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 uponreligion’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.”
“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, Darwinwent 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 objectivephenomena, 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 “Méchanique 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.”
“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 areall 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 atrue 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 archæological 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 wavesof 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 interpretationof 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 “WolfenbüttelFragments,” which had been printed by Lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer Reimarus discovered in the Wolfenbüttel 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 conceptionof 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 Tübingen 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 byGeorge 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 himselfbecomes 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 wisdomand 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 bringredemption 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 supremacyof 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 therewere 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 questionit. 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 itbroadened 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 troublesomeintellects 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 Göttingen 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.”
“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 experienceit, 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 æsthetic 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 morepersonal 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 madeon.” 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 realman, 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 ofbeauty 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 religiousfeeling 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 shrewdAnd smile at stories how John’s word could cure—Repeat that miracle and take my faith?’I say, that miracle was duly wroughtWhen 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 seeOf shows o’ the world so much as and no moreThan God wills for his purpose,—(what do ISee now, suppose you, there where you see rockRound 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 ChristAccepted by thy reason, solves for theeAll 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 expectHe 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 learnsBecause 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 truthAnd yearn to gain it, catching at mistakeAs midway help till he reach fact indeed.”
The defence of Christianity in this poem reminds one very strongly of the theology of Schleiermacher, a résumé 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 suprememanifestation 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 threeparts, 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 meansof 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 naturalisticworld; 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 voiceSaying, ‘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 apurely 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 poemspresents 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.
THE CENTURY’S END: PROMISE OF PEACE
Passingonward 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 themisery 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 werechiefly 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, “Hervé 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 withthe 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 thesepoems 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 canoeswith 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 archæological 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 portrayedand 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 consciousnessOf 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 callUpon 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 hecan 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, hereaches 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 æsthetics 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 worthythe 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 Persianfables 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 theCuban 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) isno 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 evilbe 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 onà prioriideas 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 drossSurelier true gold’s worth, guess how purityI’ the lode were precious could one light on oreClarified up to test of crucible.The prize is in the process: knowledge meansEver-renewed assurance by defeatThat 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 thelover 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 hasthrough æons 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.