Browning and His Century Part 5

If we see the thoughtful and brilliant Browning in the "Fancies" proper, we perhaps see even more clearly the emotional and pa.s.sionate 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 pa.s.sion, 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 princ.i.p.ally 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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" pa.s.sage it is the thought of the joy in the creator's soul for his creations, and the partic.i.p.ation of mankind in this joy of progression while pleasure climbs its heights forever and forever, which occupies the poet's mind, in the later pa.s.sage, 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 gla.s.s 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 superst.i.tion, 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 n.o.bleness, she leaves him free.

This story bears upon the poet's philosophy as it reflects his att.i.tude toward human love, which he considers so clearly a revelation that any treatment of it not absolutely n.o.ble 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 _a.s.sumes_ 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 n.o.body 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 att.i.tude 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 pa.s.sage 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 cla.s.sic 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 cla.s.sic metaphor and symbol, and a remarkable pa.s.sage is the result. It occupies from the eighth to the twelfth stanza. It is meant to be in derision of a grandiloquent, cla.s.sically embroidered style but so splendid is the language, so haunting the pictures, the symbolism so profound that it is as if a G.o.d 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 pa.s.sage only adds to its interest. After thus cla.s.sicizing 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 cla.s.sicism 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 a.s.surance 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 a.s.suring 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 a.n.a.logue of this in physical nature, where matter and energy are constant quant.i.ties 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 quant.i.ty. But the quant.i.ty 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 pa.s.sage 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 att.i.tude 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 p.r.o.nounced type; for example, when he says in "A Pillar at Sebzevar," "Say not that we know, rather that we love, therefore we know enough."

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAVID STRAUSS]

It must be remembered, however, that he is not in either cla.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sages in his poems, notably one already quoted from Furini, which show him to have had a perception of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 ill.u.s.trated in Paracelsus where G.o.d 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 a.s.surance of a transcendent power beyond human ken, the intuition of the higher reason which affirms G.o.d is, and the intuitions of the heart which promise that G.o.d is love, through whom is to come fulfilment of all human aspirations toward Beauty, Truth, and Love in immortality.