“Only reapers, reaping earlyIn among the bearded barley,Hear a song that echoes cheerlyFrom the river winding clearlyDown to towered Camelot:And by the moon the reaper weary,Piling sheaves in uplands airy,Listening, whispers, ‘Tis the fairyLady of Shalott.”
John Burroughs, in his inspiring essay on Walt Whitman entitled ‘The Flight of the Eagle’, quotes the following sentence from a lecture on Burns, delivered by “a lecturer from over seas”, whom he does not name: “When literature becomes dozy, respectable, and goes in the smooth grooves of fashion, and copies and copies again, something must be done; and to give life to that dying literature, a man must be found not educated under its influence.”
Such a man I would say was William Cowper, who, in his weakness, was
“Strong to sanctify the poet’s high vocation”,
and who
“Testified this solemn truth, while phrenzy desolated,—Nor man nor angel satisfies whom only God created.”
John Keats, in his poem entitled ‘Sleep and Poetry’, has well characterized the soulless poetry of the period between the Restoration and the poetical revival in the latter part of the eighteenth century, but more especially of the Popian period. After speaking of the greatness of his favorite poets of the Elizabethan period, he continues:—
“Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schismNurtured by foppery and barbarism,Made great Apollo blush for this his land.Men were thought wise who could not understandHis glories: with a puling infant’s forceThey sway’d about upon a rocking-horse,And thought it Pegasus.”
(Alluding to the rocking-horse movement of the Popian verse.)
“Ah dismal soul’d!The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’dIt’s gathering waves—ye felt it not. The blueBar’d its eternal bosom, and the dewOf summer nights collected still to makeThe morning precious: beauty was awake!Why were ye not awake? But ye were deadTo things ye knew not of,—were closely wedTo musty laws lined out with wretched ruleAnd compass vile: so that ye taught a schoolOf dolts to smooth, inlay, and clip, and fit,Till, like the certain wands of Jacob’s wit,Their verses tallied. Easy was the task:A thousand handicraftsmen wore the maskOf Poesy. Ill-fated, impious race!That blasphem’d the bright Lyrist to his face,And did not know it,—no, they went about,Holding a poor, decrepid standard outMark’d with most flimsy mottoes, and in largeThe name of one Boileau!”
It was these lines that raised the ire of Byron, who regarded them as an irreverent assault upon his favorite poet, Pope. In the controversy occasioned by the Rev. W. L. Bowles’s strictures on the Life and Writings of Pope, Byron perversely asks, “Where is the poetry of which one-half is good? Is it the Aeneid? Is it Milton’s? Is it Dryden’s? Is it any one’s except Pope’s and Goldsmith’s, of which ALL is good?”
In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, the spiritual flow which, as I have said, set in about the middle of the eighteenth century, and received its first great impulse from William Cowper, reached its high tide in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Southey, and Byron. These poets were all, more or less, influenced by that great moral convulsion, the French revolution, which stirred men’s souls to their deepest depths, induced a vast stimulation of the meditative faculties, and contributed much toward the unfolding of the ideas “on man, on nature, and on human life”, which have since so vitalized English poetry. *
—* “The agitation, the frenzy, the sorrow of the times,reacted upon the human intellect, and FORCED men into meditation.Their own nature was held up before them in a sterner form.They were compelled to contemplate an ideal of man, far more colossalthan is brought forward in the tranquil aspects of society;and they were often engaged, whether they would or not,with the elementary problems of social philosophy. Mere dangerforced a man into thoughts which else were foreign to his habits.Mere necessity of action forced him to decide.”—Thomas De Quincey’s ‘Essay on Style’.—
Wordsworth exhibited in his poetry, as they had never before been exhibited, the permanent absolute relations of nature to the human spirit, interpreted the relations between the elemental powers of creation and the moral life of man, and vindicated the inalienable birthright of the lowliest of men to those inward “oracles of vital deity attesting the Hereafter.” Wordsworth’s poetry is, in fact, so far as it bears upon the natural world, a protest against the association theory of beauty of the eighteenth century—a theory which was an offshoot of the philosophy of Locke, well characterized by Macvicar, in his ‘Philosophy of the Beautiful’ (Introd., pp. xv., xvi), as “an ingenious hypothesis for the close of the eighteenth century, when the philosophy then popular did not admit, as the ground of any knowledge, anything higher than self-repetition and the transformation of sensations.”
Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ is an imaginative expression of that divine love which embraces all creatures, from the highest to the lowest, of the consequences of the severance of man’s soul from this animating principle of the universe, and of those spiritual threshings by and through which it is brought again under its blessed influence. In his ‘Cristabel’ he has exhibited the dark principle of evil, lurking within the good, and ever struggling with it. We read it in the spell the wicked witch Geraldine works upon her innocent and unsuspecting protector; we read it in the strange words which Geraldine addresses to the spirit of the saintly mother who has approached to shield from harm the beloved child for whom she died; we read it in the story of the friendship and enmity between the Baron and Sir Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine; we read it in the vision seen in the forest by the minstrel Bard, of the bright green snake coiled around the wings and neck of a fluttering dove; and, finally, we read it in its most startling form, in the conclusion of the poem, “A little child, a limber elf, singing, dancing to itself,” etc., wherein is exhibited the strange tendency to express love’s excess “with words of unmeant bitterness”. This dark principle of evil, we may suppose, after dwelling in the poet’s mind, in an abstract form, crept into this broken poem, where it lies coiled up among the choicest and most fragrant flowers, and occasionally springs its warning rattle, and projects its forked tongue, to assure us of its ugly presence.
Both these great poems show the influence of the revival of the old English Ballads. Coleridge had drunk deep of their spirit.
Shelley and Byron were fully charged with the revolutionary spirit of the time. Shelley, of all the poets of his generation, had the most prophetic fervor in regard to the progress of the democratic spirit. All his greatest poems are informed with this fervor, but it is especially exhibited in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’, which is, in the words of Todhunter, “to all other lyrical poems what the ninth symphony is to all other symphonies; and more than this, for Shelley has here outsoared himself more unquestionably than Beethoven in his last great orchestral work. . . . The Titan Prometheus is the incarnation of the genius of humanity, chained and suffering under the tyranny of the evil principle which at present rules over the world, typified in Jupiter; the name Prometheus, FORESIGHT, connecting him with that poetic imagination which is the true prophetic power, penetrating the mystery of things, because, as Shelley implies, it is a kind of divine Logos incarnate in man—a creative force which dominates nature by acting in harmony with her.”
It is, perhaps, more correct to say of Byron, that he was charged with the spirit of revolt rather than with the revolutionary spirit. The revolutionary spirit was in him indefinite, inarticulate; he offered nothing to put in the place of the social and political evils against which he rebelled. There is nothing CONSTRUCTIVE in his poetry. But if his great passion-capital, his keen spiritual susceptibility, and his great power of vigorous expression, had been brought into the service of constructive thought, he might have been a restorative power in his generation.
The greatest loss which English poetry ever sustained, was in the premature death of John Keats. What he would have done had his life been spared, we have an assurance in what he has left us. He was spiritually constituted to be one of the subtlest interpreters of the secrets of life that the whole range of English poetry exhibits. No poet ever more deeply felt “the vital connection of beauty with truth”. He realized in himself his idea of the poet expressed in his lines,—
“‘Tis the man who with a manIs an equal, be he king,Or poorest of the beggar-clan,Or any other wondrous thingA man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;‘Tis the man who with a bird,Wren, or eagle, finds his way toAll its instincts; he hath heardThe lion’s roaring, and can tellWhat his horny throat expresseth,And to him the tiger’s yellComes articulate and pressethOn his ear like mother tongue.” *
— * “We often think of Shelley and Keats together, and they seem to have an attraction for minds of the same cast. They were both exposed to the same influences, those revolutionary influences in literature and religion which inaugurated a new period. Yet there is a great contrast as well as a great similarity between them, and it is interesting to remark the different spiritual results in the case of these two different minds subjected to conditions so similar in general, though different in detail. Both felt the same need, the need of ESCAPE, desiring to escape from the actual world in which they perceived more evil than good, to some other ideal world which they had to create for themselves. This is the point of their similarity; their need and motive were the same, to escape from the limitations of the present. But they escaped in different directions, Keats into the past where he reconstructed a mythical Greek world after the designs of his own fancy, Shelley into a future where he sought in a new and distant era, in a new and distant world, a refuge from the present. We may compare Keats’s ‘Hyperion’ with Shelley’s ‘Prometheus’, as both poems touch the same idea— the dominion of elder gods usurped by younger, for Prometheus belonged to the elder generation. The impression Keats gives us is that he represents the dethroned gods in the sad vale, “far from the fiery noon”, for the pleasure of moving among them himself, and creates their lonely world as a retreat for his own spirit. Whereas in the ‘Prometheus Unbound’ we feel that the scenes laid in ancient days and built on Greek myths, have a direct relation to the destinies of man, and that Shelley went back into the past because he believed it was connected with the future, and because he could use it as an artistic setting for exhibiting an ideal world in the future.
“This problem of escape—to rescue the soul from the clutches of time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’,—which Keats and Shelley tried to resolve for themselves by creating a new world in the past and the future, met Browning too. The new way which Browning has essayed—the way in which he accepts the present and deals with it, CLOSES with time instead of trying to elude it, and discovers in the struggle that this time, ‘ineluctabile tempus’, is really a faithful vassal of eternity, and that its limits serve and do not enslave illimitable spirit.”
—From a Paper by John B. Bury, B.A., Trin. Coll., Dublin, on Browning’s ‘Aristophanes’ Apology’, read at 38th meeting of the Browning Soc., Jan. 29, 1886. —
Wordsworth, and the other poets I have named, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Coleridge, made such a protest against authority in poetry as had been made in the 16th century against authority in religion; and for this authority were substituted the soul-experiences of the individual poet, who set his verse to the song that was within him, and chose such subjects as would best embody and articulate that song.
But by the end of the first quarter of the present century, the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by, but received an impulse from, the great political billow, the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements), had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work. A poetical interregnum of a few years’ duration followed, in which there appeared to be a great reduction of the spiritual life of which poetry is the outgrowth.
Mr. Edmund W. Gosse, in his article ‘On the Early Writings of Robert Browning’, in the ‘Century’ for December, 1881, has characterized this interregnum a little too contemptuously, perhaps. There was, indeed, a great fall in the spiritual tide; but it was not such a dead-low tide as Mr. Gosse would make it.
At length, in 1830, appeared a volume of poems by a young man, then but twenty-one years of age, which distinctly marked the setting in of a new order of things. It bore the following title: ‘Poems, chiefly Lyrical. By Alfred Tennyson, London: Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, Cornhill, 1830.’ pp. 154.
The volume comprised fifty-three poems, among which were ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Poet’s Mind’. These two poems were emphatically indicative of the high ideal of poetry which had been attained, and to the development of which the band of poets of the preceding generation had largely contributed.
A review of the volume, by John Stuart Mill, then a young man not yet twenty-five years of age, was published in ‘The Westminster’ for January, 1831. It bears testimony to the writer’s fine insight and sure foresight; and it bears testimony, too, to his high estimate of the function of poetry in this world—an estimate, too, in kind and in degree, not older than this present century. The review is as important a landmark in the development of poetical criticism, as are the two poems I have mentioned, in the development of poetical ideals, in the nineteenth century.
In the concluding paragraph of the review, Mill says: “A genuine poet has deep responsibilities to his country and the world, to the present and future generations, to earth and heaven. He, of all men, should have distinct and worthy objects before him, and consecrate himself to their promotion. It is thus that he best consults the glory of his art, and his own lasting fame. . . . Mr. Tennyson knows that “the poet’s mind is holy ground”; he knows that the poet’s portion is to be
“Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,The love of love”;
he has shown, in the lines from which we quote, his own just conception of the grandeur of a poet’s destiny; and we look to him for its fulfilment. . . . If our estimate of Mr. Tennyson be correct, he too is a poet; and many years hence may be read his juvenile description of that character with the proud consciousness that it has become the description and history of his own works.”
Two years later, that is, in 1832 (the volume, however, is antedated 1833), appeared ‘Poems by Alfred Tennyson’, pp. 163. In it were contained ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and the untitled poems, known by their first lines, ‘You ask me why, tho’ ill at ease’, ‘Of old sat Freedom on the Heights’, and ‘Love thou thy Land, with Love far brought’.
In ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is mystically shadowed forth the relation which poetic genius should sustain to the world for whose spiritual redemption it labors, and the fatal consequences of its being seduced by the world’s temptations, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.
The other poems, ‘You ask me why’, ‘Of old sat Freedom’, and ‘Love thou thy land’, are important as exponents of what may be called the poet’s institutional creed. A careful study of his subsequent poetry will show that in these early poems he accurately and distinctly revealed the attitude toward outside things which he has since maintained. He is a good deal of an institutional poet, and, as compared with Browning, a STRONGLY institutional poet. Browning’s supreme and all-absorbing interest is in individual souls. He cares but little, evidently, about institutions. At any rate, he gives them little or no place in his poetry. Tennyson is a very decided reactionary product of the revolutionary spirit which inspired some of his poetical predecessors of the previous generation. He has a horror of the revolutionary. To him, the French Revolution was “the blind hysterics of the Celt”, {‘In Memoriam’, cix.}, and “the red fool-fury of the Seine” {‘I. M.’, cxxvii.}. He attaches great importance to the outside arrangements of society for upholding and advancing the individual. He would “make Knowledge circle with the winds”, but “her herald, Reverence”, must
“flyBefore her to whatever skyBear seed of men and growth of minds.”
He has a great regard for precedents, almost AS precedents. He is emphatically the poet of law and order. All his sympathies are decidedly, but not narrowly, conservative. He is, in short, a choice product of nineteenth century ENGLISH civilization; and his poetry may be said to be the most distinct expression of the refinements of English culture—refinements, rather than the ruder but more vital forms of English strength and power. All his ideals of institutions and the general machinery of life, are derived from England. She is
“the land that freemen till,That sober-suited Freedom chose,The land where, girt with friends or foes,A man may speak the thing he will;A land of SETTLED GOVERNMENT,A LAND OF JUST AND OLD RENOWN,WHERE FREEDOM BROADENS SLOWLY DOWNFROM PRECEDENT TO PRECEDENT:Where faction seldom gathers head,But by degrees to fullness wrought,The strength of some diffusive thoughtHath time and space to work and spread.”
But the anti-revolutionary and the institutional features of Tennyson’s poetry are not those of the higher ground of his poetry. They are features which, though primarily due, it may be, to the poet’s temperament, are indirectly due to the particular form of civilization in which he has lived, and moved, and had his culture, and which he reflects more than any of his poetical contemporaries.
The most emphasized and most vitalized idea, the idea which glints forth everywhere in his poetry, which has the most important bearing on man’s higher life, and which marks the height of the spiritual tide reached in his poetry, is, that the highest order of manhood is a well-poised, harmoniously operating duality of the active or intellectual or discursive, and the passive or spiritually sensitive. This is the idea which INFORMS his poem of ‘The Princess’. It is prominent in ‘In Memoriam’ and in ‘The Idylls of the King’. In ‘The Princess’, the Prince, speaking of the relations of the sexes, says:—
“in the long years liker must they grow;The man be more of woman, she of man;He gain in sweetness and in moral height,Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw the world;She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind;Till at the last she set herself to man,Like perfect music unto noble words;And so these twain, upon the skirts of Time,Sit side by side, full-summ’d in all their powers,Dispensing harvest, sowing the To-be,Self-reverent each and reverencing each,Distinct in individualities,But like each other ev’n as those who love.Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:Then reign the world’s great bridals, chaste and calm:Then springs the crowning race of humankind.”
To state briefly the cardinal Tennysonian idea, man must realize a WOMANLY MANLINESS, and woman a MANLY WOMANLINESS.
Tennyson presents to us his ideal man in the 109th section of ‘In Memoriam’. It is descriptive of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. All that is most characteristic of Tennyson, even his Englishness, is gathered up in this poem of six stanzas. It is interesting to meet with such a representative and comprehensive bit in a great poet.
“HEART-AFFLUENCE in discursive talkFrom household fountains never dry;The CRITIC CLEARNESS of an eye,That saw through all the Muses’ walk;SERAPHIC INTELLECT AND FORCETO SEIZE AND THROW THE DOUBTS OF MAN;IMPASSIONED LOGIC, which outranThe bearer in its fiery course;HIGH NATURE AMOROUS OF THE GOOD,BUT TOUCH’D WITH NO ASCETIC GLOOM;And passions pure in snowy bloomThrough all the years of April blood.”
The first two verses of this stanza also characterize the King Arthur of the ‘Idylls of the King’. *1* In the next stanza we have the poet’s institutional Englishness:—
“A love of freedom rarely felt,Of freedom in her regal seatOf England; not the school-boy heat,The blind hysterics of the Celt;And MANHOOD FUSED WITH FEMALE GRACE *2*In such a sort, the child would twineA trustful hand, unask’d, in thine,And find his comfort in thy face;All these have been, and thee mine eyesHave look’d on; if they look’d in vain,My shame is greater who remain,Nor let thy wisdom make me wise.”
— *1* See ‘The Holy Grail’, the concluding thirty-two verses, beginning: “And spake I not too truly, O my Knights”, and ending “ye have seen that ye have seen”.
*2* The idea of ‘The Princess’. —
Tennyson’s genius was early trained by the skeptical philosophy of the age. All his poetry shows this. The ‘In Memoriam’ may almost be said to be the poem of nineteenth century scepticism. To this scepticism he has applied an “all-subtilizing intellect”, and has translated it into the poetical “concrete”, with a rare artistic skill, and more than this, has subjected it to the spiritual instincts and apperceptions of the feminine side of his nature and made it vassal to a larger faith. But it is, after all, not the vital faith which Browning’s poetry exhibits, a faith PROCEEDING DIRECTLY FROM THE SPIRITUAL MAN. It is rather the faith expressed by Browning’s Bishop Blougram:—
“With me faith means perpetual unbeliefKept quiet like the snake ‘neath Michael’s foot,Who stands firm just because he feels it writhe.”
And Tennyson, in picturing to us in the Idylls, the passage of the soul “from the great deep to the great deep”, appears to have felt it necessary to the completion of that picture (or why did he do it?), that he should bring out that doubt at the last moment. The dying Arthur is made to say:—
“I am going a long wayWith these thou seest—if indeed I go(For all my mind is clouded with a doubt)—To the island-valley of Avilion”; etc.
Tennyson’s poetry is, in fact, an expression of the highest sublimation of the scepticism which came out of the eighteenth century, which invoked the authority of the sensualistic philosophy of Locke, and has since been fostered by the science of the nineteenth; while Browning’s poetry is a decided protest against, and a reactionary product of, that scepticism, that infidel philosophy (infidel as to the transcendental), and has CLOSED with it and borne away the palm.
The key-note of his poetry is struck in ‘Paracelsus’, published in 1835, in his twenty-third year, and, with the exception of ‘Pauline’ published in 1833, the earliest of his compositions: Paracelsus says (and he who knows Browning knows it to be substantially his own creed):—
“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no riseFrom outward things, whate’er you may believe:There is an inmost centre in us all,Where truth abides in fulness; and aroundWall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,This perfect, clear perception—which is truth;A baffling and perverting carnal meshBlinds it, and makes all error: and ‘TO KNOW’Rather consists in opening out a wayWhence the imprisoned splendour may escape,Than in effecting entry for a lightSupposed to be without. Watch narrowlyThe demonstration of a truth, its birth,And you trace back the effluence to its springAnd source within us, where broods radiance vast,To be elicited ray by ray, as chanceShall favour: chance—for hitherto, your sageEven as he knows not how those beams are born,As little knows he what unlocks their fount;And men have oft grown old among their booksTo die, case-hardened in their ignorance,Whose careless youth had promised what long yearsOf unremitted labour ne’er performed:While, contrary, it has chanced some idle day,That autumn-loiterers just as fancy-freeAs the midges in the sun, have oft given ventTo truth—produced mysteriously as capeOf cloud grown out of the invisible air.Hence, may not truth be lodged alike in all,The lowest as the highest? some slight filmThe interposing bar which binds it up,And makes the idiot, just as makes the sageSome film removed, the happy outlet whenceTruth issues proudly? See this soul of ours!How it strives weakly in the child, is loosedIn manhood, clogged by sickness, back compelledBy age and waste, set free at last by death:Why is it, flesh enthralls it or enthrones?What is this flesh we have to penetrate?Oh, not alone when life flows still do truthAnd power emerge, but also when strange chanceRuffles its current; in unused conjuncture,When sickness breaks the body—hunger, watching,Excess, or languor—oftenest death’s approach—Peril, deep joy, or woe. One man shall crawlThrough life, surrounded with all stirring things,Unmoved—and he goes mad; and from the wreckOf what he was, by his wild talk alone,You first collect how great a spirit he hid.Therefore set free the spirit alike in all,Discovering the true laws by which the fleshBars in the spirit! . . .
I go to gather thisThe sacred knowledge, here and there dispersedAbout the world, long lost or never found.And why should I be sad, or lorn of hope?Why ever make man’s good distinct from God’s?Or, finding they are one, why dare mistrust?Who shall succeed if not one pledged like me?Mine is no mad attempt to build a worldApart from His, like those who set themselvesTo find the nature of the spirit they bore,And, taught betimes that all their gorgeous dreamsWere only born to vanish in this life,Refused to fit them to this narrow sphere,But chose to figure forth another worldAnd other frames meet for their vast desires,—Still, all a dream! Thus was life scorned; but lifeShall yet be crowned: twine amaranth! I am priest!”
And again:—
“In man’s self ariseAugust anticipations, symbols, typesOf a dim splendour ever on before,In that eternal circle run by life:For men begin to pass their nature’s bound,And find new hopes and cares which fast supplantTheir proper joys and griefs; and outgrow all *The narrow creeds of right and wrong, which fadeBefore the unmeasured thirst for good; while peaceRises within them ever more and more.Such men are even now upon the earth,Serene amid the half-formed creatures round,Who should be saved by them and joined with them.”
In the last three verses is indicated the doctrine of the regenerating power of exalted personalities, so prominent in Browning’s poetry, and which is treated in the next paper.
— * proper: In the sense of the Latin PROPRIUS, peculiar, private, personal. —
There is no ‘tabula rasa’ doctrine in these passages, nor in any others, in the poet’s voluminous works; and of all men of great intellect and learning (it is always a matter of mere insulated intellect), born in England since the days of John Locke, no one, perhaps, has been so entirely untainted with this doctrine as Robert Browning. It is a doctrine which great spiritual vitality (and that he early possessed), reaching out, as it does, beyond all experience, beyond all transformation of sensations, and all conclusions of the discursive understanding, naturally and spontaneously rejects. It simply says, “I know better”, and there an end.
The great function of the poet, as poet, is, with Browning, to open out a way whence the imprisoned splendor may escape, not to effect entry for a light supposed to be without; to trace back the effluence to its spring and source within us, where broods radiance vast, to be elicited ray by ray.
In ‘Fifine at the Fair’, published thirty-seven years after ‘Paracelsus’, is substantially the same doctrine:—
“Truth inside, and outside, truth also; and betweenEach, falsehood that is change, as truth is permanence.The individual soul works through the shows of sense,(Which, ever proving false, still promise to be true)Up to an outer soul as individual too;And, through the fleeting, lives to die into the fixed,And reach at length ‘God, man, or both together mixed’.”
In his poem entitled ‘Popularity’, included in his “fifty men and women”, the speaker, in the monologue, “draws” his “true poet”, whom HE knows, if others do not; who, though he renders, or stands ready to render, to his fellows, the supreme service of opening out a way whence the imprisoned splendor of their souls may escape, is yet locked safe from end to end of this dark world.
Though there may be, in his own time, no “reapers reaping early in among the bearded barley” and “piling sheaves in uplands airy” who hear his song, he holds the FUTURE fast, accepts the COMING AGES’ duty, their present for this past. This true, creative poet, whom the speaker calls “God’s glow-worm, creative in the sense of revealing, whose inmost centre, where truth abides in fulness, has that freedom of responsiveness to the divine which makes him the revealer of it to men, plays the part in the world of spirit which, in the material world was played by the fisher who, first on the coast of Tyre the old, fished up the purple-yielding murex. Until the precious liquor, filtered by degrees, and refined to proof, is flasked and priced, and salable at last, the world stands aloof. But when it is all ready for the market, the small dealers, “put blue into their line”, and outdare each other in azure feats by which they secure great popularity, and, as a result, fare sumptuously; while he who fished the murex up was unrecognized, and fed, perhaps, on porridge.
I.Stand still, true poet that you are!I know you; let me try and draw you.Some night you’ll fail us: when afarYou rise, remember one man saw you,Knew you, and named a star! *1*II.My star, God’s glow-worm! Why extendThat loving hand of His which leads you,Yet locks you safe from end to endOf this dark world, unless He needs you,Just saves your light to spend?III.His clenched hand shall unclose at last,I know, and let out all the beauty:My poet holds the future fast,Accepts the coming ages’ duty,Their present for this past.IV.That day, the earth’s feast-master’s browShall clear, to God the chalice raising;“Others give best at first, but ThouForever set’st our table praising,Keep’st the good wine till now!”V.Meantime, I’ll draw you as you stand,With few or none to watch and wonder:I’ll say—a fisher, on the sandBy Tyre the old, with ocean-plunder,A netful, brought to land.VI.Who has not heard how Tyrian shellsEnclosed the blue, that dye of dyesWhereof one drop worked miracles,And colored like Astarte’s eyesRaw silk the merchant sells?VII.And each by-stander of them allCould criticise, and quote traditionHow depths of blue sublimed some pall—To get which, pricked a king’s ambition;Worth sceptre, crown, and ball.VIII.Yet there’s the dye, in that rough mesh,The sea has only just o’er-whispered!Live whelks, each lip’s beard dripping fresh,As if they still the water’s lisp heardThrough foam the rock-weeds thresh.IX.Enough to furnish SolomonSuch hangings for his cedar-house,That, when gold-robed he took the throneIn that abyss of blue, the SpouseMight swear his presence shoneX.Most like the centre-spike of goldWhich burns deep in the blue-bell’s wombWhat time, with ardors manifold,The bee goes singing to her groom,Drunken and overbold.XI.Mere conchs! not fit for warp or woof!Till cunning come to pound and squeezeAnd clarify,—refine to proof *2*The liquor filtered by degrees,While the world stands aloof.XII.And there’s the extract, flasked and fine,And priced and salable at last!And Hobbs, Nobbs, Stokes, and Nokes combineTo paint the future from the past,Put blue into their line. *3*XIII.Hobbs hints blue,—straight he turtle eats:Nobbs prints blue,—claret crowns his cup:Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats,—Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?What porridge had John Keats?
— *1* named: Announced.*2* Original reading:— “Till art comes,—comes to pound and squeeze And clarify,—refines to proof."*3* “Line” is perhaps meant to be used equivocally,— their line of business or line of their verse. —
The spiritual ebb and flow exhibited in English poetry (the highest tide being reached in Tennyson and Browning) which I have endeavored cursorily to present, bear testimony to the fact that human nature WILL assert its wholeness in the civilized man. And there must come a time, in the progress of civilization, when this ebb and flow will be less marked than it has been heretofore, by reason of a better balancing, which will be brought about, of the intellectual and the spiritual. Each will have its due activity. The man of intellectual pursuits will not have a starved spiritual nature; and the man of predominant spiritual functions will not have an intellect weakened into a submissiveness to formulated, stereotyped, and, consequently, lifeless dogmas.
Robert Browning is in himself the completest fulfilment of this equipoise of the intellectual and the spiritual, possessing each in an exalted degree; and his poetry is an emphasized expression of his own personality, and a prophecy of the ultimate results of Christian civilization.
“Subsists no law of Life outside of Life.
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law.”
The importance of Robert Browning’s poetry, as embodying the profoundest thought, the subtlest and most complex sentiment, and, above all, the most quickening spirituality of the age, has, as yet, notwithstanding the great increase within the last few years of devoted students, received but a niggardly recognition when compared with that received by far inferior contemporary poets. There are, however, many indications in the poetical criticism of the day that upon it will ere long be pronounced the verdict which is its due. And the founding of a society in England in 1881, “to gather together some at least of the many admirers of Robert Browning, for the study and discussion of his works, and the publication of papers on them, and extracts from works illustrating them” has already contributed much towards paying a long-standing debt.
Mr. Browning’s earliest poems, ‘Pauline’ (he calls it in the preface to the reprint of it in 1868 “a boyish work”, though it exhibits the great basal thought of all his subsequent poetry), was published in 1833, since which time he has produced the largest body of poetry produced by any one poet in English literature; and the range of thought and passion which it exhibits is greater than that of any other poet, without a single exception, since the days of Shakespeare. And he is the most like Shakespeare in his deep interest in human nature in all its varieties of good and evil. Though endowed with a powerful, subtle, and restless intellect, he has throughout his voluminous poetry made the strongest protest that has been made in these days against mere intellect. And his poetry has, therefore, a peculiar value in an age like the present—an age exhibiting “a condition of humanity which has thrown itself wholly on its intellect and its genius in physics, and has done marvels in material science and invention, but at the expense of the interior divinity.” It is the human heart, that is, the intuitive, the non-discursive side of man, with its hopes and its prophetic aspirations, as opposed to the analytic, the discursive understanding, which is to him a subject of the deepest and most scrutinizing interest. He knows that its deepest depths are “deeper than did ever plummet sound”; but he also knows that it is in these depths that life’s greatest secrets must be sought. The philosophies excogitated by the insulated intellect help nothing toward even a glimpse of these secrets. In one of his later poems, that entitled ‘House’, he has intimated, and forcibly intimated, his sense of the impossibility of penetrating to the Holy of Holies of this wondrous human heart, though assured as he is that all our hopes in regard to the soul’s destiny are warmed and cherished by what radiates thence. He quotes, in the last stanza of this poem, from Wordsworth’s sonnet on the Sonnet, “With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart,” and then adds, “DID Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!”
Mrs. Browning, in the Fifth Book of her ‘Aurora Leigh’, has given a full and very forcible expression to the feeling which has caused the highest dramatic genius of the present day to seek refuge in the poem and the novel. “I will write no plays; because the drama, less sublime in this, makes lower appeals, defends more menially, adopts the standard of the public taste to chalk its height on, wears a dog-chain round its regal neck, and learns to carry and fetch the fashions of the day, to please the day; . . . ‘Tis that, honoring to its worth the drama, I would fear to keep it down to the level of the footlights. . . . The growing drama has outgrown such toys of simulated stature, face, and speech, it also, peradventure, may outgrow the simulation of the painted scene, boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume; and TAKE FOR A WORTHIER STAGE, THE SOUL ITSELF, ITS SHIFTING FANCIES AND CELESTIAL LIGHTS, WITH ALL ITS GRAND ORCHESTRAL SILENCES TO KEEP THE PAUSES OF THE RHYTHMIC SOUNDS.”
Robert Browning’s poetry is, in these days, the fullest realization of what is expressed in the concluding lines of this passage: he has taken for a worthier stage, the soul itself, its shifting fancies and celestial lights, more than any other poet of the age. And he has worked with a thought-and-passion capital greater than the combined thought-and-passion capital of the richest of his poetical contemporaries. And he has thought nobly of the soul, and has treated it as, in its essence, above the fixed and law-bound system of things which we call nature; in other words, he has treated it as supernatural. “Mind,” he makes the Pope say, in ‘The Ring and the Book’,—and his poetry bears testimony to its being his own conviction and doctrine,—“Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above.” With every student of Browning, the recognition and acceptance of this must be his starting-point. Even that which impelled the old dog, in his poem entitled ‘Tray’ (‘Dramatic Lyrics’, First Series), to rescue the beggar child that fell into the river, and then to dive after the child’s doll, and bring it up, after a long stay under water, the poet evidently distinguishes from matter,—regards as “not matter nor from matter, but above”:—