Browning and His Century Part 17

VII

PROPHETIC VISIONS

The division between centuries, though it be an arbitrary one, does actually appear to mark fairly definite steps in human development, and already there are indications that the twentieth century is taking on a character quite distinct from that of the nineteenth. It looks now as if it were to be the century of the realization of mankind's wildest dreams in the past. Air navigation, the elixir of life, perpetual motion, are some of them. About the first no one can now have much skepticism, for if airships are not as yet common objects of the everyday sky, they, at least, occupy a large share of attention in the magazines, while the aviator, a being who did not exist in the last century, is now the hero of the hour.

With regard to the second, though no sparkling elixir distilled from some rare flower, such as that Septimius Felton sought in Hawthorne's tale, has been discovered, the great scientist Metchnikoff has brought to light a preserver of youth more in keeping with the science of the day--namely, a microbe, possessing power to destroy the poison that produces age. Whether perpetual youth is to lead to immortality in the flesh will probably be a question for other centuries to discuss, though if Metchnikoff is right there is no reason why we should not retain our youthfulness all our lives in this century. Add to this, machinery run by the perpetual energy of radium--a possibility, if radium can ever be obtained in sufficient quant.i.ties to supply the needed power to keep modern civilization on its ceaseless "go"--and we may picture to ourselves, before the end of the twentieth century, youths of ninety starting forth on voyages of thirty years in radium ships, which, like the fairy watch of the Princess Rossetta, will never go wrong and will never need to be wound up, metaphorically speaking. It would almost seem as if some method of enlarging the earth, or of arranging voyages to the moon and Mars, would be necessary in order to give the new radium machinery sufficient scope for its activities. However, at present it seems unlikely that it will ever be possible to produce more than half an ounce of radium a year. As it would take a ton to run one ship for thirty years, and the expense would be something almost incalculable, it is a dream only to be realized by the inventing of methods by which the feeble radio-activity known to exist in many other substances can be utilized. These methods have not yet been invented, but it is a good deal that they have been thought of, for what man thinks of he generally seems to have the indomitable energy to accomplish.

How such inventions as these, even if very far from attaining success, may affect the social and thought ideals of the century it is impossible to say. The automobile is said to have brought about a change, not altogether beneficial, to the intellectual and artistic growth of society to-day. It has taken such powerful possession of the minds of humanity that homes have been mortgaged, music and books and pictures have been sacrificed, in order that all the money procurable could be put into the machines and their running. You hear complaints against the automobile from writers, musicians, and artists. The only thing that really has a good sale is the automobile. What effect rushing about so constantly at high speed in the open air is to have on the brain-power is another interesting problem.

Perhaps it is this growing subjective delight in motion which is causing the development of an artistic taste dependent upon motion as its chief element. Motion pictures and dancing appeal to the public with such insistence that plays will not hold successfully without an almost exaggerated attention to action and dancing, which, whenever it is at all possible, make a part of the "show."

The pictures of the new school of painters, the futurists, also reveal the craze for motion. They try to put into their pictures the successive and decidedly blurred impressions, from the ill.u.s.trations I have seen, of scenes in motion, with a result that is certainly startling and interesting, but which it is difficult to believe is beautiful. One has a horrible suspicion that all this emphasis upon motion in art is a running to seed of the art which appeals to the eye and with a psychological content derived princ.i.p.ally from sensation. Perhaps in some other century, fatuous humanity will like to listen to operas or to plays in a pitch-dark theatre. This will represent the going to seed of the art which appeals to the ear, and a psychological content derived princ.i.p.ally from sentiment.

While movement seems to be the keynote of the century thus far, in its everyday life and in its art manifestation, very interesting developments are taking place in scientific theories and in philosophy, as well as in the world of education and sociology.

In relation to Browning and the other chief poets of the nineteenth century, the only aspects of interest are in the region of thought and social ideals.

With the exception of Tennyson, no other of the chief poets of the century need be considered in this connection with Browning, because, as we have seen in a previous chapter, they reflected on the whole the prevalent disbelief and doubt of the century which came with the revelations of science. Many people have regarded Tennyson as the chief prophet of the century. He seems, however, to the present writer to have held an att.i.tude which reflected the general tone of religious aspiration in the century, rather than one which struck a new note indicating the direction in which future religious aspiration might turn.

The conflict in his mind is between doubt and belief. To doubt he has often given the most poignant expression, as in his poem called "Despair."

The story is of a man and his wife who have lost all religious faith through the reading of scientific books:

"Have I crazed myself over their horrible infidel writings? O, yes, For these are the new dark ages, you see, of the popular press, When the bat comes out of his cave, and the owls are whooping at noon, And doubt is the lord of the dunghill, and crows to the sun and the moon, Till the sun and the moon of our science are both of them turned into blood.

And hope will have broken her heart, running after a shadow of good; For their knowing and know-nothing books are scatter'd from hand to hand-- _We_ have knelt in your know-all chapel, too, looking over the sand."

If the effect of science was bad upon this weak-minded pair, the effect of religion as it had been taught them was no better. The absolute hopelessness of a blasted faith in all things reaches its climax in the following stanzas:

"And the suns of the limitless universe sparkled and shone in the sky, Flashing with fires as of G.o.d, but we knew that their light was a lie-- Bright as with deathless hope--but, however they sparkled and shone, The dark little worlds running round them were worlds of woe like our own-- No soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below, A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe.

"See, we were nursed in the drear nightfold of your fatalist creed, And we turn'd to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed, When the light of a sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the past.

And the cramping creeds that had madden'd the peoples would vanish at last, And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend, For He spoke, or it seemed that He spoke, of a h.e.l.l without help, without end.

"Hoped for a dawn, and it came, but the promise had faded away; We had pa.s.sed from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day; He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire, The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire-- Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak trodden down by the strong, Of a dying worm in a world, all ma.s.sacre, murder and wrong."

There are many hopeful pa.s.sages in Tennyson to offset such deep pessimism as is expressed in this one, which, moreover, being a dramatic utterance it must be remembered, does not reflect any settled conviction on the poet's part, though it shows him liable to moods of the most extreme doubt. In "The Ancient Sage" the agnostic spirit of the century is fully described, but instead of leading to a mood of despair, the mood is one of clinging to faith in the face of all doubt. The sage speaking, says:

"Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son, Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in, Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one.

Thou canst not prove thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal--nay, my son, Thou canst not prove that I who speak with thee, Are not thyself in converse with thyself, For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven. Wherefore thou be wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!

She reels not in the storm of warring words, She brightens at the clash of 'Yes' and 'No.'

She sees the best that glimmers thro' the worst, She feels the sun is hid but for a night, She spies the summer thro' the winter bud, She tastes the fruit before the blossom falls, She hears the lark within the songless egg, She finds the fountain where they wail'd Mirage!"

There is nothing here more rea.s.suring than a statement made by the sage, based upon no argument, nor revelation, nor intuition--nothing but the utilitarian doctrine that it will be wiser to cling to Faith beyond Faith!

This is a sample of the sort of a.s.surance in the reality of G.o.d and of immortality which Tennyson was in the habit of giving. In the poem called "Vastness" he presents with genuine power a pessimistic view of humanity and civilization in all its various phases--all of no use, neither the good any more than the bad, "if we all of us end but in being our own corpse-coffins at last?" The effect of the dismal atmosphere of the poem as a whole is supposed to be dissipated by the last stanza:

"Peace, let it be! for I loved him, and love him forever: the dead are not dead but alive."

The conviction here of immortality through personal love is born of the feeling that his friend whom he has loved must live forever. The note of "In Memoriam" is sounded again. Tennyson's philosophy, in a nutsh.e.l.l, seems to be that doubts are not so much overcome as quieted by a struggling faith in the truths of religion, of which the chief a.s.surance lies in the thought of personal love. Not as in Browning, that human love, because of its beauty and ecstasy, is a symbol of divine love, but because of its wish to be reunited to the one beloved is an earnest of continued existence. While Tennyson's poetry is saturated with allusions to the science of the century, it seems to be ever the dark side of the doctrine of evolution that is dwelt upon by him, while his religion is held to in spite of the truths of science, not because the truths of science have given him in any way a new revelation of beauty.

Much more emphasis has been laid upon Tennyson's importance as a prophet in religious matters than seems to the present writer warranted. He did not even keep pace with the thought of the century, though his poetry undoubtedly reflected the liberalized theology of the earlier years of the second half of the century. As Joseph Jacobs says, "In Memoriam" has been to the Broad Church Movement what the "Christian Year" has been to the High Church. But where is the Broad Church now? Tennyson was, on the whole, adverse to evolution, which has been almost an instinct in English speculation for the last quarter of a century. So far as he was the voice of his age in speculative matters, he only represented the thought of the "sixties."

What vision Tennyson did have came not through intuition or the higher reason, but through his psychic power of self-hypnotism. In "The Ancient Sage" is a pa.s.sage describing the sort of trance into which he could evidently cause himself to fall:

"For more than once when I Sat all alone, revolving in myself The word that is the symbol of myself, The mortal limit of the self was loosed, And pa.s.sed into the Nameless, as a cloud Melts into Heaven. I touch'd my limbs, the limbs Were strange, not mine--and yet no shade of doubt, But utter clearness, and thro' loss of self, The gain of such large life as match'd with ours Were sun to spark--unshadowable in words, Themselves but shadows of a shadow world."

Such trances have been of common occurrence in the religious life of the world, as Professor James has shown so exhaustively in his great book, "Varieties of Religious Experience." And in that book, too, it is maintained, against the scientific conclusions, that such ecstasies "signify nothing but suggested and imitated hypnoid states, on an intellectual basis of superst.i.tion, and a corporal one of degeneration and hysteria," that mystical states have an actual value as revelations of the truth. After pa.s.sing in review many examples of ecstasy and trance, from the occasional experiences of the poets to the constant experiences of the mediaeval mystics and the Hindu Yogis, he finally comes to the interesting conclusion that:

"This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our one-ness.

This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity--which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which brings it about that the mystical cla.s.sics have, as has been said, neither birthday nor native land."

The witness given religion in Tennyson's mystical trances is then his most valuable contribution to the speculative thought of the century, and in a sense is prophetic of the twentieth century, because in this century revelations attained in this way have been given a credence long denied them except in the case of the uneducated and super-emotional, by a man of the sound scholarship and good judgment of Professor James.

How fully Browning was a representative of the thought of this time, combining as he did an intuitional with a scientific outlook has already been shown. Evolution means for him the progress toward the infinite, and is full of beauty and promise. The failures in nature and life which fill Tennyson with despair furnish to Browning's mind a proof of the existence of the absolute, or a somewhere beyond, where things will be righted.

Observation shows him everywhere in the universe the existence of power and mystery. The mystery is either that of the incomprehensibleness of causes, or is emphasized in the existence of evil. The first leads to awe and wonder, and is a constant spur to mankind to seek further knowledge, but the poet insists that the knowledge so acc.u.mulated is not actual gain, but only a means to gain in so far as it keeps bringing home to the human mind the fact of its own inadequacy in the discovery of truth. The existence of evil leads to the constant effort to overcome it, and to sympathy and pity, and as the failure of knowledge proves a future of truth to be won, so the failure of mankind to attain perfection in moral action proves a future of goodness to be realized. All this may be found either explicitly or implied in the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer, whose fundamental principles, despite the fire of criticism to which he has been subjected from all sides--science, religion, metaphysics, each of which felt it could not claim him exclusively as its own, yet resenting his inclusion of the other two--are now, in the first decade of the twentieth century, receiving the fullest recognition by such masters of the history of nineteenth-century thought as Theodore Merz and emile Boutroux.

People often forget that while Spencer spent his life upon the knowledge or scientific side of human experience, he frequently a.s.serted that there was in the human consciousness an intuition of the absolute which was the only certain knowledge possessed by man. Here again Browning was at one with Spencer. Discussing the problem of a future life in "La Saisiaz," he declares that G.o.d and the soul are the only facts of which he is absolutely certain:

"I have questioned and am answered. Question, answer presuppose Two points: that the thing itself which questions, answers--_is_, it knows; As it also knows the thing perceived outside itself--a force Actual ere its own beginning, operative through its course, Unaffected by its end--that this thing likewise needs must be; Call this--G.o.d, then, call that--soul, and both--the only facts for me.

Prove them facts? That they o'erpa.s.s my power of proving, proves them such."

To this scientific and metaphysical side Browning adds, as has also already been pointed out, a mystical side based upon feeling. His revelations of divinity do not come by means of self-induced trances, as Tennyson's seem to have come, but through the mystery of feeling. This mystical state seems to have been his habitual one, if we may judge by its prominence in his poetry. He occasionally descends to the realm of reason, as he has in "La Saisiaz," but the true plane of his existence is up among the exaltations of aspiration and love. His cosmic sense is a sense of G.o.d as Love, and is the quality most characteristic of the man. It is like, though perhaps not identical with, the mysticism of Whitman, which seems to have been an habitual state. He writes: "There is, apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human ident.i.ty, a wondrous something that realizes without argument, frequently without what is called education (though I think it the goal and apex of all education deserving the name), an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and s.p.a.ce, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-believe and general unsettledness we call _the world_; a soul-sight of that divine clue and unseen thread which holds the whole congeries of things, all history and time, and all events, however trivial, however momentous, like a leashed dog in the hand of the hunter."

This mystic mood of Browning's which underlies his whole work--even a work like "The Ring and the Book," where evil in various forms is rampant and seems for the time being to conquer--is nowhere more fully, and at the same time more concisely, expressed than in his poem "Reverie," one of his last, which ends with a full revelation of this mystical feeling, from which the less inspired reasoning of "La Saisiaz" is a descent:

"Even as the world its life, So have I lived my own-- Power seen with Love at strife, That sure, this dimly shown-- Good rare and evil rife

"Whereof the effect be--faith That, some far day, were found Ripeness in things now rathe, Wrong righted, each chain unbound, Renewal born out of scathe.

"Why faith--but to lift the load, To leaven the lump, where lies Mind prostrate through knowledge owed To the loveless Power it tries To withstand, how vain! In flowed

"Ever resistless fact: No more than the pa.s.sive clay Disputes the potter's act, Could the whelmed mind disobey Knowledge the cataract.

"But, perfect in every part, Has the potter's moulded shape, Leap of man's quickened heart, Throe of his thought's escape, Stings of his soul which dart,

"Through the barrier of flesh, till keen She climbs from the calm and clear, Through turbidity all between From the known to the unknown here, Heaven's 'Shall be' from Earth's 'Has been'?

"Then life is--to wake not sleep, Rise and not rest, but press From earth's level where blindly creep Things perfected more or less, To the heaven's height, far and steep,

"Where, amid what strifes and storms May wait the adventurous quest, Power is Love--transports, transforms, Who aspired from worst to best, Sought the soul's world, spurned the worms!

"I have faith such end shall be: From the first, Power was--I knew.

Life has made clear to me That, strive but for closer view, Love were as plain to see.

"When see? When there dawns a day, If not on the homely earth, Then yonder, worlds away, Where the strange and new have birth And Power comes full in play."

Browning has, far more than Tennyson, put religious speculation upon a basis where it may stand irrespective of a belief in the revelations of historical Christianity. For the central doctrine of Christianity he had so profound a reverence that he recurs to it again and again in his poetry, and at times his feeling seems to carry him to the verge of orthodox belief. So near does he come to it that many religious critics have been convinced that he might be claimed as a Christian in the orthodox sense of the word.

A more careful reading, however, of such poems as "The Death in the Desert," and "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," upon which rest princ.i.p.ally the claim of the poet's orthodoxy, will reveal that no certain a.s.sertion of a belief in supernaturalism is made, even though the poems are dramatic and it might be made without necessarily expressing the feeling of the poet. What Browning felt was that in historical Christianity the highest symbol of divine love had been reached. Though he may at times have had moods in which he would fain have believed true an ideal which held for him great beauty, his worth for his age was in saving religion, _not_ upon a basis of faith, but upon the ground of logical arguments deduced from the failure of knowledge, of his personal intuition of G.o.d and his mystical vision in regard to the nature of G.o.d.