“In the year 1841 I was at Leamington and spent several months there. It was near the middle of September there fell upon me one of the heaviest blows that can visit any man. I found myself living there with none living of myhouse but a motherless child. Mr. Cobden called upon me the day after that event, so terrible to me and so prostrating. He said, after some conversation, ‘Don’t allow this grief, great as it is, to weigh you down too much. There are at this moment in thousands of homes in this country wives and children who are dying of hunger—of hunger made by the law. If you come along with me, we will never rest till we have got rid of the Corn Law.’ We saw the colossal injustice which cast its shadow over every part of the nation, and we thought we saw the true remedy and the relief, and that if we united our efforts, as you know we did, with the efforts of hundreds and thousands of good men in various parts of the country, we should be able to bring that remedy home, and to afford that relief to the starving people of this country.”
“In the year 1841 I was at Leamington and spent several months there. It was near the middle of September there fell upon me one of the heaviest blows that can visit any man. I found myself living there with none living of myhouse but a motherless child. Mr. Cobden called upon me the day after that event, so terrible to me and so prostrating. He said, after some conversation, ‘Don’t allow this grief, great as it is, to weigh you down too much. There are at this moment in thousands of homes in this country wives and children who are dying of hunger—of hunger made by the law. If you come along with me, we will never rest till we have got rid of the Corn Law.’ We saw the colossal injustice which cast its shadow over every part of the nation, and we thought we saw the true remedy and the relief, and that if we united our efforts, as you know we did, with the efforts of hundreds and thousands of good men in various parts of the country, we should be able to bring that remedy home, and to afford that relief to the starving people of this country.”
The movement thus inaugurated was, as Molesworth declares, “without parallel in the history of the world for the energy with which it was conducted, the rapid advance it made, and the speedy and complete success that crowned its efforts; for the great change it wrought in public opinion and the consequent legislation of the country; overcoming prejudice and passion, dispelling ignorance and conquering powerful interests, with no other weapons than those of reason and that eloquence which great truths and strong conviction inspire.”
A signal victory for the League was gained in 1843, when the LondonTimes, which up to that time had regarded the League withsuspicion and even alarm, suddenly turned round and ranged itself with the advancing tide of progress by declaring, “The League is a great fact. It would be foolish, nay, rash, to deny its importance. It is a great fact that there should have been created in the homestead of our manufacturers (Manchester) a confederacy devoted to the agitation of one political question, persevering at it year after year, shrinking from no trouble, dismayed at no danger, making light of every obstacle. It demonstrates the hardy strength of purpose, the indomitable will, by which Englishmen working together for a great object are armed and animated.”
The final victory, however, did not come until three years later, when Sir Robert Peel, who became Prime Minister to defend the Corn Laws, announced that he had been completely convinced of their injustice, and that he was an “absolute convert to the free-trade principle, and that the introduction of the principle into all departments of our commercial legislation was, according to his intention, to be a mere question of time and convenience.” This was in January, 1845, and shortly after, June, 1846, the bill for the total repeal of the Corn Laws passed the House.
How much longer it might have been before the opposition was carried is a question if it had not been for the failure of the grain crops and the widespread potato disease which plunged Ireland into a state of famine, and threatened the whole country with more or less of disaster.
Even when this state of affairs became apparent in the summer of 1845 there was still much delay. The Cabinet met and discussed and discussed; still Parliament was not assembled; and then it was that the Mansion House Relief Committee of Dublin drew up resolutions stating that famine and pestilence were approaching throughout the land, and impeaching the conduct of the Ministry for not opening the ports or calling Parliament together.
But still Peel, already won over, could not take his Cabinet with him; he was forced to resign. Lord John Russell was called to form a ministry, but failed, when Peel was recalled, and the day was carried.
Browning’s brief but pertinent allusion to this struggle in “The Englishman in Italy” shows clearly how strongly his sympathies were with the League and how disgusted he was with the procrastination of Parliament in taking a perfectly obvious step for the betterment of the people.
“Fortnu, in my England at home,Men meet gravely to-dayAnd debate, if abolishing Corn lawsBe righteous and wiseIf ’twere proper, Scirocco should vanishIn black from the skies!”
An occasional allusion or poem like this makes us aware from time to time of Browning’s constant sympathy with any movement which meant good to the masses. Even if he had not written near the end of his life “Why I am a Liberal,” there could be no doubt in any one’s mind of his political ideals. In “The Lost Leader” is perhaps his strongest utterance upon the subject. The fact that it was called out by Wordsworth’s lapse into conservatism after the horrors of the French Revolution had brought him and hissans culottebrethren, Southey and Coleridge, to pause, a fact very possibly freshened in Browning’s mind by Wordsworth’s receiving a pension in 1842 and the poet-laureateship in 1843, does not affect the force of the poem as a personal utterance on the side of democracy. Browning, himself, considered the poem far too fierce as a portrayal of Wordsworth’s case.[2]He evidently forgot Wordsworth, and thought only of a renegadeliberal as he went on with the poem. It was written the same year that there occurred the last attempt to postpone the passing of the Anti-Corn Law Bill, when the intensity of feeling on the part of all who believed in progress was at its height, and the bare thought of a deserter from Liberal ranks would be enough to exasperate any man who had the nation’s welfare at heart. That Browning’s feeling at the time reached the point not only of exasperation but of utmost scorn for any one who was not on the liberal side is shown most forcibly in the bitter lines:
“Blot out his name, then, record one lost soul more,One task more declined, one more footpath untrod,One more devil’s triumph and sorrow for angels,One more wrong to man, one more insult to God!”
Browning speaks of having thought of Wordsworth at an unlucky juncture.
Whatever the exact episode which called forth the poem may have been, we are safe in saying that at a time when Disraeli was attacking Sir Robert Peel because of his honesty in avowing his conversion to free trade, and because of his bravery in coming out from his party, in breaking up his cabinet and regardless of all costs in determining to carry the bill or resign, and finally carryingit in the face of the greatest odds—at such a time, when a great conservative leader had shown himself capable of being won over to a great liberal principle; the spectacle of a deserter from the cause, and that deserter a member of one’s own brotherhood of poets, would be especially hard to bear.
One feels a little like asking why did not Browning let his enthusiasm carry him for once into a contemporary expression of admiration for Sir Robert Peel? Perhaps the tortuous windings of parliamentary proceedings obscured to a near view the true greatness of Peel’s action.
The year of this great change in England’s policy was the year of Robert Browning’s marriage and his departure for Italy, where he lived for fifteen years. During this time and for some years after his return to England there is no sign that he was taking any interest in the political affairs of his country. Human character under romantic conditions in a social environment, or the thought problems of the age, as we have already seen, occupied his attention, and for the subject matter of these he more often than not went far afield from his native country.
In “Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau” is the poet’s first deliberate portrayal of a personof contemporary prominence in the political world. The alliance of Napoleon III with England brought his policy of government into strong contrast with that of the liberal leaders in English politics, a contrast which had been emphasized through Lord Palmerston’s sympathy with thecoup d’état.
The news of the manner in which Louis Napoleon had carried out his policy of smashing the French constitution caused horror and consternation in England, and the Queen at once gave instructions that nothing should be done by her ambassador in Paris which could be in any way construed as an interference in the internal affairs of France. Already, however, Lord Palmerston had expressed to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs his entire approbation in the act of Napoleon and his conviction that he could not have acted otherwise than as he had done. When this was known, the Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, wrote Palmerston a letter, causing his resignation, which was accepted very willingly by the Queen. The letter was as follows:
“While I concur in the foreign policy of which you have been the adviser, and much as I admire the energy and ability with which it has been carried into effect, I cannot but observe that misunderstandings perpetually renewed, violationsof prudence and decorum too frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to have followed from a sound policy and able admirers. I am, therefore, most reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct of foreign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advantage to the country.”
“While I concur in the foreign policy of which you have been the adviser, and much as I admire the energy and ability with which it has been carried into effect, I cannot but observe that misunderstandings perpetually renewed, violationsof prudence and decorum too frequently repeated, have marred the effects which ought to have followed from a sound policy and able admirers. I am, therefore, most reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that the conduct of foreign affairs can no longer be left in your hands with advantage to the country.”
When England’s fears that Louis Napoleon would emulate his illustrious predecessor and invade her shores were allayed, her attitude was modified. She forgot the horrors of thecoup d’étatand formed an alliance with him, and her hospitable island became his refuge in his downfall.
A prominent figure in European politics for many years, Louis Napoleon had just that combination of greatness and mediocrity which would appeal to Browning’s love of a human problem. Furthermore, Napoleon was brought very directly to the poet’s notice through his Italian campaign and Mrs. Browning’s interest in the political crisis in Italy, which found expression in her fine group of Italian patriotic poems.
The question has been asked, “Will the unbiased judgment of posterity allow to Louis Napoleon some extenuating circumstances, or will it pronounce an unqualified condemnation upon the man who, for the sake of consolidating his own power andstrengthening his corrupt government, spilled the blood of no less than a hundred thousand Frenchmen?”
When all Europe was putting to itself some such question as this, and answering it with varying degrees of leniency, Browning conceived the idea of making Napoleon speak for himself, and at the same time he added what purports to be the sort of criticism of him indulged in by a Thiers or a Victor Hugo. The interest of the poem centers in Napoleon’s own vindication of himself as portrayed by Browning. What Browning wrote of the poem in a letter to a friend in 1872 explains fully his aim, as well as showing by indirection, at least, how much he was interested in political affairs at this time, though so little of this interest crops out in his poetry: “I think in the main he meant to do what I say, and but for weakness—grown more apparent in his last years than formerly—would have done what I say he did not. I thought badly of him at the beginning of his career,et pour cause; better afterward, on the strength of the promises he made and gave indications of intending to redeem. I think him very weak in the last miserable year. At his worst I prefer him to Thiers’s best.” At another time he wrote: “I amglad you like what the editor of theEdinburghcalls my eulogium on the Second Empire, which it is not, any more than what another wiseacre affirms it to be, ‘a scandalous attack on the old constant friend of England.’ It is just what I imagine the man might, if he pleased, say for himself.”
Browning depicts the man as perfectly conscious of his own limitations. He recognizes that he is not the genius, nor the creator of a new order of things, but that his power lies in his faculty of taking an old ideal and improving upon it. He contends that in following out his special gifts as a conservator he is doing just what God intended him to do, and as to his method of doing it that is his own affair. God gives him the commission and leaves it to his human faculties to carry it out, not inquiring what these are, but simply asking at the end if the commission has been accomplished.
Once admit these two things—namely, that his nature, though not of the highest, is such as God gave him, and his lack of responsibility in regard to any moral ideal, so that he accomplishes the purpose of this nature—and a loophole is given for any inconsistencies he may choose to indulge in in bringing about that strengthening of an old ideal inwhich he believes. The old ideal is, of course, the monarchical principle of government, administered, however, in such a manner that it will be for the good of society in all its complex manifestations of to-day. His notion of society’s good consists in a balancing of all its forces, secured by the smoothing down of any extreme tendencies, each having its orbit marked but no more, so that none shall impede the other’s path.
“In this wide world—though each and all alike,Save for [him] fain would spread itself through spaceAnd leave its fellow not an inch of way.”
Browning makes him indulge in a curiously sophisticated view of the relativity of good and evil in the course of his argument, to the effect that since there is a further good conceivable beyond the utmost earth can realize, therefore to change the agency—the evil whereby good is brought about, try to make good do good as evil does—would be just as foolish as if a chemist wanting white and knowing that black ingredients were needed to make the dye insisted these should be white, too. A bad world is that which he experiences and approves. A good world he does not want in which there would be no pity, courage, hope, fear, sorrow, joy—devotedness,in short—which he believes form the ultimate allowed to man; therefore it has been his policy not to do away with the evil in the society he is saving. To mitigate, not to cure, has been his aim.
Browning would, himself, answer the sophistry, here, by showing that evil though permitted by divine power was only a means of good through man’s working against whatever he conceives to be evil with the whole strength of his being. To deliberately follow the policy of conserving evil would be in the end to annihilate the good. Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau could not see so far as this.
It is not astonishing that with such a policy as this his methods of carrying it out might seem somewhat dubious if not positively criminal. His departure from his early idealism is excused for the reason that idealism is not practicable when the region of talk is left for the real action of life. Every step in his own aggrandizement is apologized for on the ground that what needed to be accomplished could only be done by a strong hand and that strong hand his own. He was in fact an unprincipled utilitarian as Browning presents him, who spoiled even what virtue resides in utilitarianism by letting his care for saving society be too much influencedby his desire for personal glory. One ideal undertaking he permitted himself, the freeing of Italy from the Austrian yoke. But he was not strong enough for any such high flight of idealism, as the sequel proved.
Browning does not bring out in the poem the Emperor’s real reasons for stopping short in the Italian campaign, which certainly were sufficient from a practical standpoint, but as Archibald Forbes says in his “Life of Napoleon,” should have been thought of before he published his program of freedom to Italy “from the Alps to the Adriatic.” “Even when he addressed the Italians at Milan,” continues Forbes, “the new light had not broken in upon him which revealed the strength of the quadrilateral, the cost of expelling the Austrians from Venetia, and the conviction that further French successes would certainly bring mobilized Germany into the field. That new light seems to have flashed upon Napoleon for the first time from the stern Austrian ranks on the day of Solferino. It was then he realized that should he go forward he would be obliged to attack in front an enemy entrenched behind great fortresses, and protected against any diversion on his flanks by the neutrality of the territories surrounding him.”
Mrs. Browning, whose consternation and grief over Villafranca broke out in burning verse, yet made a defence of Napoleon’s action here which might have been worked into Browning’s poem with advantage. She wrote to John Foster that while Napoleon’s intervention in Italy overwhelmed her with joy it did not dazzle her into doubts as to the motive of it, “but satisfied a patient expectation and fulfilled a logical inference. Thus it did not present itself to my mind as a caprice of power, to be followed perhaps by an onslaught on Belgium and an invasion of England. Have we not watched for a year while every saddle of iniquity has been tried on the Napoleonic back, and nothing fitted? Wasn’t he to crush Piedmontese institutions like so many eggshells? Was he ever going away with his army, and hadn’t he occupied houses in Genoa with an intention of bombarding the city? Didn’t he keep troops in the north after Villafranca on purpose to come down on us with a grand duke or a Kingdom of Etruria and Plon-Plon to rule it? And wouldn’t he give back Bologna to the Pope?... Were not Cipriani, Farini and other patriots his ‘mere creatures’ in treacherous correspondence with the Tuileries ‘doing his dirty work’?” Of such accusationsas these the intelligent English journals were full, but she maintains that against “The Inane and Immense Absurd” from which they were born is to be set “a nation saved.” She realized also how hard Napoleon’s position in France must be to maintain “forty thousand priests with bishops of the color of Monseigneur d’Orleans and company, having, of course, a certain hold on the agricultural population which forms so large a part of the basis of the imperial throne. Then add to that the parties who use this Italian question as a weapon simply.”
Many of Napoleon’s own statements have furnished Browning with the arguments used in the apology. After deliberately destroying the constitution, for example, and himself being the cause of the violence and bloodshed in Paris, he coolly addressed the people in the following strain, in which we certainly recognize Hohenstiel-Schwangau:
“Frenchmen! the disturbances are appeased. Whatever may be the decision of the people, society is saved. The first part of my task is accomplished. The appeal to the nation, for the purpose of terminating the struggle of parties, I knew would not cause any serious risk to the public tranquillity. Why should the people have risen against me? If I donot any longer possess your confidence—if your ideas are changed—there is no occasion to make precious blood flow; it will be sufficient to place an adverse vote in the urn. I shall always respect the decision of the people.”
His cleverness in combining the idea of authority with that of the idea of obeying the will of the people is curiously illustrated in his speech at the close of his dictatorship, during which it must be confessed that he had done excellently well for the country—so well, indeed, that even the socialists were ready to cry “Vive l’Empereur!”
“While watching me reëstablish the institutions and reawaken the memories of the Empire, people have repeated again and again that I wished to reconstitute the Empire itself. If this had been so the transformation would have been accomplished long ago; neither the means nor the opportunities would have been lacking.... But I have remained content with that I had. Resolved now, as heretofore, to do all in my power for France and nothing for myself, I would accept any modification of the present state of things only if forced by necessity.... If parties remain quiet, nothing shall be changed. But if they endeavor to sap the foundations of my government; if they deny the legitimacy of the result of the popular vote; if, in short, they continually put the future of the country in jeopardy, then, but only then, it might be prudent to ask the people for a new title which would irrevocably fix on my head the power with which they have already clothed me. But let us not anticipatedifficulties; let us preserve the Republic. Under its banner I am anxious to inaugurate once more an epoch of reconciliation and pardon; and I call on all without distinction who will frankly coöperate with me for the public good.”
“While watching me reëstablish the institutions and reawaken the memories of the Empire, people have repeated again and again that I wished to reconstitute the Empire itself. If this had been so the transformation would have been accomplished long ago; neither the means nor the opportunities would have been lacking.... But I have remained content with that I had. Resolved now, as heretofore, to do all in my power for France and nothing for myself, I would accept any modification of the present state of things only if forced by necessity.... If parties remain quiet, nothing shall be changed. But if they endeavor to sap the foundations of my government; if they deny the legitimacy of the result of the popular vote; if, in short, they continually put the future of the country in jeopardy, then, but only then, it might be prudent to ask the people for a new title which would irrevocably fix on my head the power with which they have already clothed me. But let us not anticipatedifficulties; let us preserve the Republic. Under its banner I am anxious to inaugurate once more an epoch of reconciliation and pardon; and I call on all without distinction who will frankly coöperate with me for the public good.”
In contrast to such fair-sounding phrases Napoleon was capable of the most dishonorable tactics in order to gain his ends. Witness the episode of his tempting Bismarck with offers of an alliance against Austria at the same time that he was treating secretly with Francis Joseph for the cession of Venetia in return for Silesia. And while negotiating secretly and separately with these two sworn enemies, he pretended to be so disinterested as to suggest the submission of their quarrel to a European congress.
Browning has certainly presented a good portrait of the man as the history of his own utterances contrasted with the history of his actions proves. In trying to bridge with this apology the discrepancies between the two he has, however, attributed to Louis Napoleon a degree of self-consciousness beyond any ever evinced by him. The principle of imperialism was a conviction with him. That he desired to help the people of France and to a great extent succeeded, is true; that he combined with this desire the desire ofpower for himself is true; that he used unscrupulous means to gain whatever end he desired when such were necessary is true; but that he was conscious of his own despicable traits to the extent that the poet makes him conscious of them is most unlikely. Nor is it likely that he would defend himself upon any such subtle ground as that his character and temperament being the gift of God he was bound to follow out his nature in order that God’s purposes might be accomplished. It is rather an explanation of his life from the philosopher’s or psychologist’s standpoint than a self-conscious revelation. It is none the less interesting on this account, while the scene setting gives it a thoroughly human and dramatic touch.
Whatever may be said of Napoleon himself, his rule was fraught with consequences of import for the whole of Europe, not because of what he was, but because of what he was not. He was an object lesson on the fallacy of trying to govern so that all parties will be pleased by autocratically keeping each one from fully expressing itself. The result is that each grows more aware of the suppression than of the amount of freedom allowed to it, and nobody is pleased. When added to such a policy as this is the surmounting desire forpower and the Machiavellian determination to attain it by any means, fair or foul, a principle of statecraft which by the middle of the century could not be practised in its most acute form without arousing the most severe criticism, his power carried within it the seeds of destruction.
It has been said that “never in the history of the world has one man undertaken a task more utterly beyond the power of mortal man than that which Louis Napoleon was pledged to carry through.” He professed to be at one and the same time the elect sovereign of the people, a son of the revolution, a champion of universal suffrage, and an adversary of the demagogues. In the first of these characters he was bound to justify his elevation by economic and social reforms, in his second character he had to destroy the last trace of political liberty. He had, in fact, assumed various utterly incompatible attitudes, and the day that the masses found themselves deceived in their expectations, and the middle classes found their interests were betrayed, reaction was inevitable.
William Ewart Gladstone
In spite of his heinous faults, however, historians have grown more and more inclined to admit that Napoleon filled for a time a necessary niche in the line of progress, justthat step which Browning makes him say the genius will recognize that he fills—namely, to
“Carry the incompleteness on a stage,Make what was crooked straight, and roughness smooth,And weakness strong: wherein if I succeed,It will not prove the worst achievement, sureIn the eyes at least of one man, one I lookNowise to catch in critic company:To-wit, the man inspired, the genius, selfDestined to come and change things thoroughly.He, at least, finds his business simplified,Distinguishes the done from undone, readsPlainly what meant and did not mean this timeWe live in, and I work on, and transmitTo such successor: he will operateOn good hard substance, not mere shade and shine.”
That is, at a time when Europe was seething with the idea of a new order, in which the ideal of nationality was to take the place of such decaying ideas as the divine right of kings, balance of power, and so on, Napoleon held on to these ideas just long enough to prevent a general disintegration of society. He held in his hands the balance of power until the nations began to find themselves, and in the case of Italy actually helped on the triumph of the new order.
It is interesting to note in this connection that one of the principal factors in the making of Gladstone into the stanch liberal whichhe became was the freeing of Italy, in which Napoleon had so large a share. Gladstone himself wrote in 1892 of the events which occurred in the fifth decade: “Of the various and important incidents which associated me almost unawares with foreign affairs ... I will only say that they all contributed to forward the action of those home causes more continuous in their operation, which, without in any way effacing my old sense of reverence for the past, determined for me my place in the present and my direction toward the future.” In 1859 Gladstone dined with Cavour at Turin, when the latter had the opportunity of explaining his position and policy to the man whom he considered “one of the sincerest and most important friends that Italy had.” But as his biographer says, Gladstone was still far from the glorified democracy of the Mazzinian propaganda, and expressed his opinion that England should take the stand that she would be glad if Italian unity proved feasible, “but the conditions of it must be gradually matured by a course of improvement in the several states, and by the political education of the people; if it cannot be reached by these means, it hardly will by any others; and certainly not by opinions which closely link Italian reconstruction with Europeandisorganization and general war.” Yet he was as distressed as Mrs. Browning at the peace of Villafranca, about which he wrote: “I little thought to have lived to see the day when the conclusion of a peace should in my own mind cause disgust rather than impart relief.” By the end of the year he thought better of Napoleon and expressed himself again somewhat in the same strain as Mrs. Browning, to the effect that the Emperor had shown, “though partial and inconsistent, indications of a genuine feeling for the Italians—and far beyond this he has committed himself very considerably to the Italian cause in the face of the world. When in reply to all that, we fling in his face the truce of Villafranca, he may reply—and the answer is not without force—that he stood single-handed in a cause when any moment Europe might have stood combined against him. We gave him verbal sympathy and encouragement, or at least criticism; no one else gave him anything at all. No doubt he showed then that he had undertaken a work to which his powers were unequal; but I do not think that, when fairly judged, he can be said to have given proof by that measure of insincerity or indifference.”
Gladstone’s gradual and forceful emancipationinto the ranks of the liberals may be followed in the fascinating pages of Morley’s “Life,” who at the end declares that his performances in the sphere of active government were beyond comparison. Gladstone’s own summary of his career gives a glimpse of what these performances were as well as an interpretation of the century and England’s future growth which indicate that had he had another twenty years in which to progress, perhaps fewer, he would beyond all doubt have become an out and out social democrat.
“The public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey’s government. That great act was for England, improvement and extension: for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognized, and how that power has been used. The threescore years offer as the pictures of what the historian will recognize as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is, of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoiceto think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.“Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country,and the resolute preference of the interests of the wholeto any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.”
“The public aspect of the period which closes for me with the fourteen years (so I love to reckon them) of my formal connection with Midlothian is too important to pass without a word. I consider it as beginning with the Reform Act of Lord Grey’s government. That great act was for England, improvement and extension: for Scotland it was political birth, the beginning of a duty and a power, neither of which had attached to the Scottish nation in the preceding period. I rejoice to think how the solemnity of that duty has been recognized, and how that power has been used. The threescore years offer as the pictures of what the historian will recognize as a great legislative and administrative period—perhaps, on the whole, the greatest in our annals. It has been predominantly a history of emancipation—that is, of enabling man to do his work of emancipation, political, economical, social, moral, intellectual. Not numerous merely, but almost numberless, have been the causes brought to issue, and in every one of them I rejoiceto think that, so far as my knowledge goes, Scotland has done battle for the right.
“Another period has opened and is opening still—a period possibly of yet greater moral dangers, certainly a great ordeal for those classes which are now becoming largely conscious of power, and never heretofore subject to its deteriorating influences. These have been confined in their actions to the classes above them, because they were its sole possessors. Now is the time for the true friend of his country to remind the masses that their present political elevation is owing to no principles less broad and noble than these—the love of liberty, of liberty for all without distinction of class, creed or country,and the resolute preference of the interests of the wholeto any interest, be it what it may, of a narrower scope.”
Mr. Gladstone entered Parliament at twenty-three, in 1832, and a year later Browning, at twenty-one, printed his first poem, “Pauline.” The careers of the two men ran nearly parallel, for Browning died in 1889, on the day of the publication of his last volume of poems, and Gladstone’s retirement from active life took place in 1894, shortly after the defeat of his second Home Rule Bill. Though there is nothing to show that these two men came into touch with each other during their life, and while it is probable that Browning would not have been in sympathy with many of the aspects of Gladstone’s mentality, there is an undercurrent ofsimilarity in their attitude of mind toward reform. The passage in “Sordello” already referred to, written in 1840, might be regarded almost as a prophecy of the sort of leader Gladstone became. I have said of that passage that it expressed the ideal of the opportunist, not that of the revolutionary. Opportunist Mr. Gladstone was often called by captious critics, but any unbiased reader following his career now as a whole will see, as Morley points out, that whenever there was a chance of getting anything done it was generally found that he was the only man with courage and resolution enough to attempt it.
A distinction should be made between that sort of opportunism whichwaitsupon the growth of conditions favorable to the taking of a short step in amelioration, and what might be called militant opportunism, which, at all times, seizes every opportunity to take a step in the direction of an evolving, all-absorbing ideal. Is not this the opportunism of both a Browning and a Gladstone? Such a policy at least tacitly acknowledges that the law of evolution is the law that should be followed, and that the mass of the people as well as the leader have their share in the unfolding of the coming ideal, though their part in it may be less conscious than his andthough they may need his leadership to make the steps by the way clear.
The other political leader of the Victorian era with whom Gladstone came most constantly into conflict was Disraeli, of whom Browning in “George Bubb Dodington” has given a sketch in order to draw a contrast between the unsuccessful policy of a charlatan of the Dodington type and that of one like Disraeli. The skeptical multitude of to-day cannot be taken in by declarations that the politician is working only for their good, and if he frankly acknowledged that he is working also for his own good they would have none of him. The nice point to be decided is how shall he work for his own good and yet gain control of the multitude. Dodington did not know the secret, but according to Browning Disraeli did, and what is the secret? It seems to be an attitude of absolute self-assurance, a disregard of consistency, a scorn of the people he is dealing with, and a pose suggesting the play of supernatural forces in his life.
This is a true enough picture of the real Disraeli, who seems to have had a leaning toward a belief in spiritualism, and who was notorious for his unblushing changes of opinion and for a style of oratory in which hispoints were made by clever invective and sarcasm hurled at his opponents instead of by any sound, logical argument, it being, indeed one of his brilliant discoveries that “wisdom ought to be concealed under folly, and consistency under caprice.”
Many choice bits of history might be given in illustration of Browning’s portrayal of him; for example, speaking against reform, he exclaims: “Behold the late Prime Minister and the Reform Ministry! The spirited and snow-white steeds have gradually changed into an equal number of sullen and obstinate donkeys, while Mr. Merryman, who, like the Lord Chancellor, was once the very life of the ring, now lies his despairing length in the middle of the stage, with his jokes exhausted and his bottle empty.”
As a specimen of his quickness in retort may be cited an account of an episode which occurred at the time when he came out as the champion of the Taunton Blues. In the course of his speech he “enunciated,” says an anonymous writer of the fifties, “one of those daring historical paradoxes which are so signally characteristic of the man: ‘Twenty years ago’ said the Taunton Blue hero, ‘tithes were paid in Ireland more regularly than now!’
“Even his supporters appeared astounded by this declaration.
“‘How do you know?’ shouted an elector.
“‘I have read it,’ replied Mr. Disraeli.
“‘Oh, oh!’ exclaimed the elector.
“‘I know it,’ retorted Disraeli, ‘because I have read, and you’ (looking daggers at his questioner) ‘have not.’
“This was considered a very happy rejoinder by the friends of the candidate, and was loudly cheered by the Blues.
“‘Didn’t you write a novel?’ again asked the importunate elector, not very much frightened even by Mr. Disraeli’s oratorical thunder and the sardonical expression on his face.
“‘I have certainly written a novel,’ Mr. Disraeli replied; ‘but I hope there is no disgrace in being connected with literature.’
“‘You are a curiosity of literature, you are,’ said the humorous elector.
“‘I hope,’ said Mr. Disraeli, with great indignation, ‘there is no disgrace in having written that which has been read by hundreds of thousands of my fellow-countrymen, and which has been translated into every European language. I trust that one who is an author by the gift of nature may be as good a man as one who is Master of the Mint by the giftof Lord Melbourne.’ Great applause then burst forth from the Blues. Mr. Disraeli continued, ‘I am not, however, the puppet of the Duke of Buckingham, as one newspaper has described me; while a fellow laborer in the same vineyard designated me the next morning, “the Marleybone Radical.” If there is anything on which I figure myself it is my consistency.’
“‘Oh, oh!’ exclaimed many hearers.
“‘I am prepared to prove it,’ said Mr. Disraeli, with menacing energy. ‘I am prepared to prove it, and always shall be, either in the House of Commons or on the hustings, considering the satisfactory manner in which I have been attacked, but I do not think the attack will be repeated.’”
It seems extraordinary that such tactics of bluff could take a man onward to the supreme place of Prime Minister. Possibly it was just as much owing to his power to amuse as to any of the causes brought out by Browning. Is there anything the majority of mankind loves more than a laugh?
The conflicts of Disraeli and Gladstone form one of the most remarkable episodes of nineteenth-century politics. One is tempted to draw a parallel between Napoleon III and Disraeli, whose tactics were much the same,except that Disraeli was backed up by a much keener intellect. Possibly he held a part in English politics similar to that held by Napoleon in European politics—that is, he conserved the influences of the past long enough to make the future more sure of itself. Browning, however, evidently considered him nothing more than a successful charlatan.
When Browning wrote, “Why I Am a Liberal,” in 1885, liberalism in English politics had reached its climax in the nineteenth century through the introduction by Mr. Gladstone, then Premier for the third time, of his Home Rule Bill. The injustices suffered by the Irish people and the horrible atrocities resulting from these had had their effect upon Mr. Gladstone and had taken him the last great step in his progress toward freedom. The meeting at which this bill was introduced has been described as the greatest legislative assembly of modern times. The House was full to overflowing, and in a brilliant speech of nearly four hours the veteran leader held his audience breathless as he unfolded his plans for the betterment of Irish conditions. We are told that during the debates that followed there was a remarkable exhibition of feeling—“the passions, the enthusiasm, the fear, and hope, and fury andexultation, sweeping, now the surface, now stirring to its depths the great gathering.” The bill, which included, besides the founding of an Irish Parliament in Dublin, which would have the power to deal with all matters “save the Crown, the Army and Navy, Foreign and Colonial Policy, Trade, Navigation, Currency, Imperial Taxation, and the Endowment of Churches,” also provided that Ireland should annually contribute to the English exchequer the sum of £3,243,000.
Eloquence, enthusiasm, exultation—all came to naught. The bill did not even suit the liberals, the bargain from a financial point of view being regarded as hard. It was defeated in Parliament and fared no better when an appeal was made to the country, and Mr. Gladstone resigned. In nine months, however, a general election returned him to office again, and again he introduced a Home Rule Bill, and though it passed the Commons, it was overwhelmingly defeated in the House of Lords.
It is pleasant to reflect that in this last act of a noble and brilliant career spent in the interests of the ever-growing ideals of democracy Gladstone had the sympathy of Browning, shown by his emphatic expression of “liberal sentiments” at a momentous crisis,when a speech on the liberal side even from the mouth of a poet counted for much.
As we have seen, the reflections in Browning’s poetry of his interest in public affairs are comparatively few, yet such glimpses as he has given prove him, beyond all doubt, to have been a democrat in principle, to have arrived, in fact, at the beginning of his career at a point beyond that attained by England’s rulers at the end of the century. This far-sighted vision of his may have been another reason to be added to those mentioned at the beginning of the chapter why his interest in the practical affairs of his country did not more often express itself. The wrangling, the inconsequentialness, the eloquence expended upon mere personal interests which make up by far the larger proportion of all political agitation, are irritating to the last degree to a man of vision. His part was that of the philosopher and artist—to watch and to record in the portrayal of his many characters the underlying principle of freedom, which was the guiding star in all his work.
SOCIAL IDEALS
Browning’ssocial ideals revolve about a trinity of values: the value of love, the value of truth, the value of evil. His ethics are the natural outgrowth of his mysticism and his idealism, with no touch of the utilitarianism which has been a distinctive mark of the fabric of English society during the nineteenth century, nor, on the other hand, of the hidebound conventionalism which has limited personal freedom in ways detrimental to just those aspects of social morality it was most anxious to preserve.
The fact of which Browning seemed more conscious than of any other fact of his existence, and which, as we have seen, was the very core of his mysticism, was feeling. Things about which an ordinary man would feel no emotion at all start in his mind a train of thoughts, ending only in the perception of divine love. The eating of a palatable fig fills his heart with such gratefulness to the giver of the fig that immediately he faresforth upon the way which brings him into the presence of the Prime Giver from whom all gifts are received. What ecstasy of feeling in the artist aspiring through his art to the higher regions of Absolute Beauty in “Abt Vogler” of the poet who loves, aspiring to the divine through his human love in the epilogue to “Ferishtah’s Fancies!” The perception of feeling was so intense that it became in him exalted and concentrated, incapable of dissipating itself in ephemeral sentimentalities, and this it is which gives feeling to Browning its mystical quality, and puts personal love upon the plane of a veritable revelation.
Though reports have often floated about in regard to his attachments to other women after Mrs. Browning’s death, the fact remains that he did not marry again, that he wrote the lyrics in “Ferishtah’s Fancies,” and the sonnet to Edward Fitzgerald just before his death, and thirty years after his wife’s death. Moreover, in the epilogue to “The Two Poets of Croisic” he gives a hint of what might be his attitude toward any other women who may have come into his life, in the application of the tale of the cricket chirping “love” in the place of the broken string of a poet’s lyre—
“For as victory was nighest,While I sang and played,With my lyre at lowest, highest,Right alike—one string that madeLove sound soft was snapt in twain,Never to be heard again,——“Had not a kind cricket fluttered,Perched upon the placeVacant left, and duly uttered,‘Love, Love, Love,’ when’er the bassAsked the treble to atoneFor its somewhat sombre drone.”
These rare qualities of constancy, exaltation and aspiration, in love sublimating it into a spiritual emotion, which was evidently the distinctive mark of Browning’s personality on the emotional side, furnishes the keynote by which his presentation or solution of the social problems involved in the relations of men and women is always to be gauged.
He had been writing ten years when he essayed his first serious presentation of what we might to-day call a problem play on an English subject in “A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.” In all of his long poems and in many of his short ones personal love had been portrayed under various conditions—between friends or lovers, husband and wife,or father and son, and in every instance it is a dominating influence in the action, as we have already seen it to be in “Strafford.” Again, in “King Victor and King Charles” the action centers upon Charles’s love for his father, and is also moulded in many ways by Polyxena’s love for her husband, Charles.
But a perception of the possible heights to be obtained by the passion of romantic love only fully emerges in “Pippa Passes,” for example in Ottima’s vision of the reality of her own love, despite her great sin as contrasted with that of Sebald’s, and in Jules’s rising above the conventionally low when he discovers he has been duped, and perceiving in Phene a purity of soul which no earthly conditions had been able to sully,
“Who, what is Lutwyche, what Natalia’s friends,What the whole world except our love—my own,Own Phene?...I do but break these paltry models upTo begin art afresh ...Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!Like a god going through the world there standsOne mountain for a moment in the dusk,Whole brotherhoods of cedars on its brow:And you are ever by me while I gaze—Are in my arms as now—as now—as now!Some unsuspected isle in the far seas!Some unsuspected isle in far-off seas!”
Again, in “The Return of the Druses” there is a complicated clash between the ideal of religious reverence for the incarnation of divinity in Djabal and human love for him in the soul of Anael, resulting at the end in the destruction of the idea of Djabal’s supernatural divinity, and his reinstatement perceived by Anael as divine through the complete exaltation of his human love for Anael.
These examples, however, while they illustrate Browning’s attitude toward human love, are far enough removed from nineteenth-century conditions in England. In “Pippa,” the social conditions of nineteenth-century Italy are reflected; in “The Druses,” the religious conditions of the Druse nation in the fifteenth century.
In the “Blot in the ’Scutcheon” a situation is developed which comes home forcibly to the nineteenth-century Englishman despite the fact that the scene is supposed to be laid in the eighteenth century. The poet’s treatment of the clash between the ideal, cherished by an old and honored aristocratic family of its own immaculate purity, and the spontaneous, complete and exalted love of the two young people who in their ecstasy transcend conventions, illustrates, as perhaps noother situation could, his reverential attitude upon the subject of love. Gwendolen, the older, intuitional woman, and Mertoun, the young lover, are the only people in the play to realize that purity may exist although the social enactments upon which it is supposed to depend have not been complied with. Tresham learns it only when he has wounded Mertoun unto death; Mildred never learns it. The grip of conventional teaching has sunk so deeply into her nature that she feels her sin unpardonable and only to be atoned for by death. Mertoun, as he dies, gives expression to the essential purity and truth of his nature in these words:
“Die along with me,Dear Mildred! ’tis so easy, and you’ll ’scapeSo much unkindness! Can I lie at rest,With rude speech spoken to you, ruder deedsDone to you?—heartless men shall have my heartAnd I tied down with grave-clothes and the worm,Aware, perhaps, of every blow—O God!—Upon those lips—yet of no power to bearThe felon stripe by stripe! Die Mildred! LeaveTheir honorable world to them! For GodWe’re good enough, though the world casts us out.”
This is only one of many instances which go to show that Browning’s conception of love might include, on the one hand, acomplete freedom from the trammels imposed upon it by conventional codes of morality, but on the other, was so real and permanent a sympathy between two souls, and so absolute a revelation of divine beauty, that its morality far transcended that of the conventional codes, which under the guise of lawful alliances permit and even encourage marriages based upon the most external of attractions, or those entered into for merely social or commercial reasons. A sin against love seems in Browning’s eyes to come the nearest of all human failings to the unpardonable sin.
It must not be supposed from what has been said that he had any anarchistic desire to do away with the solemnization of marriage, but his eyes were wide open to the fact that there might be sin within the marriage bond, and just as surely that there might be love pure and true outside of it.
Another illustration of Browning’s belief in the existence of a love such as Shakespeare describes, which looks on tempests and is never shaken, is given in the “Inn Album.” Here, again, the characters are all English, and the story is based upon an actual occurrence. Such changes as Browning hasmade in the story are with the intention of pitting against the villainy of an aristocratic seducer of the lowest type a bourgeois young man, who has been in love with the betrayed woman, and who when he finds out that it was this man, his friend, who had stood between them, does not swerve from his loyalty and truth to her, and in the end avenges her by killing the aristocratic villain. The young man is betrothed to a girl he cares nothing for, the woman has married a man she cares nothing for. All is of no moment in the presence of a genuine loyal emotion which shows itself capable of a life of devotion with no thought of reward.
Browning has nowhere translated into more noble action the love of a man than in the passage where the hero of the story gives himself unselfishly to the woman who has been so deeply wronged:
“Take heart of hers,And give her hand of mine with no more heartThan now, you see upon this brow I strike!What atom of a heart do I retainNot all yours? Dear, you know it! EasilyMay she accord me pardon when I placeMy brow beneath her foot, if foot so deign,Since uttermost indignity is spared—Mere marriage and no love! And all this timeNot one word to the purpose! Are you free?Only wait! only let me serve—deserveWhere you appoint and how you see the good!I have the will—perhaps the power—at leastMeans that have power against the world. Fortune—Take my whole life for your experiment!If you are bound—in marriage, say—why, still,Still, sure, there’s something for a friend to do,Outside? A mere well-wisher, understand!I’ll sit, my life long, at your gate, you know,Swing it wide open to let you and himPass freely,—and you need not look, much lessFling me a ‘Thank you!—are you there, old friend?’Don’t say that even: I should drop like shot!So I feel now, at least: some day, who knows?After no end of weeks and months and yearsYou might smile! ‘I believe you did your best!’And that shall make my heart leap—leap such leapAs lands the feet in Heaven to wait you there!Ah, there’s just one thing more! How pale you look!Why? Are you angry? If there’s after all,Worst come to worst—if still there somehow beThe shame—I said was no shame,—none, I swear!—In that case, if my hand and what it holds,—My name,—might be your safeguard now,—at once—Why, here’s the hand—you have the heart.”
The genuine lovers in Browning’s gallery will occur to every reader of Browning: lovers who are not deterred by obstacles, like Norbert, lovers like Miranda, devoted to a woman with a “past”; like the lover in “One Way of Love,” who still can say, “Those who win heaven, blest are they.” Sometimes thereis a problem to be solved, sometimes not. Whenever there is a problem, however, it is solved by Browning on the side of sincerity and truth, never on the side of convention.
Take, for example, “The Statue and the Bust,” which many have considered to uphold an immoral standard and of which its defenders declare that the moral point of the story lies not in the fact that the lady and the Duke wished to elope with each other but that they never had strength enough of mind to do so. Considering what an entirely conventional and loveless marriage this of the lady and the Duke evidently was we cannot suppose, in the light of Browning’s solution of similar situations, that he would have thought it any great crime if the Duke and the lady had eloped, since there was so genuine an attraction between them. But he does word his climax, it must be confessed, in a way to leave a loophole of doubt on the subject for those who do not like to be scandalized by their Browning: “Let a man contend to the uttermost for his life’s set prize, be it what it will!”
There is a saving grace to be extracted from the last line.
“—The sin I impute to each frustrate ghostIs—the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin,Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.”
In “The Ring and the Book,” the problem is similar to that in the “Inn Album,” except that the villain in the case is the lawful husband. The lover, Caponsacchi, under different conditions demanding that he shall not give the slightest expression to his love, rises to a reverential height which even some of Browning’s readers seem to doubt as possible. Caponsacchi is, however, too much under the spell of Catholic theology to see the mystical meaning of the love which he acknowledges in his own soul for Pompilia. In this poem it is Pompilia who is given the divine vision. If I may resay what I have said in another connection,[3]there is no moral struggle in Pompilia’s short life such as that in Caponsacchi’s. Both were alike in the fact that up to a certain point in their lives their full consciousness was unawakened: hers slept, through innocence and ignorance; his, in spite of knowledge, through lack of aspiration. She was rudely awakened by suffering; he by the sudden revelation of a possible ideal. Therefore, while for him, conscious of his past failures, a strugglebegins: for her, conscious of no failure in her duty, which she had always followed according to her light, there simply continues duty according to the new light. Neither archbishop nor friendly “smiles and shakes of head” could weaken her conviction that, being estranged in soul from her husband, her attitude toward him was inevitable. No qualms of conscience troubled her as to her inalienable right to fly from him. That she submitted as long as she did was only because no one could be found to aid her. And how quick and certain her defence of Caponsacchi, threatened by Guido, when he overtakes them at the Inn! As she thinks over it calmly afterward, she makes no apology, but justifies her action as the voice of God.
“If I sinned so—never obey voice more.O, the Just and Terrible, who bids us ‘Bear.’Not—‘Stand by; bear to see my angels bear!’”
The gossip over her flight with Caponsacchi does not trouble her as it does him. He saved her in her great need; the supposition that their motives for flight had any taint of impurity in them is too puerile to be given a thought, yet with the same sublime certainty of the right, characteristic of her, she acknowledges, at the end, her love forCaponsacchi, and looks for its fulfilment in the future when marriage shall be an interpenetration of souls that know themselves into one. Having attained so great a good she can wish none of the evil she has suffered undone. She goes a step farther. Not only does she accept her own suffering for the sake of the final supreme good to herself, but she feels assured that good will fall at last to those who worked the evil.
In her absolute certainty of her realization of an unexpressed love in a future existence, she is only equaled in Browning’s poetry by the speaker in “Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead.”
That Browning’s belief in the mystical quality of personal love never changed is shown by the fact that near the end of his life, in the “Parleying” with Daniel Bartoli, he treats a love romance based upon fact in a way to emphasize this same truth which so constantly appears in his earlier work. The lady in this case, who is of the people, having been offered a bribe by the King which will mean the dishonoring of herself and her husband, and which if she does not accept will mean her complete separation from her husband, instantly decides against the bribe. She prefers love in spirit in a convent to theaccepting of the King’s promise that she will be made much of in court if she will sign a paper agreeing that her husband shall at once cede his dukedoms to the King. She explains her attitude to the Duke, who hesitates in his decision, whereupon she leaves and saves his honor for him, but his inability to decide at once upon the higher ground of spiritual love reveals to her the inadequacy of his love as compared with her own and kills her love for him. She later, however, marries a man who was only a boy of ten at the time of this episode, and their life together was a dream of happiness. But she dies and the devoted husband becomes a man of the world again. The Duke, however, has a streak of genuineness in his nature after all. Although carried away by the charms of a bold, black-eyed, tall creature, a development in keeping with the nature of the Duke in the true story, Browning is equal to the occasion, and makes him declare that the real man in him is dead and is still faithful to the old love. All she has is his ghost. Some day his soul will again be called into life by his ideal love.
The poet frequently expresses a doubt of man’s power to be faithful to the letter in case of a wife’s death. “Any wife to anyhusband” reveals that feeling as it comes to a woman. The poet’s answer to this doubt is invariably, that where the love was true other attraction is a makeshift by which a desolate life is made tolerable, or, as in “Fifine at the Fair,” an ephemeral indulgence in pleasure which does not touch the reality of the spiritual love.
Browning was well aware that the ordinary woman had a stronger sense of the eternal in love than the ordinary man. In relation to the Duke in the poem previously mentioned he remarks:
“One leans to like the duke, too; up we’ll patchSome sort of saintship for him—not to matchHers—but man’s best and woman’s worst amountSo nearly to the same thing, that we countIn man a miracle of faithfulnessIf, while unfaithful somewhat, he lay stressOn the main fact that love, when love indeed,Is wholly solely love from first to last—Truth—all the rest a lie.”
It may be said that all this is the romantic love about which the poets have always sung, and has as much existence in real life as the ideal of disinterested helpfulness to lovelorn damsels sung about in the days of chivalry. True, others have sung of the exaltation and the immortality of love, andfew have been those who have found it, but nowhere has the distinctively human side been touched with such reverence as in Browning. It is not Beatrice translated into a divine personage to be adored by a worshipping devotee, but a wholly human woman who loves and is loved, who touches divinity in Browning’s mind. Human love is then not an impossible ideal of which he writes in poetic language existing only in the realm of fancy; it is a living religion, bringing those who love nearer to God through the exaltation of their feeling than any other revelation of the human soul. Other states of consciousness reveal to humanity the existence of the absolute, but this gives a premonition of what divine love may have in store for the aspiring soul.
In holding to such an ideal of love as this Browning has ranged himself entirely apart from the main tendencies of thought of the century, on the relations of men and women, which have, on the one hand, been wholly conventional, marriage being a contract under the law binding for life except in cases of definite breaches of conduct, and under the Church of affection which is binding only for life; and have, on the other hand, gone extreme lengths in the advocacy of entire freedom inthe relations of the sexes. The first degrades love by making it too much a matter of law, the second by making it an ephemeral passion from which almost everything truly beautiful in the relationship of two human beings is, of necessity, eliminated.
To either of these extreme factions Browning’s attitude is equally incomprehensible. The first cries out against his liberalness, the second, declaring that human emotion should be untrammeled by either Church, law or God, would find him a pernicious influence against freedom; there are, however, many shades of opinion between the two extremes which would feel sympathy with his ideals in one or more directions.
The chief difficulty in the acceptance of the ideal for most people is that they have not yet developed to the plane where feeling comes to them with the intensity, the concentration, the depth or the constancy that brings with it the sense of revelation. For many people law or the Church is absolutely necessary to preserve such feeling as they are capable of from dissipating itself in shallow sentimentalism; while one or the other will always be necessary in some form because love has its social as well as its personal aspect.
Yet the law and the Church should both allow sufficient freedom for the breaking of relations from which all sincerity has departed, even though humanity as a whole has not yet and probably will not for many ages arrive at Browning’s conception of human love.
Truth to one’s own highest vision in love being a cardinal principle with Browning, it follows that truth to one’s nature in any direction is desirable. He even carries this doctrine of truth to the individual nature so far as to base upon it an apology for the most unmitigated villain he has portrayed, Guido, and to put this apology into the mouth of the person he had most deeply wronged, Pompilia. With exquisite vision she, even, can say:
“But where will God be absent! In his faceIs light, but in his shadow healing too:Let Guido touch the shadow and be healed!And as my presence was unfortunate,—My earthly good, temptation and a snare,—Nothing about me but drew somehow downHis hate upon me,—somewhat so excusedTherefore, since hate was thus the truth of him,—May my evanishment for evermoreHelp further to relieve the heart that castSuch object of its natural loathing forth!So he was made; he nowise made himself:I could not love him, but his mother did.”
It is this notion that every nature must express its own truth which underlies a poem like “Fifine at the Fair.” Through expressing the truth of itself, and so grasping at half truths, even at the false, it finally reaches a higher truth. A nature like Guido’s was not born with a faculty for development. He simply had to live out his own hate. The man in “Fifine” had the power of perceiving an ideal, but not the power of living up to it without experimentation upon lower planes of living, probably the most common type of man to-day. There are others like Norbert or Mertoun, in whom the ideal truth is the real truth of their natures and for whom life means the constant expansion of this ideal truth within them. In many of the varying types of men and women portrayed by Browning there is the recognition of the possibility of psychic development either by means of experience or by sudden intuitions, and if, as in the case of Guido, there is no development in this life, there is hope in a future existence in a universe ruled by a God of love.
In his views upon human character and its possibilities of development Browning is, of course, in touch with the scientific views on the subject which filled the air in all later nineteenth-century thought, changing theorthodox ideal of a static humanity born in sin and only to be saved by belief in certain dogmas to that of a humanity born to develop; changing the notion that sin was a terrible and absolutely defined entity, against which every soul had ceaselessly to war, into the notion that sin is a relative evil, consequent upon lack of development, which, as the human soul advances on its path, led by its inborn consciousness of the divine to be attained, will gradually disappear.
But the evil which results from this lack of development in individuals to other individuals, and to society at large, brings a problem which as we have already seen in the first chapter is not so easy of solution. Yet Browning solves it, for is it not through the combat with this evil that the soul is given its real opportunity for development? Pain and suffering give rise to the thirst for happiness and joy, and through the arousing of sympathy and pity, the desire that others shall have happiness and joy, therefore to be despairing and pessimistic about evil or to wish for its immediate annihilation would really be suicidal to the best interests of the human race; nay, he even goes farther than this, as is hinted in one of his last poems, “Rephan,” and imagines that any other state than one offlux between good and evil would be monotonous:
“Startle me up, by an InfiniteDiscovered above and below me—heightAnd depth alike to attract my flight,“Repel my descent: by hate taught love.Oh, gain were indeed to see aboveSupremacy ever—to move, remove,“Not reach—aspire yet never attainTo the object aimed at! Scarce in vain,—As each stage I left nor touched again.“To suffer, did pangs bring the loved one bliss,Wring knowledge from ignorance:—just for this—To add one drop to a love—abyss!“Enough: for you doubt, you hope, O men,You fear, you agonize, die: what then?Is an end to your life’s work out of ken?“Have you no assurance that, earth at end,Wrong will prove right? Who made shall mendIn the higher sphere to which yearnings tend?”
In his attitude toward the existence of evil Browning takes issue with Carlyle, as already noted in the second chapter. Carlyle, as Browning represents him, cannot reconcile the existence of evil with beneficent and omniscient power. He makes the opponent, who is an echo of Carlyle in the argument in “Bernard de Mandeville,” exclaim:
“Where’sKnowledge, where power and will in evidence’Tis Man’s-play merely! Craft foils rectitude,Malignity defeats beneficence,And grant, at very last of all, the feud’Twixt good and evil ends, strange thoughts intrudeThough good be garnered safely and good’s foeBundled for burning. Thoughts steal even so—Why grant tares leave to thus o’ertop, o’ertowerTheir field-mate, boast the stalk and flaunt the flower,Triumph one sunny minute?”
No attempt must be made to show God’s reason for allowing evil. Any such attempt will fail. This passage comes as near as any in Browning to a plunge into the larger social questions which during the nineteenth century have come more and more to the front, and is an index of just where the poet stood in relation to the social movements of the century’s end. His gaze was so centered upon the individual and the power of the individual to work out his own salvation and the need of evil in the process that his philosophical attitude toward evil quite overtops the militant interest in overcoming it.
Carlyle, on the other hand, saw the immense evil of the social conditions in England, and raged and stormed against them, but could see no light by which evil could be turned into good. He little realized that his ownstorming at the ineptitude, the imbecility, the fool-ness of society, and his own despair over the, to him, unaccountable evils of existence, were in themselves a positive good growing out of the evil. Though he was not to suggest practical means for leading the masses out of bondage, he was to call attention in trumpet tones to the fact that the bondage existed. By so doing he was taking a first step or rather drawing aside the curtain and revealing the dire necessity that steps should be taken and taken soon. While Carlyle was militantly shouting against evil to some purpose which would later mean militant action against it, Browning was settling in his own mind just what relation evil should hold to good in the scheme of the universe, and writing a poem to tell why he was a liberal. In fine, Carlyle was opening the way toward the socialism of the latter part of the century, while Browning was still found in the camp of what the socialist of to-day calls the middle-class individualist.