms of truth and beauty of which every age has had its living, immortal
examples, the "broken arcs" which finally will make the perfect round,
each arc perfect in itself, and thus the poet's final paean is joyous,
"Never dream that what once lived shall ever die."
The prologue of this series of poems prefigures the thought in a striking
dialogue between Apollo and the Fates wherein the Fates symbolize the
natural forces of life, behind which is Zeus or divine power; Apollo's
light symbolizes the glamour which hope and aspiration throw over the
events of human existence, without actually giving any assurance of its
worth, and the wine of Bacchus symbolizes feeling, by means of which a
perception of the absolute is gained. Man's reason, guided by the divine,
accepts this revelation through feeling not as actual knowledge of the
absolute which transcends all intellectual attempts to grasp it, but as a
promise sufficiently assuring to take him through the ills and
uncertainties of life with faith in the ultimate triumph of beauty and
good.
The epilogue, a dialogue between John Fust and his friends, brings home
the thought once more in another form, emphasizing the fact that there can
be no new realm of actual, palpable knowledge opened up to man beyond that
which his intellect is able to perceive. Once having gained this knowledge
of the failure of intellectual knowledge to solve what Whitman calls the
"strangling problems" of life, man's part is to follow onward through
ignorance.
"Dare and deserve!
As still to its asymptote speedeth the curve,
So approximates Man--Thee, who reachable not,
Hast formed him to yearningly
Follow thy whole
Sole and single omniscience!"
It will be seen from this review of the salient points enlarged upon by
Browning in these last groups of poems that he has deliberately set
himself to harmonize the intellectual and the intuitional aspects of human
consciousness. He has sought to join the hands of mind and spirit. The
artistic exuberance of Paracelsus is supplemented by spiritual fervor. To
the young Browning, the beauty of immortal, joyous life pursuing its
heights forever was as a radiant vision, to the Browning who had grappled
with the strangling problems of the century this beauty was not so
distinctly seen, but its reality was felt with all the depth of an
intensely spiritual nature--a nature moreover so absolutely fearless, that
it could unflinchingly confront every giant of doubt, or of
disillusionment which science in its pristine egotism had conjured up,
saying "Keep to thine own province, where thou art indeed powerful; to the
threshold of the eternal we may come through thy ministrations, but the
consciousness of divine things cometh through the still small voice of the
heart."
Thus, while he accepted every law relating to phenomena which science has
been able to formulate, he realized the futility of resting in a primal,
wholly dehumanized energy, that is, something not greater but less than
its own outcome, humanity. He was incapable of any such absurdity as
Clifford's dictum that "Reason, intelligence and volition are properties
of a complex which is made up of elements, themselves not rational, not
intelligent, not conscious." Since Clifford's time, the marked differences
between the processes of a psychic being like man, and the processes of
nature have been so fully recognized and so carefully defined by
psychologists that Browning's insistence upon making man the center whence
truth radiates has had full confirmation.
Theodore Merz has summed up these psychological conclusions in regard to
the characteristics peculiar to man as distinguished from all the rest of
the universe in the following words:
"There are two properties with which we are familiar through common
sense and ordinary reflection as belonging especially to the phenomena
of our inner self-conscious life, and these properties seem to lie
quite beyond the sphere and the possibilities of the ordinary methods
of exact research.
"As we ascend in the scale of human beings we become aware that they
exhibit a special kind of unity which cannot be defined, a unity
which, even when apparently lost in periods of unconsciousness, is
able to reestablish itself by the wonderful and indefinable property
called 'memory'--a center which can only be very imperfectly
localized--a together which is more than a mechanical sum; in fact
we rise to the conception of individuality, that which cannot be
divided and put together again out of its parts.
"The second property is still more remarkable. The world of the inner
processes which accompany the higher forms of nervous development in
human beings is capable of unlimited growth and it is capable of this
by a process of becoming external: it becomes external, and, as it
were, perpetuates itself in language, literature, science and art,
legislation, society, and the like. We have no analogue of this in
physical nature, where matter and energy are constant quantities and
where the growth and multiplication of living matter is merely a
conversion of existing matter and energy into special altered forms
without increase or decrease in quantity. But the quantity of the
inner thing is continually on the increase; in fact, this increase is
the only thing of interest in the whole world."
Thus the modern psychologist and the poet who in the early days of the
century said the soul was the only thing worth study join hands.
The passage already referred to in "Francis Furini" presents most
explicitly the objective or intellectual method and the subjective or
intuitional method of the search for truth.
Furini is made to question--
"Evolutionists!
At truth I glimpse from depths, you glance from heights,
Our stations for discovery opposites,
How should ensue agreement! I explain."
He describes, then, how the search of the evolutionist for the absolute is
outside of man. "'Tis the tip-top of things to which you strain." Arriving
at the spasm which sets things going, they are stopped, and since having
arrived at unconscious energy, they can go no further, they now drop down
to a point where atoms somehow begin to think, feel, and know themselves
to be, and the world's begun such as we recognize it. This is a true
presentation of the attitude of physicists and chemists to-day, the latter
especially holding that experiment proves that in the atoms themselves is
an embryonic form of consciousness and will. From these is finally evolved
at last self-conscious man. But after all this investigating on the part
of the evolutionist what has been gained? Of power--that is, power to
create nature or life, or even to understand it--man possesses no
particle, and of knowledge, only just so much as to show that it ends in
ignorance on every side. This is the result of the objective search for
truth. But begin with man himself, and there is a fact upon which he can
take a sure stand, his self-consciousness--a "togetherness," as Merz says,
which cannot be explained mathematically by the adding up of atoms; and
furthermore an inborn certainty that whatever is felt to be within had
its rise or cause without: "thus blend the conscious I, and all things
perceived in one Effect." Through this subjective perception of an
all-powerful cause a reflex light is thrown back upon all that the
investigations of the intellect have accomplished. The cause is no longer
simply blind energy, but must itself be possessed of gifts as great and
still greater than those with which the soul of man is endowed. The forces
at work in nature thus become instinct with wonder and beauty, the good
and evil of life reveal themselves as a means used by absolute Power and
Love for the perfecting of the soul which made to know on and ever must
know
"All to be known at any halting stage
Of [the] soul's progress, such as earth, where wage
War, just for soul's instruction, pain with joy,
Folly with wisdom, all that works annoy
With all that quiets and contents."
To sum up--our investigations into Browning's thought show him to be a
type primarily of the mystic. Mysticism in its most pronounced forms
regards the emotions of the human mind as supreme. The mystic, instead of
allowing the intellectual faculty to lead the way, degrades it to an
inferior position and makes it entirely subservient to the feelings. In
some moods Browning seems almost to belong to this pronounced type; for
example, when he says in "A Pillar at Sebzevar," "Say not that we know,
rather that we love, therefore we know enough."
[Illustration: DAVID STRAUSS]
It must be remembered, however, that he is not in either class of the
supernatural mystic, one of which supposes truth to be gained by a fixed
supernatural channel, the other that it is gained by extraordinary
supernatural means. On the contrary, truth comes to Browning in pursuance
of a regular law or fact of the inward sensibility, which may be defined
in his case as a mode of intuition. His intuition of God, as we have seen,
is based upon the feeling of love both in its human and its abstract
aspects.
But this is not all. Upon the intellectual side Browning accepted the
conclusions of scientific investigation as far as phenomena were
concerned, and while he denied its worth in giving direct knowledge of the
Absolute, he recognized it as useful because of its very failure in
strengthening the sense of the existence of a power transcending human
conception. "What is our failure here but a triumph's evidence of the
fulness of the days?" And, furthermore, with mystic love already in our
hearts, all knowledge that the scientist may bring us of the phenomena of
nature and life only adds immeasurably to our wonder and awe of the power
which has brought these things to pass, thus "with much more knowledge"
comes "always much more love."
Once more, the poet's mysticism is tempered by a tinge of idealism. There
are several passages in his poems, notably one already quoted from Furini,
which show him to have had a perception of God directly through his own
consciousness by means of what the idealist calls the higher reason. His
perception, for instance, that whatever takes place within the
consciousness had its rise without and that this external origin emanates
from God is the idealist's way of arriving at the absolute.
Thus we see that into Browning's religious conceptions enter the
intuitions of the artistic consciousness as illustrated in Paracelsus
where God is the divine artist joying in his creations, the intuitions of
the intellect which finds in the failure of knowledge to probe the secrets
of the universe the assurance of a transcendent power beyond human ken,
the intuition of the higher reason which affirms God is, and the
intuitions of the heart which promise that God is love, through whom is
to come fulfilment of all human aspirations toward Beauty, Truth, and Love
in immortality.
If these are all points which have been emphasized, now by one, now by
another, of the vast array of thinkers who have crowded the past century,
there is no one who to my knowledge has so completely harmonized the
various thought tendencies of the age, and certainly none who has clothed
them in such a wealth of imaginative and emotional illustration.
In these last poems Browning appears to borrow an apt term from Whitman,
as the "Answerer" of his age. In them he has unquestioningly accepted the
knowledge which science has brought, and, recognizing its relative
character, has yet interpreted it in such a way as to make it subserve the
highest ideals in ethics, religion, and art. Far from reflecting any
degeneration in Browning's philosophy of life, these poems place on a
firmer basis than ever thoughts prominent in his poetry from the first,
while adding to these the profounder insight into life which life's
experiences had brought him.
The subject matter and form are no less remarkable than their thought. The
variety in both is almost bewildering. Religion and fable, romance and
philosophy, art and science all commingled in rich profusion; everything
in language--talk almost colloquial, dainty lyrics full of exquisite
emotion, and grand passages which present in sweeping images now the
processes of cosmic evolution, now those of spiritual evolution, until it
seems as if we had indeed been conducted to some vast mountain height,
whence we can look forth upon the century's turbulent seas of thought,
into which flows many a current from the past, while suspended above
between the sea and sky, like the crucifix in Simons's wonderful symbolic
picture of the Middle Ages, is the mystical form of divine love and joy
which Browning has made symbolic of the nineteenth century.
III
POLITICAL TENDENCIES
In the political affairs of his own age and country Browning as a poet
shows little interest. This may at first seem strange, for that he was
deeply sympathetic with past historical movements indicating a growth
toward democratic ideals in government is abundantly proved by his choice
and treatment of historical epochs in which the democratic tendencies were
peculiarly evident. Why then did he not give us dramatic pictures of the
Victorian era, in which as perhaps in no other era of English history the
yeast of political freedom has been steadily and quietly working?
There were probably several reasons for his failure to make himself felt
as an influence in the political world of his time. In the first place, he
was preeminently a dramatic poet, and as such his interest was in the
presentation and analysis of individual character as it might work itself
out in a given historical environment. To deal with contemporaries in
this analytic manner would be a difficult and delicate matter, and, as we
see, in those instances where he did venture upon an analysis of English
contemporaries, as in the case of Wiseman (Bishop Blougram), Carlyle in
Bernard de Mandeville and in "George Bubb Dodington," the sketch of Lord
Beaconsfield, he takes care to suppress every external circumstance which
would lead to their identification, and to dwell only upon their
intellectual or psychic aspects.
A second reason is that the present is usually too near at hand to be used
altogether effectively as dramatic material. Contemporary conditions of
history seem to have an air of stateliness owing to the fact that every
one is familiar with them, not only through talk and experience but
through newspapers and magazines, while their larger, universal meanings
cannot be seen at too close a range. If, however, past historical episodes
and their tendencies can be so presented as to illustrate the tendencies
of the present, then the needful artistic perspective is gained. In this
manner, with a few minor exceptions, Browning has revealed the direction
in which his political sympathies lay.
When Browning was born, the first Napoleonic episode was nearing its
close. Absolutism and militarism had in its lust for power and bloodshed
slaughtered itself for the time being, and once more there was opportunity
for the people of England to strive for their own enfranchisement.
As a progressive ministry in England did not come into power until 1830,
the struggles of the people were rewarded with little success during many
years after the Battle of Waterloo. During the childhood and boyhood of
Browning the events which from time to time marked the determination of
the downtrodden Englishman to secure a larger measure of justice for
himself were exciting enough to have made a strong impression upon the
precocious mind of the incipient poet even in the seclusion of his
father's library at Camberwell.
The artificial prosperity which had buoyed up the workman during the war
with France suddenly collapsed with the advent of peace after the Battle
of Waterloo. Everything seemed to combine to make the affairs of the
workingman desperate. Public business had been blunderingly administered,
and while a fatuous Cabinet was congratulating the nation upon the
flourishing state of the country, trade was actually almost at a
standstill, and failures in business were the order of the day. To make
matters worse, a wet summer and early frosts interfered with farming, and
the result was that laborers and workmen could not find employment. A not
unusual percentage of paupers in any given district was four fifths of the
whole population. Thinking the farmers were to blame for the high price of
bread, these starving people wreaked their vengeance on them by burning
farm buildings, and machinery, and even stacks of corn and hay.
[Illustration: CARDINAL WISEMAN]
Instead of giving sympathy to these men in their desperate condition, a
conservative government saw in them only rioters, and took the most
stringent measures against them. They were tried by a special commission,
and thirty-four of them were condemned to death, though it is recorded
that only five of them were executed. The miners of Cornwall and Wales,
the lace makers of Nottingham, and the iron workers of the Black Country,
next broke out and the smashing of machinery continued. Finally there was
a meeting of the artisans of London, Westminster, and Southwick in Spa
Fields, Clerkenwall, which had been called by Harry Hunt, a man of
property and education, who was known as a supporter of extreme measures,
and the leader of the Radicals of that day. They met for the legitimate
purpose, one would think, of considering the propriety of petitioning the
Prince Regent and Parliament to adopt means of relieving the existing
distress. One of the speakers, however, a poor doctor by the name of
Watson, was of a more belligerent disposition. He made an inflammatory
speech which ended by his seizing a tri-colored flag and marching toward
the city followed by the turbulent rabble. On their way they seized the
contents of a gunsmith's shop on Snow Hill, murdered a man, and finally
were met opposite the Mansion House by the Lord Mayor, who, assisted by a
strong body of police, arrested some of the leaders and dispersed the
rest. The arrested persons were brought to trial and indicted for high
treason by the Attorney General, but the jury, evidently thinking the
indictment had taken too exaggerated a form, acquitted Watson, and the
others were dismissed.
The conservative Parliament was, however, so alarmed by these proceedings
that, instead of seeking some way of removing the cause of the
difficulties, it thought only of making restrictions for the protection of
the person of the Regent, of the more effective prevention of seditious
meetings and of surer punishment. And what were some of these measures?
Debating societies, lecture halls and reading rooms were shut up. Even
lectures on medicine, surgery and chemistry were prohibited. Though there
was a possibility of getting a license to lecture from the magistrate, the
law was interpreted in the narrowest spirit.
Parliamentary reform began to be spoken of in 1819, when a resolution
pledging the House of Commons to the consideration of the state of
representation was rejected by a vote of one hundred and fifty-three to
fifty-eight. This decision stirred up the reform spirit, and large
meetings in favor of it were held. The people attending these meetings
received military drilling and marched to their meetings in orderly
processions, a fact naturally very disturbing to the government. When a
great meeting was arranged at Manchester on the 16th of August, troops
were accordingly sent to Manchester. The cavalry was ordered to charge the
crowd, and although they used the flat side of their swords, the charge
resulted in the killing of six persons and the wounding of some hundreds.
The clash did not end here, for to offset the ministerial approval of the
action of the magistrates and their decision that the meeting was illegal,
the Common Council of London passed a resolution by a large majority
declaring that the meeting was legal. A number of Whig noblemen also were
on the side of the London Council and made similar motions. But the
ministers, unmoved by these signs of the times, introduced bills in
Parliament for the repression of disorder and the further restraining of
public liberty. The bills, it is true, were strenuously opposed in both
houses, but the eloquence expended against them was all to no purpose, the
bills were passed, and reform for the time being was nipped in the bud.
Although after this laws were gradually introduced by the ministers which
tended very much to the betterment of conditions, the fire of reform did
not burst out again with full fury until the time of the Revolution of
July, in France, which it will be remembered was directed against the
despotic King Charles X, and ended in his being deposed, when his crown
was given to his distant cousin Louis Philippe. The success of the French
in their stand against despotism caused a general revolutionary stir in
several European countries, while in England the spirit of revolution
showed itself in incendiary fires from one end of the country to the
other.
With Parliament itself full of believers in reform, the chief of the
Cabinet, the Duke of Wellington, announced that the House of Commons did
not need reform and that he would resist all proposals for a change. So
great was the popular excitement at this announcement that the Duke could
not venture to go forth to dine at the Guildhall for fear that he might be
attacked.
Such were the chief episodes in the forward advance of the people up to
the time of the presentation of the Reform Bill in Parliament. This
important measure has been described as the greatest organic change in the
British Constitution that had taken place since the revolution of 1688.
When this bill was finally passed it meant a transference of governmental
control from the upper classes to the middle classes, and was the
inauguration of a policy which has constantly added to the prosperity and
well-being of the English people. The agitation upon this bill, introduced
in the House by Lord John Russell, under the Premiership of Earl Grey, and
a ministry favorable to reform, was filling the attention of all
Englishmen to the exclusion of every other subject just at the time when
Browning was emerging into manhood, 1831 and 1832, and though he has not
commemorated in his poetry this great step in the political progress of
his own century, his first play, written in 1837, takes up a period of
English history in which a momentous struggle for liberty on the part of
the people was in progress.
Important as the Reform Bill was, it furnished no such picturesque
episodes for a dramatist as did the struggle of Pym and Strafford under
the despotic rule of King Charles I.
In choosing this period for his play the poet found not only material
which furnished to his hand a series of wonderfully dramatic situations,
but in the three men about whom the action moves is presented an
individuality and a contrast in character full of those possibilities for
analysis so attractive to Browning's mind.
Another point to be gained by taking this remote period of history was
that his attitude could be supremely that of the philosopher of history.
He could portray with fairness whatever worth of character he found to
admire in the leaders upon either side, at the same time that he could
show which possessed the winning principle--the principle of progress. In
dealing with contemporary events a strong personal feeling is sure to gain
the upper hand, and to be non-partisan and therefore truly dramatic is a
difficult, if not an impossible, task. When we come to examine this play,
we find that the character which unquestionably interested the poet most
was Strafford's; not because of his political principles but because of
his devotion to his King. Human love and loyalty in whomever manifested
was always of the supremest interest to Browning, and, working upon any
hints furnished by history, the poet has developed the character of
Strafford in the light of his personal friendship for the King--a feeling
so powerful that no fickle change of mood on the part of the King could
alter it. Upon this fact of his personal relations to the King Strafford's
actions in this great crisis have been interpreted and explained, though
not defended, from the political point of view.
Some wavering on the part of Pym is also explained upon the ground of his
friendship for and his belief in Strafford, but mark the difference
between the two men. Pym, once sure that Strafford is not on the side of
progress, crushes out all personal feeling. He allows nothing to stand in
the way of his political policy. With unflinching purpose he proceeds
against his former friend, straight on to the impeachment for treason,
straight on, like an inexorable fate, to the prevention of his rescue from
execution. Browning's dramatic imagination is responsible for this last
climax in which he brings the two men face to face. Here, in Pym's
strength of will to serve England at any cost, mingled with the hope of
meeting Strafford purged of all his errors in a future life, and in
Strafford's response, "When we meet, Pym, I'd be set right--not now! Best
die," is foreshadowed the ultimate triumph of the parliamentary over the
monarchical principles of government, and the poet's own sympathy with the
party of progress is made plain.
It is interesting in the present connection to inquire whether there are
any parallels between the agitation connected with the reform legislation
of 1832 and the revolution at the time of Charles I which might send
Browning's mind back to that period. The special point about which the
battle raged in 1832 was the representation in Parliament. This was so
irregular that it was absolutely unfair. In many instances large districts
or towns would have fewer representatives than smaller ones, or perhaps
none at all. Representation was more a matter of favoritism than of
justice. The votes in Parliament were, therefore, not at all a true
measure of the attitude of the country. It seems strange that so eminently
sensible a reform should meet with such determined opposition. As usual,
those in power feared loss of privilege. The House of Lords was the
obstruction. The bill was in fact a step logically following upon the
determination of the people of the time of Charles I that they would not
submit to be levied upon for ship-money upon the sole authority of the
King. They demanded that Parliament, which had not been assembled for ten
years, should meet and decide the question. This question was not merely
one of the war-tax or ship-money, but of whether the King should have the
power to levy taxes upon the people without consent of Parliament.
As every one knows, when the King finally consented to the assembling of
Parliament, in April, 1840, he informed it that there would be no
discussion of its demands until it had granted the war subsidies for which
it had been asked. The older Vane added to the consternation of the
assembly by announcing that the King would accept nothing less than the
twelve subsidies which he had demanded in his message. In the face of this
ultimatum the committee broke up without coming to a conclusion,
postponing further consideration until the next day, but before they had
had time to consider the matter the next day the King had decided to
dissolve the Parliament.
The King was forced, however, to reassemble Parliament again in the
autumn. In this Parliament the people's party gained control, and many
reforms were instituted. Led by such daring men as Pym, Hampden, Cromwell,
and the younger Vane, resolutions were passed censuring the levying of
ship-money, tonnage and poundage, monopolies, innovations in religion--in
fact, all the grievances of the oppressed which had been ignored for a
decade were brought to light and redressed by the House, quite regardless
of the King's attitude.
The chief of the abuses which it was bent upon remedying was the imposing
of taxes upon the authority of the King and the persecution of the
Puritans. But there was another grievance which received the attention of
the Long Parliament, and which forms a close link with the reforms of
1832--namely, the attempt to improve the system of representation in
Parliament, an attempt which was partially carried into effect by Cromwell
later. Under Charles II, however, things fell back into their old way and
gradually went on from bad to worse until the tide changed, and the people
became finally aroused after two hundred years to the need of a radical
change. The blindness of the Duke of Wellington, declaring no reform was
needed, is hardly less to be marveled at than that of King Charles
declaring he would rule without Parliament. The King took the ground that
the people had no right to representation in the government; the Minister,
that only some of the people had a right.
The horrors of revolution followed upon the blindness of the one, with its
reactionary aftermath, while upon the other there was violence, it is
true, and a revolution was feared, but through the wise measures of the
liberal ministers no subversion of the government occurred. Violence
reached such a pitch, however, that the castle of Nottingham in Derby was
burned, the King's brother was dragged from his horse, and Lord
Londonderry roughly treated. The mob at Bristol was so infuriated that Sir
C. Wetherell, the Recorder of the city, who had voted against the bill,
had to be escorted to the Guildhall by a hundred mounted gentlemen. Two
men having been arrested, the mob attacked and destroyed the interior of
the Mansion House, set fire to the Bishop's palace and to many other
buildings. There was not only an enormous loss of property, but loss of
life.
A quieter demonstration at Birmingham carries us back, as it might have
carried Browning, to the "great-hearted men" of the Long Parliament. A
meeting was called which was attended by one hundred and fifty thousand
persons, and resolutions were passed to the effect that if the Reform Bill
were not passed they would refuse to pay taxes, as Hampden had refused to
pay ship-money.
The final act in this momentous drama was initiated with the introduction
by Lord John Russell of the third Reform Bill in December, 1831. Again it
was defeated in the House of Lords, whereupon some of the Cabinet wished
to ask the King to create a sufficient number of new peers to force the
bill through the House. Earl Grey was not at all in favor of this, but at
last consented. This course was not welcome to the House of Lords, and the
doubtful members in the House promised that if this suggestion were not
carried into effect they would insure a sufficient majority in the House
of Lords to carry the bill. This was done, but before the Lords went into
committee a hostile motion postponing the disfranchisement clauses was
carried. Then Earl Grey asked for the creation of new peers. As it would
require the creating of about fifty new peers, the King refused, the
ministry resigned and the Duke of Wellington came into power again. But
his power, like that of Strafford, was broken. He had reached the point of
recognizing that some reform was needed, but he could not persuade his
colleagues of this. In the meantime the House of Commons passed a
resolution of confidence in the Grey administration. Such determined
opposition being shown not only in Parliament but by the people in various
ways, Wellington felt his only course was resignation. William IV had,
much to his chagrin, to recall Grey, but he escaped the necessity of
creating a large number of peers, by asking the opposition in the House of
Lords to withdraw their resistance to the bill. The Duke of Wellington and
others thereupon absented themselves, and finding further obstruction was
useless, the Lords at last passed the bill and it became law in June,
1832.
This national crisis through which Browning had lived could not fail to
have made its impression on him. It is certainly an indication of the
depth of his interest in the growth of liberalism that his first English
subject, written only a few years subsequent to this momentous change in
governmental methods, should have dealt with a period whose analysis and
interpretation in dramatic form gave him every opportunity for the
expression of his sympathy with liberal ideals. Broad-minded in his
interpretation of Strafford's career, in love with his qualities of
loyalty, and his capabilities of genuine affection for the vacillating
Charles, he made Strafford the hero of his play, but it is Pym whom, in
his play, he has exalted as the nation's hero, and into whose mouth he has
put one of the greatest and most intensely pathetic speeches ever uttered
by an Englishman. It is when he confronts Strafford at the last:
"Have I done well? Speak, England! Whose sole sake
I still have labored for, with disregard
To my own heart,--for whom my youth was made
Barren, my manhood waste, to offer up
Her sacrifice--this friend--this Wentworth here--
Who walked in youth with me, loved me, it may be,
And whom, for his forsaking England's cause,
I hunted by all means (trusting that she
Would sanctify all means) even to the block
Which waits for him. And saying this, I feel
No bitterer pang than first I felt, the hour
I swore that Wentworth might leave us, but I
Would never leave him: I do leave him now.
I render up my charge (be witness, God!)
To England who imposed it. I have done
Her bidding--poorly, wrongly,--it may be,
With ill effects--for I am weak, a man:
Still, I have done my best, my human best,
Not faltering for a moment. It is done.
And this said, if I say ... yes, I will say
I never loved but one man--David not
More Jonathan! Even thus I love him now:
And look for that chief portion in that world
Where great hearts led astray are turned again,
(Soon it may be, and, certes, will be soon:
My mission over, I shall not live long)--
Ay, here I know and talk--I dare and must,
Of England, and her great reward, as all
I look for there; but in my inmost heart,
Believe, I think of stealing quite away
To walk once more with Wentworth--my youth's friend
Purged from all error, gloriously renewed,
And Eliot shall not blame us. Then indeed ...
This is no meeting, Wentworth! Tears increase
Too hot. A thin mist--is it blood?--enwraps
The face I loved once. Then, the meeting be."
At the same time that Browning was writing "Strafford," he was also
engaged upon "Sordello." In that he has given expression to his democratic
philosophy through his construction and interpretation of Sordello's
character as a champion of the people as well as a poet who ushered in the
dawn of the Italian literary Renaissance. As he made Paracelsus develop
from a dependence upon knowledge as his sole guide in his philosophy of
life into a perception of the place emotion must hold in any satisfactory
theory of life, and put into his mouth a modern conception of evolution
illuminated by his own artistic emotion, so he makes Sordello develop from
the individualistic type to the socialist type of man, who is bent upon
raising the masses of the people to higher conditions. The ideal of
liberal forms of government was even in Sordello's time a growing one,
sifting into Italy from Greek precedents, but Browning's Sordello sees
something beyond either political or ecclesiastical espousal of the
people's cause--namely, the espousal of the people's cause by the people
themselves, the arrival of the self-governing democracy, an ideal much
nearer attainment now than when Browning was writing:
"Two parties take the world up, and allow
No third, yet have one principle, subsist
By the same injustice; whoso shall enlist
With either, ranks with man's inveterate foes.
So there is one less quarrel to compose
The Guelf, the Ghibelline may be to curse--
I have done nothing, but both sides do worse
Than nothing. Nay, to me, forgotten, reft
Of insight, lapped by trees and flowers, was left
The notion of a service--ha? What lured
Me here, what mighty aim was I assured
Must move Taurello? What if there remained
A cause, intact, distinct from these, ordained
For me its true discoverer?"
The mood here portrayed was one which might have been fostered in Browning
in relation to his own time. He doubtless felt that neither the
progressive movements in the state nor those in religion really touched
upon the true principles of freedom for the individual. He might not have
defined these principles to himself any more definitely than as a desire
for the greatest happiness of the whole number. And even of such an ideal
as that he had his doubts because of the necessity of his mind to find a
logical use for evil in the world. This he could only do by supposing it a
divine means for the development of the human soul in its sojourn in this
life. Speaking in his own person in "Sordello," he gives expression to
this doubt in the following passage in the third book:
"I ask youth and strength
And health for each of you, not more--at length
Grown wise, who asked at home that the whole race
Might add the spirit's to the body's grace,
And all be dizened out as chiefs and bards.
* * * * *
"----As good you sought
To spare me the Piazza's slippery stone
Or keep me to the unchoked canals alone,
As hinder Life the evil with the good
Which make up Living rightly understood."
Still, though vague as to what the good for the whole people might be,
there was no vagueness in his mind as to the people's right to possess the
power to bring about their own happiness. Yet given the right principles,
he would not have the attempt made to put them into practice all at once.
His final attitude toward the problem of the best methods for bettering
human conditions in the poem is, strictly speaking, that of the
opportunist working a step toward his ideal rather than that of the
revolutionist who would gain it by one leap. Sordello should realize that
"God has conceded two lights to a man--
One, of men's whole work, man's first
Step to the plan's completeness."
Man's part is to take this first step, leaving the ultimate ideal to be
worked out, as time goes, on by successive men. To reach at one bound the
ideal would be to regard one's self as a god. Some such theory of action
as this is the one which guides the Fabian socialist working in England
to-day. Nothing is to be done to subvert the present order of society, but
every opportunity is to be made the most of which will tend to the
betterment of the conditions of the masses, until by degrees the
socialist regime will become possible. Sordello was too much of the
idealist to seize the opportunity when it came to him of helping the
people by means of the Ghibelline power suddenly conferred upon him, and
so he failed.
This opportunist doctrine is one especially congenial to the English
temperament and certainly has its practical advantages, if it is not so
inspiring as the headlong idealism of a Pym, which just as surely has its
disadvantages in the danger that the ideal will be ahead of humanity's
power of seizing it and living it, and will therefore run the risk of
being overturned by a reaction to the low plane of the past; especially
does this danger become apparent when the way to the attainment of the
ideal is paved with violence.
While Browning was writing "Sordello," the preparation of which included a
short trip to Italy, the Chartist agitation was going on in England. It
may well, at that time, have been considered to demand an ideal beyond
possibility of attainment, which was proved by its final utter
annihilation. The workingmen's association led by Mr. Duncombe was
responsible for a program in the form of a parliamentary petition which
asked for six things. These were: universal suffrage, or the right of
voting by every male of twenty-one years of age; vote by ballot; annual
Parliaments; abolition of the property qualification for members of
Parliament; members of Parliament to be paid for their services; equal
electoral districts.
There were two sorts of Chartists, moral-force Chartists and
physical-force Chartists, the latter of whom did as much damage as
possible in the agitation.
The combined forces were led by Feargus O'Connor, an Irish barrister, who
madly spent his force and energy for ten years in carrying forward the
movement, and, at last, confronted by disagreement in the ranks of the
Chartists and the Duke of Wellington and his troops, gave it up in
despair. He was a martyr to the cause, for he took its failure so much to
heart that he ended his days in a lunatic asylum.
This final failure came many years after "Sordello" was finished, but the
poet's conclusions in "Sordello" seem almost prophetic in the light of the
passage in the poem already quoted, in which the poet declares himself
grown wiser than he was at home, where he had asked the utmost for all
men, and now realized that this cannot be attained in one leap.
Agitation about the relations between England and Ireland were also
filling public attention at this time, but most important of all the
contemporary movements was the League for the Repeal of the Corn Laws. The
story of the growth and the peaceful methods by which it attained its
growth is one of the most interesting in the annals of England's political
development. It meant the adoption of the great principle of free trade,
to which England has since adhered. For eight years the agitation in
regard to it was continued, during which great meetings were held,
thousands of pounds were subscribed to the cause, and the names of Sir
Richard Cobden and John Bright became famous as leaders in the righteous
cause of untaxed food for the people. John Bright's account of how he
became interested in the movement and associated himself with Cobden in
the work, told in a speech made at Rochdale, gives a vivid picture of the
human side of the problem which by the conservatives of the day was
treated as a merely political issue:
"In the year 1841 I was at Leamington and spent several months there.
It was near the middle of September there fell upon me one of the
heaviest blows that can visit any man. I found myself living there
with none living of my house but a motherless child. Mr. Cobden
called upon me the day after that event, so terrible to me and so
prostrating. He said, after some conversation, 'Don't allow this
grief, great as it is, to weigh you down too much. There are at this
moment in thousands of homes in this country wives and children who
are dying of hunger--of hunger made by the law. If you come along with
me, we will never rest till we have got rid of the Corn Law.' We saw
the colossal injustice which cast its shadow over every part of the
nation, and we thought we saw the true remedy and the relief, and that
if we united our efforts, as you know we did, with the efforts of
hundreds and thousands of good men in various parts of the country, we
should be able to bring that remedy home, and to afford that relief to
the starving people of this country."
The movement thus inaugurated was, as Molesworth declares, "without
parallel in the history of the world for the energy with which it was
conducted, the rapid advance it made, and the speedy and complete success
that crowned its efforts; for the great change it wrought in public
opinion and the consequent legislation of the country; overcoming
prejudice and passion, dispelling ignorance and conquering powerful
interests, with no other weapons than those of reason and that eloquence
which great truths and strong conviction inspire."
A signal victory for the League was gained in 1843, when the London
_Times_, which up to that time had regarded the League with suspicion
and even alarm, suddenly turned round and ranged itself with the advancing
tide of progress by declaring, "The League is a great fact. It would be
foolish, nay, rash, to deny its importance. It is a great fact that there
should have been created in the homestead of our manufacturers
(Manchester) a confederacy devoted to the agitation of one political
question, persevering at it year after year, shrinking from no trouble,
dismayed at no danger, making light of every obstacle. It demonstrates the
hardy strength of purpose, the indomitable will, by which Englishmen
working together for a great object are armed and animated."
The final victory, however, did not come until three years later, when Sir
Robert Peel, who became Prime Minister to defend the Corn Laws, announced
that he had been completely convinced of their injustice, and that he was
an "absolute convert to the free-trade principle, and that the
introduction of the principle into all departments of our commercial
legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question of time
and convenience." This was in January, 1845, and shortly after, June,
1846, the bill for the total repeal of the Corn Laws passed the House.
How much longer it might have been before the opposition was carried is a
question if it had not been for the failure of the grain crops and the
widespread potato disease which plunged Ireland into a state of famine,
and threatened the whole country with more or less of disaster.
Even when this state of affairs became apparent in the summer of 1845
there was still much delay. The Cabinet met and discussed and discussed;
still Parliament was not assembled; and then it was that the Mansion House
Relief Committee of Dublin drew up resolutions stating that famine and
pestilence were approaching throughout the land, and impeaching the
conduct of the Ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament
together.
But still Peel, already won over, could not take his Cabinet with him; he
was forced to resign. Lord John Russell was called to form a ministry, but
failed, when Peel was recalled, and the day was carried.
Browning's brief but pertinent allusion to this struggle in "The
Englishman in Italy" shows clearly how strongly his sympathies were with
the League and how disgusted he was with the procrastination of Parliament
in taking a perfectly obvious step for the betterment of the people.
"Fortnu, in my England at home,
Men meet gravely to-day
And debate, if abolishing Corn laws
Be righteous and wise
If 'twere proper, Scirocco should vanish
In black from the skies!"
An occasional allusion or poem like this makes us aware from time to time
of Browning's constant sympathy with any movement which meant good to the
masses. Even if he had not written near the end of his life "Why I am a
Liberal," there could be no doubt in any one's mind of his political
ideals. In "The Lost Leader" is perhaps his strongest utterance upon the
subject. The fact that it was called out by Wordsworth's lapse into
conservatism after the horrors of the French Revolution had brought him
and his _sans culotte_ brethren, Southey and Coleridge, to pause, a fact
very possibly freshened in Browning's mind by Wordsworth's receiving a
pension in 1842 and the poet-laureateship in 1843, does not affect the
force of the poem as a personal utterance on the side of democracy.
Browning, himself, considered the poem far too fierce as a portrayal of
Wordsworth's case.[2] He evidently forgot Wordsworth, and thought only of
a renegade liberal as he went on with the poem. It was written the same
year that there occurred the last attempt to postpone the passing of the
Anti-Corn Law Bill, when the intensity of feeling on the part of all who
believed in progress was at its height, and the bare thought of a deserter
from Liberal ranks would be enough to exasperate any man who had the
nation's welfare at heart. That Browning's feeling at the time reached the
point not only of exasperation but of utmost scorn for any one who was not
on the liberal side is shown most forcibly in the bitter lines:
"Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,
One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,
One more devil's triumph and sorrow for angels,
One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!"
Browning speaks of having thought of Wordsworth at an unlucky juncture.
Whatever the exact episode which called forth the poem may have been, we
are safe in saying that at a time when Disraeli was attacking Sir Robert
Peel because of his honesty in avowing his conversion to free trade, and
because of his bravery in coming out from his party, in breaking up his
cabinet and regardless of all costs in determining to carry the bill or
resign, and finally carrying it in the face of the greatest odds--at
such a time, when a great conservative leader had shown himself capable of
being won over to a great liberal principle; the spectacle of a deserter
from the cause, and that deserter a member of one's own brotherhood of
poets, would be especially hard to bear.
One feels a little like asking why did not Browning let his enthusiasm
carry him for once into a contemporary expression of admiration for Sir
Robert Peel? Perhaps the tortuous windings of parliamentary proceedings
obscured to a near view the true greatness of Peel's action.
The year of this great change in England's policy was the year of Robert
Browning's marriage and his departure for Italy, where he lived for
fifteen years. During this time and for some years after his return to
England there is no sign that he was taking any interest in the political
affairs of his country. Human character under romantic conditions in a
social environment, or the thought problems of the age, as we have already
seen, occupied his attention, and for the subject matter of these he more
often than not went far afield from his native country.
In "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau" is the poet's first deliberate portrayal
of a person of contemporary prominence in the political world. The
alliance of Napoleon III with England brought his policy of government
into strong contrast with that of the liberal leaders in English politics,
a contrast which had been emphasized through Lord Palmerston's sympathy
with the _coup d'etat_.
The news of the manner in which Louis Napoleon had carried out his policy
of smashing the French constitution caused horror and consternation in
England, and the Queen at once gave instructions that nothing should be
done by her ambassador in Paris which could be in any way construed as an
interference in the internal affairs of France. Already, however, Lord
Palmerston had expressed to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs his
entire approbation in the act of Napoleon and his conviction that he could
not have acted otherwise than as he had done. When this was known, the
Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, wrote Palmerston a letter, causing his
resignation, which was accepted very willingly by the Queen. The letter
was as follows:
"While I concur in the foreign policy of which you have been the
adviser, and much as I admire the energy and ability with which it has
been carried into effect, I cannot but observe that misunderstandings
perpetually renewed, violations of prudence and decorum too
frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to have
followed from a sound policy and able admirers. I am, therefore, most
reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct of
foreign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advantage to
the country."
When England's fears that Louis Napoleon would emulate his illustrious
predecessor and invade her shores were allayed, her attitude was modified.
She forgot the horrors of the _coup d'etat_ and formed an alliance with
him, and her hospitable island became his refuge in his downfall.
A prominent figure in European politics for many years, Louis Napoleon had
just that combination of greatness and mediocrity which would appeal to
Browning's love of a human problem. Furthermore, Napoleon was brought very
directly to the poet's notice through his Italian campaign and Mrs.
Browning's interest in the political crisis in Italy, which found
expression in her fine group of Italian patriotic poems.
The question has been asked, "Will the unbiased judgment of posterity
allow to Louis Napoleon some extenuating circumstances, or will it
pronounce an unqualified condemnation upon the man who, for the sake of
consolidating his own power and strengthening his corrupt government,
spilled the blood of no less than a hundred thousand Frenchmen?"
When all Europe was putting to itself some such question as this, and
answering it with varying degrees of leniency, Browning conceived the idea
of making Napoleon speak for himself, and at the same time he added what
purports to be the sort of criticism of him indulged in by a Thiers or a
Victor Hugo. The interest of the poem centers in Napoleon's own
vindication of himself as portrayed by Browning. What Browning wrote of
the poem in a letter to a friend in 1872 explains fully his aim, as well
as showing by indirection, at least, how much he was interested in
political affairs at this time, though so little of this interest crops
out in his poetry: "I think in the main he meant to do what I say, and but
for weakness--grown more apparent in his last years than formerly--would
have done what I say he did not. I thought badly of him at the beginning
of his career, _et pour cause_; better afterward, on the strength of the
promises he made and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him
very weak in the last miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to
Thiers's best." At another time he wrote: "I am glad you like what the
editor of the _Edinburgh_ calls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it
is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, 'a
scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.' It is just what
I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself."
Browning depicts the man as perfectly conscious of his own limitations. He
recognizes that he is not the genius, nor the creator of a new order of
things, but that his power lies in his faculty of taking an old ideal and
improving upon it. He contends that in following out his special gifts as
a conservator he is doing just what God intended him to do, and as to his
method of doing it that is his own affair. God gives him the commission
and leaves it to his human faculties to carry it out, not inquiring what
these are, but simply asking at the end if the commission has been
accomplished.
Once admit these two things--namely, that his nature, though not of the
highest, is such as God gave him, and his lack of responsibility in regard
to any moral ideal, so that he accomplishes the purpose of this
nature--and a loophole is given for any inconsistencies he may choose to
indulge in in bringing about that strengthening of an old ideal in which
he believes. The old ideal is, of course, the monarchical principle of
government, administered, however, in such a manner that it will be for
the good of society in all its complex manifestations of to-day. His
notion of society's good consists in a balancing of all its forces,
secured by the smoothing down of any extreme tendencies, each having its
orbit marked but no more, so that none shall impede the other's path.
"In this wide world--though each and all alike,
Save for [him] fain would spread itself through space
And leave its fellow not an inch of way."
Browning makes him indulge in a curiously sophisticated view of the
relativity of good and evil in the course of his argument, to the effect
that since there is a further good conceivable beyond the utmost earth can
realize, therefore to change the agency--the evil whereby good is brought
about, try to make good do good as evil does--would be just as foolish as
if a chemist wanting white and knowing that black ingredients were needed
to make the dye insisted these should be white, too. A bad world is that
which he experiences and approves. A good world he does not want in which
there would be no pity, courage, hope, fear, sorrow, joy--devotedness, in
short--which he believes form the ultimate allowed to man; therefore it
has been his policy not to do away with the evil in the society he is
saving. To mitigate, not to cure, has been his aim.
Browning would, himself, answer the sophistry, here, by showing that evil
though permitted by divine power was only a means of good through man's
working against whatever he conceives to be evil with the whole strength
of his being. To deliberately follow the policy of conserving evil would
be in the end to annihilate the good. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau could
not see so far as this.
It is not astonishing that with such a policy as this his methods of
carrying it out might seem somewhat dubious if not positively criminal.
His departure from his early idealism is excused for the reason that
idealism is not practicable when the region of talk is left for the real
action of life. Every step in his own aggrandizement is apologized for on
the ground that what needed to be accomplished could only be done by a
strong hand and that strong hand his own. He was in fact an unprincipled
utilitarian as Browning presents him, who spoiled even what virtue resides
in utilitarianism by letting his care for saving society be too much
influenced by his desire for personal glory. One ideal undertaking he
permitted himself, the freeing of Italy from the Austrian yoke. But he was
not strong enough for any such high flight of idealism, as the sequel
proved.
Browning does not bring out in the poem the Emperor's real reasons for
stopping short in the Italian campaign, which certainly were sufficient
from a practical standpoint, but as Archibald Forbes says in his "Life of
Napoleon," should have been thought of before he published his program of
freedom to Italy "from the Alps to the Adriatic." "Even when he addressed
the Italians at Milan," continues Forbes, "the new light had not broken in
upon him which revealed the strength of the quadrilateral, the cost of
expelling the Austrians from Venetia, and the conviction that further
French successes would certainly bring mobilized Germany into the field.
That new light seems to have flashed upon Napoleon for the first time from
the stern Austrian ranks on the day of Solferino. It was then he realized
that should he go forward he would be obliged to attack in front an enemy
entrenched behind great fortresses, and protected against any diversion on
his flanks by the neutrality of the territories surrounding him."
Mrs. Browning, whose consternation and grief over Villafranca broke out in
burning verse, yet made a defence of Napoleon's action here which might
have been worked into Browning's poem with advantage. She wrote to John
Foster that while Napoleon's intervention in Italy overwhelmed her with
joy it did not dazzle her into doubts as to the motive of it, "but
satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. Thus it
did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed
perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium and an invasion of England. Have we not
watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the
Napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? Wasn't he to crush Piedmontese
institutions like so many eggshells? Was he ever going away with his army,
and hadn't he occupied houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the
city? Didn't he keep troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to
come down on us with a grand duke or a Kingdom of Etruria and Plon-Plon to
rule it? And wouldn't he give back Bologna to the Pope?... Were not
Cipriani, Farini and other patriots his 'mere creatures' in treacherous
correspondence with the Tuileries 'doing his dirty work'?" Of such
accusations as these the intelligent English journals were full, but she
maintains that against "The Inane and Immense Absurd" from which they were
born is to be set "a nation saved." She realized also how hard Napoleon's
position in France must be to maintain "forty thousand priests with
bishops of the color of Monseigneur d'Orleans and company, having, of
course, a certain hold on the agricultural population which forms so large
a part of the basis of the imperial throne. Then add to that the parties
who use this Italian question as a weapon simply."
Many of Napoleon's own statements have furnished Browning with the
arguments used in the apology. After deliberately destroying the
constitution, for example, and himself being the cause of the violence and
bloodshed in Paris, he coolly addressed the people in the following
strain, in which we certainly recognize Hohenstiel-Schwangau:
"Frenchmen! the disturbances are appeased. Whatever may be the decision of
the people, society is saved. The first part of my task is accomplished.
The appeal to the nation, for the purpose of terminating the struggle of
parties, I knew would not cause any serious risk to the public
tranquillity. Why should the people have risen against me? If I do not
any longer possess your confidence--if your ideas are changed--there is no
occasion to make precious blood flow; it will be sufficient to place an
adverse vote in the urn. I shall always respect the decision of the
people."
His cleverness in combining the idea of authority with that of the idea of
obeying the will of the people is curiously illustrated in his speech at
the close of his dictatorship, during which it must be confessed that he
had done excellently well for the country--so well, indeed, that even the
socialists were ready to cry "_Vive l'Empereur!_"
"While watching me reestablish the institutions and reawaken the
memories of the Empire, people have repeated again and again that I
wished to reconstitute the Empire itself. If this had been so the
transformation would have been accomplished long ago; neither the
means nor the opportunities would have been lacking.... But I have
remained content with that I had. Resolved now, as heretofore, to do
all in my power for France and nothing for myself, I would accept any
modification of the present state of things only if forced by
necessity.... If parties remain quiet, nothing shall be changed. But
if they endeavor to sap the foundations of my government; if they deny
the legitimacy of the result of the popular vote; if, in short, they
continually put the future of the country in jeopardy, then, but only
then, it might be prudent to ask the people for a new title which
would irrevocably fix on my head the power with which they have
already clothed me. But let us not anticipate difficulties; let us
preserve the Republic. Under its banner I am anxious to inaugurate
once more an epoch of reconciliation and pardon; and I call on all
without distinction who will frankly cooperate with me for the public
good."
In contrast to such fair-sounding phrases Napoleon was capable of the most
dishonorable tactics in order to gain his ends. Witness the episode of his
tempting Bismarck with offers of an alliance against Austria at the same
time that he was treating secretly with Francis Joseph for the cession of
Venetia in return for Silesia. And while negotiating secretly and
separately with these two sworn enemies, he pretended to be so
disinterested as to suggest the submission of their quarrel to a European
congress.
Browning has certainly presented a good portrait of the man as the history
of his own utterances contrasted with the history of his actions proves.
In trying to bridge with this apology the discrepancies between the two he
has, however, attributed to Louis Napoleon a degree of self-consciousness
beyond any ever evinced by him. The principle of imperialism was a
conviction with him. That he desired to help the people of France and to a
great extent succeeded, is true; that he combined with this desire the
desire of power for himself is true; that he used unscrupulous means to
gain whatever end he desired when such were necessary is true; but that he
was conscious of his own despicable traits to the extent that the poet
makes him conscious of them is most unlikely. Nor is it likely that he
would defend himself upon any such subtle ground as that his character and
temperament being the gift of God he was bound to follow out his nature in
order that God's purposes might be accomplished. It is rather an
explanation of his life from the philosopher's or psychologist's
standpoint than a self-conscious revelation. It is none the less
interesting on this account, while the scene setting gives it a thoroughly
human and dramatic touch.
Whatever may be said of Napoleon himself, his rule was fraught with
consequences of import for the whole of Europe, not because of what he
was, but because of what he was not. He was an object lesson on the
fallacy of trying to govern so that all parties will be pleased by
autocratically keeping each one from fully expressing itself. The result
is that each grows more aware of the suppression than of the amount of
freedom allowed to it, and nobody is pleased. When added to such a policy
as this is the surmounting desire for power and the Machiavellian
determination to attain it by any means, fair or foul, a principle of
statecraft which by the middle of the century could not be practised in
its most acute form without arousing the most severe criticism, his power
carried within it the seeds of destruction.
It has been said that "never in the history of the world has one man
undertaken a task more utterly beyond the power of mortal man than that
which Louis Napoleon was pledged to carry through." He professed to be at
one and the same time the elect sovereign of the people, a son of the
revolution, a champion of universal suffrage, and an adversary of the
demagogues. In the first of these characters he was bound to justify his
elevation by economic and social reforms, in his second character he had
to destroy the last trace of political liberty. He had, in fact, assumed
various utterly incompatible attitudes, and the day that the masses found
themselves deceived in their expectations, and the middle classes found
their interests were betrayed, reaction was inevitable.
[Illustration: WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE]
In spite of his heinous faults, however, historians have grown more and
more inclined to admit that Napoleon filled for a time a necessary niche
in the line of progress, just that step which Browning makes him say
the genius will recognize that he fills--namely, to
"Carry the incompleteness on a stage,
Make what was crooked straight, and roughness smooth,
And weakness strong: wherein if I succeed,
It will not prove the worst achievement, sure
In the eyes at least of one man, one I look
Nowise to catch in critic company:
To-wit, the man inspired, the genius, self
Destined to come and change things thoroughly.
He, at least, finds his business simplified,
Distinguishes the done from undone, reads
Plainly what meant and did not mean this time
We live in, and I work on, and transmit
To such successor: he will operate
On good har
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