Liberalism, which had taken on social conditions to the point through legislation where every man was free to be a property holder if he could manage to become one, and to amass wealth, left out of consideration the fact that he never could be free as long as hehad to compete with every other man in the state to get these things. Hence the movement of the working classes to gain freedom by substituting for a competitive form of society a coöperative form. Great names in literature and art have helped toward the on-coming of this movement. Carlyle had railed at the millions of the English nation, “mostly fools;” Ruskin had bemoaned the enthronement of ugliness as the result of the industrial conditions; Matthew Arnold had proposed a panacea for the ills of the social condition in the bringing about of social equality through culture, and, best of all, William Morris had not only talked but acted.
William Morris
To any student of social movements to-day, whether he has been drawn into the swirl of socialistic propaganda or whether he is still comfortably sitting in his parlor feeling an intellectual sympathy but no emotional call to leave his parlor and be up and doing, Morris appears as the most interesting figure of the century. The pioneers in the nineteenth-century movement toward socialism in England, unless we except the social enthusiasm of a Shelley or a Blake, were Owen and Maurice. Owen was that remarkable anomaly, a self-made man who had gained his wealth because of the new industrial order inaugurated by the inventionof machinery, who yet could look at the circumstances so fortuitous for him in an impersonal manner, and realize that what had put a silver spoon into his own mouth was taking away even pewter spoons from other men’s mouths. Although he was really in love with the new order of machine production, he realized what many to-day fail to see, that machine production organized for the benefit of private persons would most assuredly mean the poverty and the degradation of the workers. He did not stop here, however, but spent his vast fortune in trying to make the conditions of the workingmen better. In the estimation of socialists to-day his work was of a very high order, “not mere utopianism.” It bore no similarity to the romantic dreams of poets who saw visions of a perfect society regardless of the fact that a perfect society cannot suddenly blossom from conditions of appalling misery and degradation. Owen was a practical business man. He knew all the ins and outs of the industrial régime, and consequently he had a practical program, not a dream, which he wished to see carried out. Accounts of the conditions of the workers at that time are heartrending. Everywhere the same tale of abject poverty, ignorance, and oppression in field and factory,long hours of labor and dear food. To bring help to these downtrodden people was the burning desire of Robert Owen and his followers. His efforts were not rewarded by that success which they deserved, his failure being a necessary concomitant of the fact that even a practical program for betterment cannot suddenly take effect owing to the inevitable inertia of any long-established conditions. In showing the causes which kept him from the full accomplishment of his ideals, in spite of his genuine practicalness, Brougham Villiers, the recent historian of the socialist movement in England, says he attempted too much “to influence the workers from without, trying, of course vainly, to induce the governing classes to interest themselves in the work of social reform. Yet it is difficult to see what else he could have done at the time. We have already shown how utterly disorganized the working classes were, how incapable, indeed, of any organization. They were also destitute of political power, and miserably underpaid. What could they do to help themselves? Help, if it was to come at all, must come from the only people who then had the power, if they only had the will, to accord it, and to them, at first, Robert Owen appealed. Later, he turned tothe people, and for them indeed his work was not utterly wasted, though generations were to pass before the full effect of it could be seen.”
However abortive his attempts to gain political sympathy for his socialist program, and in spite of the fact that socialist agitation came to a standstill in England with the defeat of the somewhat chaotic socialism of the Chartists, it cannot be doubted that his efforts influenced the political reformers who were to take up one injustice after another and fight for its melioration until the working classes were at least brought to a plane where they could begin to organize and develop toward the still higher plane where they could themselves take their own salvation in hand.
Another man who did much to bring the workingman’s cause into prominence was Maurice, who emphasized the Christian aspect of the movement. He was an excellent supplement to Owen, whose liberal views on religion militated in some quarters against an acceptance of his humane views in regard to workingmen.
Notwithstanding the personal strength of these two men they failed not only in the practical attainment of their object, but theirideas on socialism did not even wedge itself into the thought consciousness of the Englishmen.
The men who did more than any one else to awaken the sleeping English consciousness were Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold and Morris. Of these Morris held a position midway between the old-fashioned dreamer of dreams and the new-fashioned hustling political socialist, who now sends his representatives to Parliament and has his “say” in the national affairs of the country.
Being a poet, he could, of course, dream dreams, and one of these, “The Dream of John Ball,” puts the case of the toilers in a form at once so convincing and so full of divine pity that it does not seem possible it could be read even by the most hardened of trust magnates without making him see how unjust has been the distribution of this world’s goods through the making of one man do the work of many: “In days to come one man shall do the work of a hundred men—yea, of a thousand or more: and this is the shift of mastership that shall make many masters and many rich men.” This is a riddle which John Ball cannot grasp at once, and when it is explained to him he is still more mystified at the result.
“Thou hast seen the weaver at his loom:think how it should be if he sit no longer before the web and cast the shuttle and draw home the sley, but if the shed open of itself, speed through it as swift as the eye can follow, and the sley come home of itself, and the weaver standing by ... looking to half a dozen looms and bidding them what to do. And as with the weaver so with the potter, and the smith, and every worker in metals, and all other crafts, that it shall be for them looking on and tending, as with the man that sitteth in the cart while the horse draws. Yea, at last so shall it be even with those who are mere husbandmen; and no longer shall the reaper fare afield in the morning with his hook over his shoulder, and smite and bind and smite again till the sun is down and the moon is up; but he shall draw a thing made by men into the field with one or two horses, and shall say the word and the horses shall go up and down, and the thing shall reap and gather and bind, and do the work of many men. Imagine all this in thy mind if thou canst, at least as ye may imagine a tale of enchantment told by a minstrel, and then tell me what shouldst thou deem that the life of men would be amidst all this, men such as these of the township here, or the men of the Canterbury guilds.”
And John Ball’s conclusion is that things in that day to come will be not as they are but as they ought to be. With irresistible logic he declares:
“I say that if men still abide men as I have known them, and unless these folk of England change as the land changeth—and forsooth of the men, for good and for evil, I can think no other than I think now, or behold them other than I have known them and loved them—I say if the men be still men, what will happen except that there should be all plenty in the land, and not one poor man therein ... for there would then be such abundance of good things, that, as greedy as the lords might be, there would be enough to satisfy their greed and yet leave good living for all who labored with their hands; so that these should labor for less than now, and they would have time to learn knowledge,” and he goes on, “take part in the making of laws.”
But Morris was not the man to dream, merely. Though he did not trouble himself about the doctrinaire side of socialism, he preached it constantly from the human side and from the artistic side. While some socialist writers make us feel that socialism might possibly only be Gradgrind in another guise, he makes us feel that peace and plentyand loveliness would attend upon the sons and daughters of socialism. As one of his many admirers says of him: “He was an out-and-out Communist because of the essential sanity of a mind incapable of the desire to monopolize anything he could not use.”
The authoritarianism of the Marxian socialists was distasteful to him, for, to quote from the same admirer, his “conception of socialism was that of a free society, based on the simple rights of all to use the earth and anything in it, and the consequent abolition of all competition for the means of life.” His attitude of mind on these points led him to break away from the Social Democratic Federation, which, with its political program, was distasteful to Morris’s more purely social feeling, and found the Socialist League. This emphasized more particularly the artistic side of socialism. Morris and his followers were bent upon making life a beautiful thing as well as a comfortable thing.
According to all accounts, the League was not as great a force in the development of socialist ideals as was Morris himself, who inspired such men as Burne-Jones and Walter Crane with a sympathy in the new ideals, as well as multitudes of lesser men in the crowds that gathered to listen to him in WalthamGreen or in some other like open place of a Sunday.
Morris’s chief contribution to the growth of the cause was perhaps his own business plant, into which he put as many of his ideals for the betterment of the workingmen’s conditions as he was able to do under existing conditions. Who has not gloated over his exquisite editions of Chaucer and the like—books in which even the punctuation marks are a delight to the eye, and the illustrations as far beyond ordinary illustrations as the punctuation marks are beyond ordinary periods. If anything could add to the richness of the interior it is the contrasting simplicity of the white vellum bindings, and, again, if there is another possible touch of grace—a gilding of the lily—what could better fulfil that purpose than the outer boxing covered with a Morris cotton print! The critical may object that these Morris editions are so expensive that none but millionaire bibliophiles can have many of them. How many of us have even seen them except in such collections! And how many of his workmen are able to share in this product of their labor to any greater extent than the product of labor is usually shared in by its producers, may be asked.
Though we are obliged to answer that the workmen probably do not have the Morris books in their own libraries, they yet have the joy of making these beautiful books under conditions of happy workmanship—that is, they are skilled craftsmen, who have been trained in an apprenticeship, who are asked to work only eight hours a day, who receive higher wages than other workmen and, above all, who have the stimulation of the presence of Morris, himself, working among them.
Morris’s enthusiasm for a more universally happy and beautiful society combined with the object lesson of his own methods in conducting a business upon genuinely artistic principles has done an incalculable amount in spreading the gospel of socialism. Still there was too much of thelaissez faireatmosphere about his attitude for it to bring about any marked degree of progress.
The opinion of Mr. William Clarke who had many conversations with Morris on the subject reveals that, after all, there was too much of the poet about him for him to be a really practical force in the movement. He writes:
“It is not easy to understand how Morris proposes to bring about the condition of thingshe looks forward to. No parliamentary or municipal methods, no reliance upon lawmaking machinery, an abhorrence of everything that smacks of ‘politics’: it all seems very impracticable to the average man, and certainly suggests the poet rather than the man of affairs. What Morris thinks will really happen is, I should say, judging from numerous conversations I have had with him, something like this: Existing society is, he thinks, gradually, but with increasing momentum, disintegrating through its own rottenness. The capitalist system of production is breaking down fast and is compelled to exploit new regions in Africa and other parts, where he thinks its term will be short. Economically, socially, morally, politically, religiously, civilization is becoming bankrupt. Meanwhile it is for the socialist to take advantage of this disintegration by spreading discontent, by preaching economic truths, and by any kind of demonstration which may harass the authorities and develop among the people anesprit de corps. By these means the people will, in some way or other, be ready to take up the industry of the world when the capitalist class is no longer able to direct or control it. Morris believes less in a violent revolution than he did and thinks thatworkmen’s associations and labor unions form a kind of means between brute force on the one hand and a parliamentary policy on the other. He does not, however, share the sanguine views of John Burns as to the wonders to be accomplished by the ‘new’ trades unionism.”
The practical ineffectiveness of the Morris socialism in spite of its having taken some steps in the direction of vital activity was overcome by the next socialist body which came into prominence—the Fabian Society, in which Bernard Shaw has been so conspicuous a figure.
As already mentioned, the Fabians are not a fighting body, but a solidly educational body. To them is due the bringing of socialism into the realm of political economy, and in so doing they have striven to harmonize it with English practical political methods. Besides this, they have done a vast amount of work in educating public opinion, not with the view to immediately converting the English nation to a belief in the changing of the present order into one wholly socialistic, but with a view to introducing socialistic treatment of the individual problems which arise in contemporary politics.
John Burns
Their campaign of education was conducted so well that its effects were soon visible, notonly in the modification of public opinion, but upon the workingmen themselves. The method was simple enough: “If any public, especially any social, question came to the front, the Fabian method was to make a careful independent study of the matter, and present to the public, in a penny pamphlet, a thoughtful statement of the case and some common sense, and incidentally socialistic, suggestions for a solution.” Fabian ideas were thus introduced into the consciousness of the awakening trades unionists.
It has been objected that the gain was much more for the trades unionists than for the Fabians. Their one-time eager pupils have, it is said, progressed beyond their masters, as a review of recent socialistic tendencies would divulge had we the time to follow them in this place. However that may be, the great fact remains that the Fabians have done more than any other branch of socialists to bridge over the distance between what the English writers call the middle-class idealist and the proletarian, with the result that the proletarian has begun to think for himself and to translate middle-class idealism into proletarian realism.
Socialism, from being the watch word of the enthusiastic revolutionary, began to bediscussed in every intelligent household and in every debating society. This enormous growth in public sentiment occurred during the session of the Unionist Parliament, 1886-92. When this Parliament opened there was hardly any socialist literature, and when it closed everybody was reading Bellamy and the “Fabian Essays,” and Sir William Harcourt had made his memorable remark: “We are all socialists now.”
The gesticulating and bemoaning idealists, the Carlyles and the Ruskins, the revolutionary butlaissez faireprophets like Morris, who believed in a complete change but not in using any of the means at hand to bring about that change, had given place to men like Keir Hardie and John Burns, who had sprung into leadership from the ranks of the workingmen themselves, and who were to be later their representatives in Parliament when the Independent Labor Party came into existence. All this had been done by that group of progressive men, long-headed enough to see that the ideal of a better and more beautiful social life could not be gained except by a long and toilsome process of education and of action which would consciously follow the principles of growth discovered by scientists to obtain in all unconscious cosmic andphysical development, the very principle which as we have seen, Browning declared should have guided his hero Sordello long before the Fabian socialists came into existence—namely, the principle of evolution. That their methods should have peacefully brought about the conditions where it was possible to form an Independent Labor Party, which would have the power to speak and act for itself instead of working as the Fabians themselves do through the parties already in power, shouts aloud for the wisdom of their policy. And is there not still plenty of work for them to do in the still further educating of all parties toward the flowering of genuine democracy, when the dreams of the dreamer shall have become actualities, because true and not spurious ways of making them actual shall have been worked out by experience?
This remarkable growth in social ideals was taking place during the ninth decade of the century and the last decade of Browning’s life. Is there any indication in his later work that he was conscious of it? There is certainly no direct evidence in his work that he progressed any farther in the development of democratic ideals than we find in the liberalism of such a parliamentary leader as Mr. Gladstone, while in that poem in which heconsiders more especially than in any other the subject of better conditions for the people, “Sordello,” he distinctly expresses a mood of doubt as to the advisability of making conditions too easy for the human being, who needs the hardships and ills of life to bring his soul to perfection, a far more important thing in Browning’s eyes than to live comfortably and beautifully. All he wishes for the human being is the fine chance to make the most of himself spiritually. The socialist would say that he could not secure the chance to do this except in a society where the murderous principle of competition should give way to that of coöperation. With this Browning might agree. Indeed, may this not have been the very principle Sordello had in mind as something revealed to him which neither Guelf nor Ghibelline could see, or was this only the more obvious principle of republican as opposed to monarchical principle and still falling under an individualistic conception of society?
While his work is instinct with sympathy for all classes and conditions of men, Browning does not feel the ills of life with the intensity of a Carlyle, nor its ugliness with the grief of a Ruskin, nor yet its lack of culture with the priggishness of an Arnold, nor would hestand in open spaces and preach discontent to the masses like Morris. Why? Because he from the first was made wise to see a good in evil, a hope in ill-success, to be proud of men’s fallacies, their half reasons, their faint aspirings, upward tending all though weak, the lesson learned after weary experiences of life by Paracelsus. His thought was centered upon the worth of every human being to himself and for God. Earth is after all only a place to grow in and prepare one’s self for lives to come, and failure here, so long as the fight has been bravely fought, is to be regarded with anything but regret, for it is through the failure that the vision of the future is made more sure.
What he finds true, as we saw, in the religious or philosophical world, he finds true in the moral world. Lack in human knowledge points the way to God; lack in human success points the way to immortality.
The meaning of this life in relation to a future life being so much more important than this life in itself, and man’s individual development being so much more important than his social development, Browning naturally would not turn his attention upon those practical, social or governmental means by which even the chance for individual development mustbe secured. He is too much occupied with the larger questions. He is not even a middle-class idealist, dreaming dreams of future earthly bliss; he is the prophet of future existences.
Does his practical influence upon the social development of the century amount to nothing then? Not at all. He started out on his voyage through the century toward the democratic ideal in the good ship Individualism—the banner ship indeed. What he has emphasized upon this voyage is first the paramount worth of each and every human being, whether good or bad. Second, the possibility in every human being of conceiving an ideal, toward which by the exertion of his will power he should aspire, battling steadfastly against every obstruction that life throws in his course. Third, that even those who are incapable of formulating an ideal must be regarded as living out the truth of their natures and must therefore be treated with compassion. Fourth, that the highest function of the human soul is love, which expresses itself in many ways, but attains its full flowering only in the love of man and woman on a plane of spiritual exaltation, and that through this power of human love some glimpse of the divine is caught; therefore tothis function of the soul it is of the utmost importance that human beings should be loyal and true, even if that loyalty and truth conflict with conventional ways of looking at life. Sailing in this good ship he also expresses his sympathy indirectly in his dramas and directly upon several occasions with the ideals of political freedom which during the century have been making progress toward democracy in the English Parliament through the legislation of the liberals, whose laws have brought a greater and greater measure of freedom to the middle classes and some measure of freedom to the working classes.
But it seems as if when nearing the end of the century Browning landed from his ship upon some high island and straining his eyes toward the horizon of the dawn of another life did not fully realize that there was another good ship, Socialism, struggling to reach the ideal of democracy, and now become the banner ship whose work is to sail out into the unknown, turbulent seas of the future, finding the path to another high island in order that the way may be made clear for the ship Individualism to continue her course to another stage in the voyage toward a perfect democracy. And as the new ship, Socialism, passes on its way it will do well to heed thevision of the poet seer, straining his eyes toward the dawn of other lives in other spheres, lest in the struggle and strain to bring about a more comfortable and beautiful life upon earth, the important truth be slighted that humanity has a higher destiny to fulfil than can be realized in the most Utopian dreams of an earthly democracy. This truth is in fact not only forgotten but is absolutely denied by many of the latter-day social reformers.
To sum up, I think one is justified in concluding that as a sympathizer with the liberal political tendencies of the nineteenth century Browning is of his age. In his quiescence upon the proletarian movement of the latter part of the nineteenth century he seems to have been left behind by his age. In his insistence upon the worth of the individual to himself and to God he is both of his age and beyond it. As has been said of philosophy, “It cannot give us bread but it can give us God, soul and immortality,” so we may say of Browning, that though he did not raise up his voice in the cry of the proletarian for bread, he has insisted upon the truths of God, the soul and immortality.
ART SHIBBOLETHS
In theforegoing chapters the relations of the poet to the philosophical, religious, political, and social movements of the nineteenth century have been pointed out. In this and the next chapter some account of his relation to the artistic and literary ideals of the century will be attempted.
Browning’s relation to the art of the century is, of course, twofold, dealing as it must with his own conceptions and criticisms of art as well as with the position of his own art in the poetic development of the century.
In order to understand more fully his own contribution to the developing literary standards of the century it may be well first to consider the fundamental principles of art laid down by him in various poems wherein he has deliberately dealt with the subject.
The poem in which he has most clearly formulated the general principles underlying the growth of art is the “Parleying” with Charles Avison. Though music is the specialart under consideration, the rules of growth obtaining in that are equally applicable to other arts. They are found to be, as we should expect in Browning, a combination of the ideas of evolution and conservation. Though the standards of art change and develop, because as man’s soul evolves, more complex forms are needed to express his deeper experiences, his wider vision, yet in each stage of the development there is an element of permanent beauty which by the aid of the historical sense man may continue to enjoy. That element of permanence exists when genuine feeling and aspiration find expression in forms of art. The element of change grows out of the fact that both the thought expressed and the form in which it is expressed are partial manifestations of the beauty or truth toward which feeling aspires; hence the need of fresh attempts to reach the infinite. The permanence of feeling, expressing itself in ever new forms, is brought out finely in this passage:
“Truths escapeTime’s insufficient garniture: they fade,They fall—those sheathings now grown sere, whose aidWas infinite to truth they wrapped, saved fineAnd free through march frost: May dews crystallineNourish truth merely,—does June boast the fruitAs—not new vesture merely but, to boot,Novel creation? Soon shall fade and fallMyth after myth—the husk-like lies I callNew truth’s Corolla-safeguard.”
In another passage is shown how the permanence of feeling conserves even the form, if we will bring ourselves into touch with it:
“Never dreamThat what once lived shall ever die! They seemDead—do they? lapsed things lost in limbo? BringOur life to kindle theirs, and straight each kingStarts, you shall see, stands up.”
This kindling of an old form with our own life is more difficult in the case of music than it is in painting or poetry, for in these we have a concrete form to deal with—a form which reflects the thought with much more definiteness than music is able to do. The strength and weakness, at once, of music is that it gives expression to subtler regions of thought and feeling than the other arts, at the same time that the form is more evanescent, because fashioned out of elements infinitely less related to nature than those of other art forms. In his poems on music, the poet always emphasizes these aspects of music. Its supremacy as a means of giving expression to the subtlest regions of feeling is dwelt uponin “Abt Vogler” and “Fifine at the Fair.” The Abbé, from the standpoint of the creator of music, feels so strongly from the inside its power for expressing infinite aspiration that in his ecstasy he exclaims: “The rest may reason and welcome. ’Tis we musicians know.” Upon the evanescence of the form peculiar emphasis is also laid in this poem, through the fact that the music is improvised. Yet even this fact does not mean the entire annihilation of the form. In the tenth stanza of the poem the idea of the permanence of the art form as well as of the feeling is expanded into a symbol of the immortality of all good:
“All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;Not its semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor powerWhose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodistWhen eternity confirms the conception of an hour,The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky,Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;Enough that he heard it once: we shall hear it by-and-by.”
The sophistical arguer in “Fifine” feels this same power of music to express thoughts not to be made palpable in any other manner.
“Words struggle with the weightSo feebly of the False, thick element betweenOur soul, the True, and Truth! which, but that interveneFalse shows of things, were reached as easily by thoughtReducible to word, and now by yearnings wroughtUp with thy fine free force, oh Music, that canst thrill,Electrically win a passage through the lidOf earthly sepulchre, our words may push against,Hardly transpierce as thou.”
And again, in another passage, he gives to music the power of conserving a mood of feeling, which in this case is not an exalted one, since it is one that chimes in with his own rather questionable feeling for Fifine, the fiz-gig. It is found in Schumann’s “Carnival”:
“Thought hankers after speech, while no speech may evinceFeeling like music,—mine, o’er-burthened with each giftFrom every visitant, at last resolved to shiftIts burthen to the back of some musician deadAnd gone, who feeling once what I feel now, insteadOf words, sought sounds, and saved forever, in the same,Truth that escapes prose,—nay, puts poetry to shame.I read the note, I strike the Key, I bidrecordThe instrument—thanks greet the veritable word!And not in vain I urge: ‘O dead and gone away,Assist who struggles yet, thy strength becomes my stay,Thy record serve as well to register—I feltAnd knew thus much of truth! With me, must knowledge meltInto surmise and doubt and disbelief unlessThy music reassure—I gave no idle guess,But gained a certitude I yet may hardly keep!What care? since round is piled a monumental heapOf music that conserves the assurance, thou as wellWas certain of the same! thou, master of the spell,Mad’st moonbeams marble, didstrecordwhat other menFeel only to forget!’”
The man in the case is merely an appreciator, not a creator, yet he experiences with equal force music’s power as a recorder of feeling. He notes also that the feeling must appear from time to time in a new dress,
“the stuff that’s madeTo furnish man with thought and feeling is purveyedSubstantially the same from age to age, with changeOf the outside only for successive feasters.”
In this case, the old tunes have actually been worked over by the more modern composer whose form has not yet sufficiently gone by to fail of an immediate appeal to this person with feelings kindled by similar experiences. What the speaker in the poem perceives is not merely the fact of the feelings experienced but the power of the music to take him off upon a long train of more or less philosophical reasoning born of that very element of change. In this power of suggestiveness lies music’s greater range of spiritual force even when the feeling expressed is not of the deepest.
If we look at his poems on painting, the same principles of art are insisted upon except that more emphasis is laid upon the positive value of the incompleteness of the form. In so far as painting or sculpture reaches a perfect unity of thought and form it loses its power of suggesting an infinite beauty beyond any that our earth-born race may express.
This in Browning’s opinion is the limitation of Greek art. It touches perfection or completion in expression and in so doing limits its range to the brief passion of a day. The effect of such art is to arouse a sort of despair, for it so far transcends merely human beauty that there seems nothing left to accomplish:
“So, testing your weakness by their strength,Your meagre charms by their rounded beautyMeasured by Art in your breadth and length,You learned—to submit is a mortal’s duty.”
When such a deadlock as this is reached through the stultifying effect of an art expression which seems to have embodied all there is of passion and physical beauty, the one way out is to turn away from the abject contemplation of such art and go back again to humanity itself, in whose widening nature may be discovered the promise of an eternity of progression. Therefore, “To cries of Greekart and what more wish you?” the poet would have it that the early painters replied:
“To become now self-acquainters,And paint man, whatever the issue!Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:To bring the invisible full into play!Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?”
The revolution in art started by these early worthies had more of spiritual promise in it than the past perfection—“The first of the new, in our race’s story, beats the last of the old.”
His emphasis here upon the return to humanity in order to gain a new source of inspiration in art is further illustrated in his attitude toward the two painters which he portrays so splendidly: Fra Lippo Lippi, the realist, whose Madonnas looked like real women, and who has scandalized some critics on this account, and Andrea del Sarto, the faultless painter, who exclaims in despair as he gazes upon a picture by Raphael, in which he sees a fault to pardon in the drawing’s line, an error that he could alter for the better, “But all the play, the insight and the stretch,” beyond him.
The importance of basing art upon the studyof the human body is later insisted upon in Francis Furini, not as an end in itself, but as the dwelling place of the soul. “Let my pictures prove I know,” says Furini,
“Somewhat of what this fleshly frame of oursOr is or should be, how the soul empowersThe body to reveal its every moodOf love and hate, pour forth its plenitudeOf passion.”
The evolutionary ideal appears again in his utterances upon poetry, though when speaking of poetry it is the value of the subject matter and its intimate relation to the form upon which he dwells.
The little poem “Popularity” shows as clearly as any the importance which he attaches to a new departure in poetic expression, besides giving vent to his scorn of the multitude which sees nothing in the work of the innovator but which is ready at a later date to laud his imitators. Any minor poet, for that matter, any Nokes or Stokes who merely prints blue according to the poetic conventions of the past, possessing not a suspicion of the true inspiration which goes to the making of a poet of the new order, is more acceptable to an unseeing public than him with power to fish “the murex up” that contains the precious drop of royal blue.
More than one significant hint may be gleaned from his verse in regard to his opinion upon the formal side of the poet’s art. In “Transcendentalism” he has his fling at the didactic poet who pleases to speak naked thoughts instead of draping them in sights and sounds, for “song” is the art of the poet. Some stout mage like him of Halberstadt has his admiration, who with a
“‘Look you!’ vents a brace of rhymes,And in there breaks the sudden rose herself,Over us, under, round us every side,Nay, in and out the tables and the chairsAnd musty volumes, Boehme’s book and all,—Buries us with a glory young once more,Pouring heaven into this shut house of life.”
He was equally averse to an ornate classical embellishment of a latter day subject or to a looking at nature through mythopœic Greek eyes. This is driven home in the splendid fooling in “Gerard de Lairesse” where the poet himself indulges by way of a joke in some high-flown classical imagery in derision of the style of Lairesse and hints covertly probably at the nineteenth-century masters of classical resuscitation, in subject matter and allusion, Swinburne and Morris. Reacting to soberer mood, he reiterates his belief in the utter deadness of Greek ideals of art, speakingwith a strength of conviction so profound as to make one feel that here at least Browning suffered from a decided limitation, all the more strange, too, when one considers his own masterly treatment of Greek subjects. To the poets whose poetic creed is
“Dream afresh old godlike shapes,Recapture ancient fable that escapes,Push back reality, repeople earthWith vanished falseness, recognize no worthIn fact new-born unless ’tis rendered backPallid by fancy, as the western rackOf fading cloud bequeaths the lake some gleamOf its gone glory!”
he would reply,
“Let things be—not seem,I counsel rather,—do, and nowise dream!Earth’s young significance is all to learn;The dead Greek lore lies buried in the urnWhere who seeks fire finds ashes. Ghost, forsooth!What was the best Greece babbled of as truth?A shade, a wretched nothing,—sad, thin, drear,······Sad schoolWas Hades! Gladly,—might the dead but slinkTo life back,—to the dregs once more would drinkEach interloper, drain the humblest cupFate mixes for humanity.”
The rush onward to the supreme is uppermost in the poet’s mind in this poem. Though he does indulge in the refrain that there shall never be one lost good echoing the thought in “Charles Avison,” the climax of his mood is in the contemplation of the evolutionary force of the soul which must leave Greek art behind and find new avenues of beauty:
“The Past indeedIs past, gives way before Life’s best and lastThe all-including Future! What were lifeDid soul stand still therein, forego her strifeThrough the ambiguous Present to the goalOf some all-reconciling Future? Soul,Nothing has been which shall not bettered beHereafter,—leave the root, by law’s decreeWhence springs the ultimate and perfect tree!Busy thee with unearthing root? Nay, climb—Quit trunk, branch, leaf and flower—reach, rest sublimeWhere fruitage ripens in the blaze of day.”
When it comes to the subject matter of poetry, Browning constantly insists that it should be the study of the human soul. A definite statement as to the range of subjects under this general material of poetry is put forth very early in his poetical career in “Paracelsus” and it is all-inclusive. It is the passage where Aprile describes how universal he wished to make his sympathy as a poet.No one is to be left out of his all-embracing democracy.
Such, then, are his general principles in regard to poetic development and subject matter. These do not touch upon the question so often discussed of the relative value of the subjective as against the objective poet. This point the poet considers in “Sordello,” where he throws in his weight on the side of the objective poet. In the passage in the third book the poet, speaking in person, gives illustrations of three sorts of poetic composition: the dramatic, the descriptive and the meditative; the first belongs to the objective, the second, not distinctively to either, and the third to the subjective manner of writing. The dramatic method is the most forceful, for it imparts the gift of seeing to others, while the descriptive and meditative merely tell what they saw, or, worse still, talk about it.
Further indications of his allegiance to the dramatic form of poetry as the supreme one are found in his poems inspired by Shakespeare, “House” and “Shop,” but we must turn to a pregnant bit of his prose in order to find his exact feeling upon the relations of the subjective and objective poet, together with a clear conception of what he meant bya dramatic poet, which was something more than Shakespeare’s “holding the mirror up to nature.” In his view the dramatic poet must have the vision of the seer as well as the penetration of a psychologist. He must hold the mirror up not only to nature, regarded as phenomena, but to the human soul, and he must perceive the relation of that human soul to the universal. He must in fact plunge beneath the surface of actions and events and bring forth to the light the psychic and cosmic causes of these things. The passage referred to in the “Introduction to the Shelley Letters” points out how in the evolution of poetry there will be the play and interplay of the subjective and the objective faculties upon each other, with the probable result of the arising of poets who will combine the two sorts of faculty. While Browning’s own sympathy with the dramatic poet is as fully evident here as in the passage in “Sordello,” he realizes, as perhaps he did not at that time, when he was himself breaking away from Shelley’s influence, the value of the subjective method in carrying on the process of poetic evolution: